1747—a small outlay or risk ventured in the hope or expectation of a significant return—a metaphor from fishing, in which sprats are used as bait to catch larger fish—in early use with the words ‘salmon’ and ‘herring’ instead of ‘mackerel’
Read Moresaid to console a child choking over his or her food—UK, obsolete—first recorded in A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation (1738), by Jonathan Swift
Read Moremeans that, in a specific situation, a person will be blamed or considered wrong no matter what he or she does—USA, 1817—originally used in Christian contexts
Read More
something that hastens, or contributes to, the end of the person or thing referred to—USA, 1805 in an open letter by the English political writer Thomas Paine
Read More
1808, as ‘to talk a horse’s hind leg off’—‘[animal’s] hind leg off’ is probably a hyperbolic extension of ‘to talk’, emphasising the speaker’s persistence or eloquence
Read More
‘Backward in coming forward’ means ‘reluctant, shy to do something’. The earliest instances that I have found are about funds set up in order to provide aid to soldiers wounded during the Napoleonic Wars.
Read More
Red herring, used in laying trails for hounds to follow, was misunderstood as a deliberate attempt to distract them, hence the figurative use of ‘red herring’.
Read MoreThe pig probably symbolises the unpleasant fact of sweating profusely in the same way as it often represents greed, dirt, etc. in many other derogatory idioms.
Read MoreMEANING the fourth estate: the press; the profession of journalism ORIGIN The first known user of the expression, designating the ordinary people, was the English author and magistrate Henry Fielding (1707-54) writing, under the pseudonym of Sir Alexander Drawcansir, Knt. Censor of Great Britain, in The Covent-Garden Journal of Saturday 13th June […]
Read MoreMEANING The phrase to beggar belief (or description) means to be too extraordinary to be believed (or described). ORIGIN The literal meaning of the verb to beggar is to make a beggar of, exhaust the means of, reduce to beggary. It came to be used figuratively to mean to exhaust the resources […]
Read More