• About Me
  • Writer’s Corner

Elizabeth Fais

~ Where awesome begins…

Elizabeth Fais

Tag Archives: Bite the dust

Idiotic Idioms: Expressions that make you ask, “Seriously?”

26 Saturday Sep 2015

Posted by Elizabeth Fais in English, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Bite the dust, colloquialism, dollars to donuts, eat my hat, Elizabeth Fais, English, idioms, informal expressions, pie in the sky, slang, take the cake

There are quite a few common colloquialisms that are centered around food. Phrases with meanings that have little or nothing to do with food … or even eating. Here are a few of my favorites.

Dollars to donuts ~ A certainty

I’d bet dollars to donuts. Why are people betting donuts? Are they Krispy Creme employees, perhaps with a gambling problem? Seriously, what is up with that?

Dollars and donuts

This is a uniquely American betting term. However, I was relieved to discover it did not originate from actual bets that involved donuts. It’s an expression that indicates short odds. Dollars being valuable, while donuts are not. The phrase first appeared in mid 19th century in the newspaper The Daily Nevada State Journal, February 1876:

Whenever you hear any resident of a community attempting to decry the local paper… it’s dollars to doughnuts that such a person is either mad at the editor or is owing the office for subscription or advertising.

The phrase doesn’t appear in print again for some years, but is still used today.

I’ll eat my hat ~ A display of confidence

red cowboy hatThis next phrase is about something to eat, but not something you’d actually want to. Why someone would offer to eat their hat is beyond me. Where do people get this stuff? Absurd as it is, this phrase has been around since the late 16th century!

“I’ll eat my hat” is an expression used to convey confidence in a specific outcome. For example, “She’d forget her head if it weren’t screwed on. I’ll  eat my hat, if she remembers my birthday.”

The earliest example of the phrase found in print is in Thomas Brydges’ Homer Travestie, 1797:

For though we tumble down the wall,
And fire their rotten boats and all,
I’ll eat my hat, if Jove don’t drop us,
Or play some queer rogue’s trick to stop us.

Charles Dickens used another version of the expression in The Pickwick Papers, 1837:

If I knew as little of life as that, I’d eat my hat and swallow the buckle whole.

The expression later became popular in the United States, and is still used today. No one wants to actually eat a hat. Which is why the phrase is only used when there’s certainty about the outcome of an event.

Take the cake ~ Get all the honors

We’re on a roll (no pun intended) with food obsessed idioms, but back to something more enjoyable … and Strawberry cakemuch more logical. Like taking a cake. Because most everyone likes cake.

This phrase was used by the Greeks in the 5th century BC. The Greeks used ‘take the cake’ as a symbol of a prize for victory. Surprisingly, there’s no evidence of the English use of this phrase until it caught on in the United States in the 19th century.

In the US, the phrase became popular due to the cake-walk strutting competitions in the South in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The following is from The Indiana Progress, January 1874:

The cake-walk, in which ten couple [sic] participated, came off on Friday night, and the judges awarded the cake, which was a very beautiful and costly one, to Mrs Sarah and John Jackson.

In cake-walk competitions, couples were judged on their strutting style. The winners were said to have ‘taken the cake’, which was the prize.

In modern-day usage, the meaning has changed somewhat. Today, the expression is often used with sarcastic overtones. For example, “She got perfect scores on the SAT, but has a 2.0 grade point average. If that doesn’t take the cake…”.

Pie in the sky ~ A fantastical idea or promise

Pie in the sky … seriously? Why is there a pie in the sky? What were they smoking? You have to wonder.

The ridiculousness of this phrase makes it even harder to believe that it first had a religious connotation. I am not kidding. Originally, it implied the promise of heaven while continuing to suffer on earth.

blueberry pie

The phrase originated in America in 1911. A Swedish laborer named Joe Hill–a leader of a radical labor organization called the Wobblies, for which he wrote songs–first used the phrase in his song The Preacher and the Slave, a parody of the Salvation Army hymn In the Sweet Bye and Bye.

The phrase didn’t become popular until the Second World War, however. Then it was used figuratively, to refer to happiness that was unlikely to ever come about. Similar to how the phrase is used today. The following excerpt is from the California newspaper The Fresno Bee, November 1939:

The business world is fearful that Roosevelt’s obsession with war problems will mean a continued neglect of questions which still restrict trade and profits. They are highly skeptical of Washington’s promise that they will ‘eat pie in the sky’ solely from war orders, which they decry publicly.

[Photo Credits: morguefile.com]

Bite the Dust ~ To die

This phrase has nothing to do with eating anything, not even dust. I wrote about this idiom in a previous post. To learn more, go here.


Confounding Colloquialisms: Expressions that make you go, “What?”

28 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by Elizabeth Fais in Fun Facts, Humor, Writing

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Americanism, Bite the dust, colloquialism, Elizabeth Fais, Independent as a hog on ice, informal expressions, Till the cows come home, Two shakes of a lamb's tail, Writing

A colloquialism is a word, phrase or other form used in informal language.

Parents can say some pretty weird things. My father grew up in Iowa, the heart of the Midwest, so some of the things he said seemed weirder than normal to us California-kids. Like the time he scolded my sister at the dinner table, saying she was “As independent as a hog on ice.”

Our reaction: “Huh?” (Could’ve been, “WTF?” but we weren’t allowed to swear.)

Hog on ice

Seriously. We’d lived in Southern California all our lives and had never seen ice or hogs in real life. We just stared. He took our stunned silence for acceptance and compliance, which was probably a good thing. For a lot of years, I assumed the hog-on-ice thing was an my dad’s own home-grown Iowanism. That is, until I started on my writing journey.

When I started writing, I started to notice all the odd informal sayings we used every day. I knew the implied meanings from the context in which they were used. But the meaning itself? Not so much.  That’s why I decided to take on a handful of these oddball sayings…

“As independent as a hog on ice” Flailing about

Strangely enough, I’m not the only one who has been confused by this saying. This phrase has been baffling people for decades. Yes, decades! Etymologists started searching for an explanation from the time it first appeared in the mid 19th century. In 1948 Charles Earle Funk titled his first book of word origins “A Hog on Ice”. His foreword contains a seven (7!) page narrative of his inconclusive quest for the roots of this phrase.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the phrase as “denoting independence, awkwardness, or insecurity.” That about sums it up for a hog that’s slip-n-sliding across the ice, much like Thumper and Bambi in the Disney animated feature. “You’re doing it your way, and making a mess of it,” was what my father meant by his independent-as-a-hog-on-ice speech.

Time magazine usage in 1948, “They like to think of themselves as independents … independent as a hog on ice.”

“In two shakes of a lamb’s tail” Fast, really fast

In general usage, it is easy to infer that this phrase means “a very short period of time”.LambsTail

But why a lamb’s tail, of all things, to measure time by? Seriously. A little historical sleuthing uncovered that this is phrase is a distinct Americanism that dates back to the early 1800’s.

Apparently, a lamb can shake its tail pretty darn fast, much faster than other animals. Who knew? The term crossed “the pond” during the World War I, and became popular as British army slang.

“Bite the dust” ~ To die

Tomb stoneI always associated this phrase with westerns. So I was not too surprised to discover that it was made popular by American westerns of the 1930’s. Picture a cowboy falling to the ground after being shot, and quite literally biting the dust when he lands face down. Because of its association with westerns, I was completely taken aback that the phrase actually dates  back thousands of years before, to Homer’s Iliad. The following  translation was made by American poet, William Cullen Bryant, in 1870:

His fellow warriors, many a one, fall around him to the earth and bite the dust.

Some might say that Bryant introduced the phrase in his interpretation of Homer.  But I’m not going to argue that point. It works for m.

The phrase also appeared in the mid 1700’s in Tobias Smollett’s translation of Alain-Rene Lesage’s novel “Gil Blas (1715-1745):

…we make two of them bite the dust.

Again, the accuracy of the translation could be open to debate. However, I think it’s interesting that traces of the phrase date so far back.

“Till the cows come home” ~ A very long time

If you grew up in a city with no exposure to cows or farm life, this phrase makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. That’s because the expression alludes to cows’ fondness for extended leisure time out at pasture where there is lots of green grass to munch on. The cows would only rush back to the barn when their udders hurt and needed milking.

The phrase originated back in the late 1500s to early 1600s. But again, it was the cinema of the 1930s that made the expression popular. Groucho Marx used it in Duck Soup (1933) when he said to Margaret Dumont,

I could dance with you till the cows come home. Better still, I’ll dance with the cows till you come home.

Cows in a green pasture

Images: morguefile.com


What’s your favorite confounding colloquialism?


Calendar

August 2022
M T W T F S S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  
« Jul    

Enter your email address to have new posts sent directly to your inbox.

Join 235 other followers

It's really me!

  • Elizabeth Fais

Life is Tweet

Follow @elizabethfais

Recent Posts

  • Wisdom of Richard Peck ~ Writing for young readers
  • The Writer and Rabbit Who Saved the Countryside
  • 3 TREE-rific Informational Picture Books
  • Musings from the Writing Cave
  • MG Review ~ HOW I BECAME A SPY
  • The “Creative High” is real!
  • MG Review: Louisiana’s Way Home by Kate DiCamillo

Past Posts

Officially SCBWI


Member of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators

Reading Fun

Advice for Writers

I Write for Apples

Author Photos


Categories

Adventure Amazing but true! Animals Animation Blake Snyder Book Reviews Books Cats Character Dancing Disneyland Elizabeth Fais Fiction Fun Facts Funny Videos Giveaway Giving Back Holiday Humor Inspiration Middle Grade Movies Music Mystery Nonfiction Paranormal Reading Romance SCBWI Shakespeare Story Supernatural Thriller Winner! Writing YA YAppiest Young Adult Zombies

Keeping It Real

wordpress analytics

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Elizabeth Fais
    • Join 235 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Elizabeth Fais
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...