I and A Mag Sep19

Over The Moon?
back into the cooking pot. However it’s more likely we owe
the saying to the practice of iron smelting, where damaged
tools or weapons would be melted down in a crucible.
Gets my goat
Welcome to the cutthroat world of nineteenth century
horse racing, when owners often used dirty tricks to knock
back their rivals. It was believed that nervous horses would
become calm if a goat was placed in the stall beside them, so
it was common for racing rivals to remove or ‘get’ the goat
assigned to a potential winner, in order to unsettle the horse.
Talking nineteen to the dozen
WHAT A LOAD
OF TOSH!
“He was yakking nineteen to the dozen, acting
like he was the bee’s knees, but when I said he
was talking a load of tosh he got the hump.”
Foreign visitors overhearing this conversation in a British
pub could be forgiven for thinking they’d landed in a parallel
universe, but if you’re a native Brit, you’ll have understood it
as: “He was talking very quickly, behaving as though he was
somebody special, but when I criticised what he was saying
he became angry.”
Here in the UK we love our idioms: in fact English is probably
the most idiom-friendly language in the world. The Oxford
Dictionary defines an idiom as “a group of words established
by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those
of the individual words.” In plain English that means when
we say we’re “over the moon” it doesn’t mean we’ve joined
NASA’s space programme. This expression, meaning “elated
and excited”, is particular to our culture and we expect the
listener to know the words are being used in a non-literal
sense.
Here are some more great examples of English language
idioms, together with their origins:
A load of tosh
Although this is now taken to mean “a lot of nonsense”, a
load of tosh would originally have indicated success for
London’s ‘toshers’, individuals who used to scour the city’s
sewers searching for anything of value. ‘Tosh’ was actually the
treasure the searchers found, but the word became a negative
term to describe the unfortunate toshers themselves.
Bob’s your uncle
Believed to date from the Victorian era, “Bob’s your uncle”
refers to something that is easily and smoothly achieved. It
is thought that the saying was a sarcastic response to the
appointment of Arthur Balfour to a prominent position in
government by his uncle, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil. ‘Bob’ was
Prime Minister at the time.
All gone to pot
In olden times when food was scarce, leftover bones would
be used to make soup, so it’s possible that the expression
grew from the habit of putting discarded pieces from a meal
This expression comes from the Cornish tin and copper mines,
which were often affected by flooding. In the eighteenth
century steam pumps were installed to clear the floodwater
and, when working to their maximum capacity, these pumps
were able to clear nineteen thousand gallons of water for
every twelve bushels of coal used to fuel them. It must
have been easy for the miners to make the imaginative leap
between the rattling of the pumps at full steam and someone
speaking rapidly.
Raining cats and dogs
There are conflicting explanations for this expression, which
describes heavy rainfall. Witches were supposed to ride out
during storms in the shape of cats, while the Norse storm god
Odin was attended by dogs, so there could be a pagan origin
for this unlikely saying. A less fanciful explanation emerges
from the filthy streets of seventeenth century Britain, when
a heavy rainstorm might occasionally cause dead animals to
wash out of the drains.
Why are we so attached to these odd (and often illogical)
sayings? Maybe it’s because the English language has been
influenced by the presence of so many foreign invaders. The
Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and the Norman
French have all left their mark on our language, so it’s
possible that our ancestors reinforced their sense of identity
by using expressions that were unique to their communities.
Another use for idioms is to succinctly express an idea when
no single word exists to do the job. When someone is accused
of being “in the doghouse” we know in just three words that
the person is not just in disgrace: they have behaved so badly
that they deserve the lowest possible status in the household
– banished to sleep in a drafty kennel with the dog.
Some of today’s most commonly-used idioms hark back to
working practices that are now obsolete. Someone working
on a sailing ship might literally “show someone the ropes” so
they would know which sail to hoist, but that useful phrase
gradually spilled out into wider society and “showing the
ropes” became the shorthand for introducing someone to a
specific job, task or activity.
Given that most of these terms are archaic, outdated and
obscure, it’s surprising that we continue to use them so
enthusiastically today. Idioms may continue to baffle students
of English, but there’s no doubt they help to give our speech
its unique character and vitality.
by Kate McLelland
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