You Won’t Believe Where These Sayings Come From Pt. 2

A few months ago we shared our love of language by educating you on the absolute truth (no really we promise) on the history of some famous sayings.

From cocktails to paddy wagons, we impressed quite a few of you with our understanding of history, so now it’s time to do it all again.

We use sayings all the time in the English language, and most of the time we take them for granted as a faster way to get across what we’re talking about. But did you ever really think where these sayings come from? Here are some more to get your noodle around.

Pipe Dream

Back in the old days, before people figured out that drugs scrambled your brains something wicked and were generally not a very clever idea, opium was all the rage. In fact, there were venues in many large cities, hidden from the public of course, where people could go and smoke opium in these intricate pipes. After the smoking everyone could just lie around tripping out on the floor, enjoying the intense fantasies that couldn’t ever be real. As opium users emerged from the dens and began to share those visions they got a name of their own: pipe dreams

Hair Of The Dog

We didn’t always know what caused infection or made people sick, so before you could just pop up to your local GP people had to put their faith in traditional healers to ward of death. Even something as simple and unfortunate as a dog bite could spell the end, so any cure that was suggested was one people would try. For several centuries the accepted treatment for a dog bite was to take some hair from the dog that bit you, singe it a little, and then press it onto the wound before it was wrapped. This hair of the dog was apparently the key to the cure.

Real McCoy

In American in the 1920s, some geniuses decided that booze never got anybody anywhere, and was in fact an evil beverage in the face of religion, launching the age of Prohibition. Just as fast as the lawmakers banned it, entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to make a buck. Rum-runner boats started landing in Florida from more booze-accepting countries to supply the thirsty thousands. Of the rum-runner boats, one of the most famous was an Irish-American fellow by the name of William S. McCoy. He made a name for himself thanks to his high quality Scotch and Irish Whiskey, always delivering with the manufacturers seal intact and never adding water to spread his profit. When the product made it to the customer and they took a drink of the quality grog they were able to say with confidence: Now that’s the real McCoy!

Bite The Bullet

If you’ve ever had surgery you can imagine the horror of being injured without anaesthesia on your side. So imagine being a soldier in the early days of the war when, following injury by any number of potential weapons, you were stitched up or chopped up in the field with nothing to distract you from the eye-watering, nightmare-inducing agony. That’s where bullets came in apparently, as they were hardly in short supply. Battlefield surgeons used to jam them between the teeth of patients as they worked, to stop them from chewing on their own tongue, and to distract them from the pain. While they hacked away, there was nothing to do but bite the bullet.

Keep Mum

Despite what you might assume, this saying actually has absolutely nothing to do with mothers at all! It comes from a German word mummeln, which means to mumble. It’s also related to a dice game called mumchance where none of the players were allowed to talk or make any other noises during the game. These two things together somehow created keep mum, a phrase championed by mothers who are, interestingly, not often known for their ability to remain silent and keep secrets. Go figure!

Babies & Bathwater

Before we were modern folk, bath time was not a common occurrence. In fact, around the 1500s many middle-class families didn’t bathe more than once or twice in a entire year! When they did get around to having a bath, it was practice for one family to all use the same tub of water, starting with the head of the house and heading down. So that meant Dad first, followed by other men (no equality here!), then woman and finally children and babies. This meant that by the time the babies got into the tub the water was absolutely filthy, cloudy and generally gross. In fact it was so dirty that mums had to make sure they didn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater when everyone was finished.

We don’t pretend that we know all their is to know about the history of human kind and the English language, but we’re always willing to give it a go.

If you have a better story about how these phrases ended up in the English language, or you have another yarn about ‘where that saying came from’, we’d love to hear it!