Origins: Fire In the Hole

Anyone who watches TV, especially Mythbusters, will have heard the expression “Fire in the hole”. It is usually called out before a blast or explosion is deliberately detonated, warning those present to take cover.

Having wondered why someone pushing down the plunger on a detonator that looks like an upright shoebox would shout out “Fire in the hole” rather than “Watch out” or something similar, I looked it up.

It turns out that it is a leftover from the days when armies fought by walking towards each other into cannon fire and rifle shot, playing drums and fifes. You can see such battle scenes in Barry Lyndon.

The cannon in those days were simple. You took a big metal tube and put gunpowder into it. Then you put in a cannonball or lots of metal shrapnel. Then you put wadding down the tube, tamping it down with a big stick with a big lump on the end (impressed with my military jargon and technical talk?).

Origins: Hiking the Appalachian Trail

Sometimes a respected political career is ruined or tainted by an adulterous affair, leaving the politician remembered for the wrong reasons. More importantly for us, it often enriches the English language in the process.

In 1983 Liberal Member Michael Hodgman called PM Bob Hawke a “retired boudoir bandicoot”. Bill Clinton may have been a fine President but his Presidency will forever be remembered for his 1998 words “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” And who will forget 1993’s Camillagate, with Charles declaring “I'll just live inside your trousers” and stating that he wanted to come back as Camilla’s tampon. Shakespeare would be envious.

In June 2009 it was the turn of Mark Sanford, the Governor of South Carolina. Mooted as a future Presidential candidate, Sanford became Governor in 2002 after serving 5 years in Congress.

Origins: A bird in the hand and a town called Intercourse

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Meaning: a small advantage actually held is better than a larger potential advantage.

The earliest written usage in its current form is in the Compleat British Songster, 1781, in a song wherein the female speaker declares that she will be faithful and loving to the man who has asked her to marry, that she cares not for the other swains in that “One bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” The word “bird” in this context means girl or woman, a usage dating back to the 14th century. Variations of the saying date back to the 13th century. The Latin Bible at Ecclesiastes 9:4 states “A living dog is better than a dead lion”, this being recorded as such in Wycliffe’s version of the Bible. A 1546 collection of proverbs records “Better one word in hand than ten in the wood.” Many medieval pubs (some still existing) were named “The Bird in the Hand” as a reference to falconry, the bird in the hand being the falcon and the two in the bush being the prey.

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/64950.html

Origins: The Wheeled Shopping Trolley

The first shopping cart was developed in 1937 by Sylvan Goodman, the owner of the Humpty Dumpty Supermarket chain in Oklahoma City. Looking at ways to increase profits to avoid ruin, he had noticed that shoppers did no further shopping when their carry basket was full. He based his design on a wooden folding chair with wheels, adding a metal basket. The invention did not catch on immediately. Men found them effeminate; women found them suggestive of a baby carriage. He overcame this by paying people to walk around the supermarkets using trolleys to do their shopping, thereby inspiring others to do the same. Shopping carts became extremely popular and Goldman became a multimillionaire. Goldman continued to make modifications to his original design.  The basket size of the shopping cart increased as stores realised that their customers purchased more as trolley size increased. At his death in 1984, Goldman was worth $400m.

Origins: Pen and Pencil

The modern word “pen” comes from the Latin penna, meaning a “feather”. It harks back to the days when scribes wrote using quills.

In the 19th century quills became fitted with replaceable points covered in gold. Later other materials such as tortoiseshell were used. The development of the fountain pen by Waterman in 1884, with its own reservoir of ink, revolutionised pens. Ball point pens came 50 years later and felt tipped pens developed in the 1950’s.

The word “pencil” goes back to the use of a miniature pointed brush, which became known as “a little tail”, penicillum in Latin. The word “tail” in Latin is penis and hence a penicllus was “a little tail”. (This same Latin word gives us penicillin, from the brush-like shape of the Penicillium mold from which it is produced.  There may be other applications).

Why a “lead pencil” if the graphite is not lead? In the mid-16th C., a large, extremely pure graphite deposit was found in England, and an economical method was developed for wrapping the graphite in wood and producing the writing instrument (which had already existed for some time). This became the major European source for pencils, and at that time, graphite (from the Greek word graphein, 'to write'), was thought to be a form of lead. It wasn't until the 18th century that graphite was shown to be a form of carbon, but by then "lead pencil" was already in common usage.

Source: http://www.trussel.com/jap/pen.htm

Origins: Cold enough to freeze the balls on a brass monkey

The commonly held belief that the above phrase originated from a brass cannonball holder, known as a “monkey”, freezing and contracting and thereby causing the stacked cannonballs to fall, is inaccurate. This is because there is no known usage of the term monkey in that context, cannonballs were not stored in that manner and there is a long history of literary references going back to the 1840’s to various parts of brass monkeys being affected by heat and cold eg “singe the hair of a brass monkey”, “scald the throat of a brass monkey,” “hot enough to melt the nose of a brass monkey,” “cold enough to freeze the brass ears on a tin monkey.” Whilst there are oblique references to the balls of a brass monkey before World War II, the first specific recorded instances are after WW2. It is clear that the term has developed from the earlier less risqué usages and that the term means what it says.

Sources:
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings
http://www.snopes.com/business/names/wd40.asp

Origins: Rule of Thumb

Contrary to popular opinion, the origin of the above phrase is not that men in 18th century England were legally allowed to chastise their wives with a piece of wood no wider than the first joint of their thumb. That belief has now been exposed as a feminist hoax from 1976 which ultimately came to be universally accepted as accurate:

http://www.debunker.com/texts/ruleofthumb.html

The earliest citation of the phrase comes from Sir William Hope’s The Compleat Fencing-Master, second edition, 1692, page 157: "What he doth, he doth by rule of thumb, and not by art." The term is thought to originate with wood workers who used the length of their thumbs rather than rulers for measuring things, cementing its modern use as an inaccurate, but reliable and convenient standard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thumb

Origins: Citius, Altius, Fortius

Baron Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937), renowned as the founder of the International Olympic Committee which revived the Olympic Games, was also a bit of a plagiarist.

His Olympic creed was a pinch from what he heard at a church service for the Olympians during the 1908 London Olympics Bishop Ethelbert Talbot of Philadelphia in St Paul's Cathedral closed his sermon by saying: "The important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win, but to participate..." Mightily impressed, De Coubertin borrowed those words for the Olympic Creed:

"The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well."

As with the athletes he was seeking to motivate, the baron did not rest on his laurels.

Origins: Stealing someone's thunder

The above phrase, meaning to take someone else’s glory or credit, originated from an expression of the London playwright John Dennis (1657-1734), who is no longer remembered for his plays but who lives on in the phrase. Dennis invented a new method of simulating the sound of thunder as a theatrical sound effect and used it in his unsuccessful play Appius and Virginia. Although his technique is not now known, until then thunder had been simulated by rolling metal balls in a wooden bowl. Shortly after his play came to the end of its disappointingly short run he heard the same thunder effects used at a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Dennis was understandably furious. ‘Damn them!’, he fumed, ‘they will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder!’ The phrase thereafter gained wider circulation for taking the credit belonging to someone else.

Source: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/steal-ones-thunder.html