Phrases and idioms
Everyday expressions whose literal meaning has been forgotten: where they started, who used them first, and how they drifted into the sense we use today.
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- Aboveboard
Keep your hands on top of the table and nobody can accuse you of dealing from the bottom of the deck. "Above board" started as literal card-table etiquette, and the Elizabethan pamphleteer Thomas Nashe made it a metaphor in 1594, writing that Satan "plays…
From the Wed, Sep 23, 2026 roundup → - Clapback
"Clap back," meaning a sharp, witty retort to criticism, traces to Ja Rule's 2003 diss track "Clap Back", aimed at 50 Cent and Eminem. The phrase migrated from the song into hip-hop and internet slang over the 2000s and 2010s, eventually landing in…
From the Sun, Aug 2, 2026 roundup → - Dead ringer
In 19th-century American horse racing, a "ringer" was a good horse entered fraudulently under a slower horse's name so insiders could clean up at the betting window, the word borrowed from an older bell-ringing phrase for substituting one thing for another…
From the Tue, Sep 22, 2026 roundup → - Eight ball
In the pool game named for it, sinking the black ball before you've cleared your own loses you the game, so a position where the ball you need sits behind it is hopeless. "Behind the eight ball" first appears in print on February 8, 1923, in the Buffalo…
From the Sun, Sep 27, 2026 roundup → - Fraternité
"Liberté, égalité, fraternité" is the motto of France, but it wasn't handed down whole from the Revolution's opening days. The three ideas — liberty and equality especially — circulated separately throughout the Enlightenment, showing up in Rousseau and Locke…
From the Fri, Aug 14, 2026 roundup → - Green light
On early railways, a plain white lamp meant "all clear," red meant stop, and green meant caution. The trouble was that the colored glass was a separate piece in front of the flame, and when a red lens fell off, was smashed, or was stolen, the signal behind it…
From the Sat, Sep 26, 2026 roundup → - Impromptu
"Impromptu" comes from the Latin phrase in promptu, "in readiness" or "at hand," which French speakers fused into one word before English borrowed it whole in the 1660s. Samuel Pepys used it in his diary as early as 1663, describing a speech made impromptu…
From the Sun, Sep 6, 2026 roundup → - Iron curtain
Churchill's March 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri, declaring that "an iron curtain has descended across the Continent," made the phrase famous, but he didn't invent it. The Russian philosopher Vasily Rozanov wrote of "an iron curtain" descending on Russian…
From the Tue, Sep 22, 2026 roundup → - Led Zeppelin
According to drummer Keith Moon, when musicians from The Who and The Yardbirds floated the idea of forming a supergroup together in 1966, Moon joked that it would go over "like a lead balloon." The phrase stuck in Jimmy Page's memory, and when he formed his…
From the Sat, Sep 19, 2026 roundup → - Limelight
Nineteenth-century theaters achieved their brightest, whitest stage lighting by burning a chunk of heated calcium oxide — quicklime — in a flame hot enough to make it glow intensely. First used to illuminate a London stage in 1837, the technique gave the most…
From the Wed, Sep 2, 2026 roundup → - No man's land
Long before it meant the deadly strip of ground between opposing trenches, the phrase described disputed or ownerless territory in medieval England, recorded as early as 1320 in the spelling "nonesmanneslond," and used specifically for a patch of ground just…
From the Sun, Sep 20, 2026 roundup → - Over the top
In the trenches of the First World War, "over the top" was the order to climb the parapet and advance across no man's land into machine-gun fire. An American volunteer, Arthur Guy Empey, used it as the title of his 1917 memoir and defined it as "the order for…
From the Wed, Sep 23, 2026 roundup → - Rain check
On June 21, 1883, the St. Louis Brown Stockings announced that fans who paid for a game called off by rain before five innings would get a ticket good for a future game. The "rain check" spread through baseball within a few seasons, and by 1887 a shoe-shiner…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 2026 roundup → - Red tape
In the 16th century, the administration of Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, began binding the most urgent dossiers, the ones headed straight to the Council of State, with red ribbon, to separate them from ordinary files tied up with plain…
From the Tue, Sep 15, 2026 roundup → - Rubicon
The Rubicon is a modest river in northern Italy that once marked the boundary between the province of Cisalpine Gaul and Italy proper. Roman law forbade a general from bringing his army across it, so when Julius Caesar marched his legions over the "Rubicon"…
From the Sat, Sep 26, 2026 roundup → - Skunk Works
In 1943, Lockheed engineer Kelly Johnson was told to design and build America's first jet fighter, the XP-80, in total secrecy and in record time. There was no spare building for his team, so they set up shop in a rented circus tent pitched next to a plastics…
From the Mon, Aug 17, 2026 roundup → - Toast
Raising a glass "in a toast" traces back to an old, very practical habit: dropping a piece of spiced, scorched bread into a cup of wine. Cheap or slightly off wine of past centuries was often too acidic or bland to enjoy on its own, and a piece of toast…
From the Sat, Aug 15, 2026 roundup → - Umbrage
To "take umbrage" at something comes from the Latin umbra, simply meaning "shadow." The word entered English describing literal shade — the cool cover cast by a tree — long before it picked up its modern figurative sense of resentment or offense, via the…
From the Fri, Aug 21, 2026 roundup → - Waterloo
Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815 gave English an idiom almost immediately, but the specific, personal phrasing "meet one's Waterloo" took longer to arrive. Arthur Conan Doyle appears to be the first to use it in exactly that sense, in a 1905 Sherlock…
From the Fri, Sep 4, 2026 roundup →