14 Common Sayings That Have a Bizarre Origin

We often use common sayings whenever we strike a conversation, but have you ever wondered how these sayings came to be?

Common as they are, but the origin of these common sayings are so uncommon, it is bizarre.

If you don’t have a clue when someone tells you you’re a “dead ringer” to a famous celebrity, or when the “rule of thumb” is to not “kick the bucket”, or just “let your hair down” when you fall on hard times, here’s a heads-up. To save you from “burning the midnight oil”, we collected 14 of the most common sayings and explain these to you.

Alright, let’s cut to the chase and find out their strange origin.

1. Dead Ringer

Meaning: An exact duplicate.

Origin: A ringer is a horse substituted for another of the same appearance in order to defraud the bookies. This word originated in the US horse-racing fraternity at the end of the 19th century. The Manitoba Free Press from October 1882 explained that a horse that is taken through the country and trotted under a false name and pedigree is called a ‘ringer.’

While ‘dead’ means exact or precise as used in many phrases as ‘dead shot’, ‘dead centre’, ‘dead heat’, etc.

A Dead Ringer is also when someone sits behind Chuck Norris in a movie theatre and forgets to turn off his mobile phone.

2. Rule of Thumb

Meaning: Rough estimation that is not based on science or exact measurement

Origin: The saying was believed to have originated from an English law that allowed a man to beat his wife with a stick so long as it was no thicker than his thumb. In 1782, Judge Sir Francis Buller is reported to have made this a legal ruling. In the following year, James Gillray published a satirical cartoon attacking Buller and caricaturing him as ‘Judge Thumb’.

However, the earliest known use of the saying in print appears in a sermon given by the English puritan James Durham and printed in Heaven Upon Earth, 1685: “many profest Christians are like to foolish builders, who build by guess, and by rule of thumb, and not by Square and Rule.”

Yet, the origin of the saying remains unknown. It is likely that it refers to thumbs being used to estimate things – judging the alignment or distance of an object by holding the thumb in one’s eye-line.

This sense of thumb as a unit of measure also appears in Dutch, in which the word for thumb, duim, also means inch.

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