My grandfather, who was a master shipwright by trade, explained the _Rule of Thumb_ as being a tradesmen's saying, if you needed to mark off an inch, and you didn't need to be exactly precise, a craftsman would just use the width of his thumb as his gage, because most men's thumbs are about an inch wide, give or take a smidgeon, and each craftsman would know how much of a smidgeon off _His Thumb_ would be to be nearly exact... or close enough. if they needed precise measure they'd actually use a ruler, of course.
Here's an enduring one: "posh" is said to have emerged as the acronym "Port Out. Starboard Home" (familiar to viewers of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) allegedly printed on the tickets of high class passengers on ocean liners, because this would ensure that the more well-heeled passenger would have the better (more shady) climate on both outward and return journeys between Britain and the colonies. No tickets have *ever* been found with this marking, and there are no records of the practice by Cunard or any of the other liner operators. Does anyone seriously think that the ocean liner nerds would overlook a detail like this? More plausibly the word "posh" is a homophone with "poche" (Fr. pocket/purse/wallet), presumably an anglo-Norman reference to a bulging pouch of coins. "Look at that posh over there!" (i.e. someone who clearly has plenty of money). Posh is therefore not an acronym but a *metonym* (or synecdoche) - the pouch *stands in for* the wealthy individual who carries it.
Hmm, an interesting idea. I'm going to stick with the Romany origin of posh, though. French _poche_ came into Middle English but as _pouch,_ and _posh_ didn't appear till the 1830's in a slightly different sense of money. 'Posh' in Victorian low slang meant a small coin and then money in general. It most likely came from Romany _posh horro_ or 'poshoro', 'half copper'=halfpenny. By 1890 'posh' seems to have become society slang for money too (or so A. Barrère and C. G. Leland say in their _Dictionary of Slang,_ London, 1890). Their dictionary is also the first to define 'a posh' as a 'a dandy'. So I think it's likely the dandy comes from the money. There's also the possiblity the OED suggests that the posh dandy sense comes from Urdu سفيد پوش /safīd pōsh/ meaning a man dressed in white and therefore 'a well-dressed man' (nowadays this can mean 'white-collar'). As every Indian Army officer spoke Urdu as his language of command, this is plausible (perhaps it was originally pronounced as if it were 'poshe' and then assimilated to the posh of money). But there doesn't seem a lot of evidence and I think the money sense of posh is more likely, closer to your _poche_ idea.
@@BrennanYoung I like this. The "poche" explanation, I mean. A good test for folk etymology (spurious derivation) is that if an explanation fits PERFECTLY into an acronym it's spurious because language mutates. Moreover, slang of such olden times that literacy was a select accomplishment is perforce the product of oral transmission. Londoners need look no further than the Norman Rue duRoi (King's Road) becoming "Rotten Row."
I don't want to miss the boat on your American idiom video and the whole nine yards. I usually prefer to hear these things straight feom the horses mouth, but you can't have your cake and eat it too.
As it happens, I work on a tugboat and play the bag pipes. Being late for work and actually missing the boat can equate to loosing a weeks work. The pipe band I joined had a kilt made for me . With all the pleats and over laps ,my kilt used nine yard of cloth.
'Safety coffins' with strings and bells actually were a real thing historically. But they were from the 18th and 19th century, rather than medieval times, and were really just a rare gimmick that undertakers would sell to people who were terrified of being buried alive. There's no evidence anyone was ever saved by one. I've heard some other very silly idiom origin stories- there seems to have been a long standing cottage industry of concocting them. Two that come to mind are for 'left on the shelf' and 'raining cats and dogs'. The claim for 'left on the shelf' was that children in medieval and Tudor homes would sleep on shelves, so that being 'left on the shelf' meant that an unmarried woman was still sleeping on a shelf in her mum and dad's house. It doesn't really stand up because kids didn't actually ever sleep on shelves as a rule, and because there's a much more obvious and straightforward comparison to be made with unwanted goods being left on a shelf in a shop or pantry It's just about plausible, I guess, so it's maybe a 3 on the BSometer. The 'raining cats and dogs' story is a solid 5, though. The claim is that in medieval times family pets would be made to sleep up in the rafters to keep them out of the way, and if it rained heavily on the thatch they'd start falling down into the house. I don't even think it's worth explaining why this is nonsense. It makes even less sense than the baby and bathwater story. As far as I can tell, 'raining cats and dogs' is possibly a survival of a mostly lost kind of joke where people would compare heavy rain to improbable objects. Apparently similarly improbable idioms relating to rain sometimes turn up in historical sources in both English and Welsh. I seem to remember one of the Welsh ones was 'raining old women'. Sometimes something that seems surreal and funny doesn't have a secret meaning- it's just supposed to be surreal and funny.
"On the wagon" leads to the related idiom "falling off the wagon". Which is interesting, because it seems "on" in the original phrase wasn't about physical location, but in "falling off the wagon" it's been taken as meaning located on an actual wagon.
I'm a NY attorney and have never heard about that wife beating story. It's true that the main US law fundamentals come from old English law. As a matter of fact, it's quite common in the US to refer to "English law" as the ancient law of the time of Hadley v. Baxendale. Regarding tolerance towards some brutal acts: in the hierarchy of homicides, you have first degree murder (the most serious), second degree murder, sometimes third degree murder, then you have voluntary manslaughter. Voluntary manslaughter is not as serious as the other types of homicides mentioned and it includes someone killing his/her spouse caught in the act of adultery. The third-party lover can be killed too and that'll qualify as voluntary manslaughter. This is considered to be a crime justified by provocation...
Throwing the baby out with the bath water got me to laugh. That was a good segment. "On the wagon" is one I haven't heard in decades. When I did hear it I associated it to like some sort of death wagon -- for example plague victims -- a Monty Python "bring out your dead". Interesting video. I enjoyed it very much.
I always assumed that "rule of thumb" came from using your thumb (or similar) to approximate a measurement in lack of a proper "rule" (as in ruler). But maybe that's because in my language, the word for our old (now obsolete) inch measurement is basically the same as the word for thumb.
Considering the idiom baby/ bath water was a critique of religious reform, it may have been making an allusion to the rite of baptism. Like, don’t forget the child in the baptismal font when you leave church kind of a thing. Besides, have people never dealt with babies? Their vocal prowess tends to make their presence known. I have an idea that “On the wagon” while referencing the temperance movement and its associated Christian revival movement, is referring to the term band wagon. Meaning, the term band wagon, which comes from circus slang, also means a growing movement. In this case, the growing temperance movement, and a nod (or a pejorative toward) revival movement, as they resembled a circus by travelling, setting up in large tents, being spectacles etc. In truth there is never one source for an idiom because people use them from their own life references or they wouldn’t use them at all.
I think the fake "rule of thumb" origin is ridiculous. It's obviously related to measurement. Look at how closely related the words "thumb" and "inch" are in many languages. They're even identical in some languages. For example, "thumb" in Spanish is "pulgar" while "inch" is "pulgada"; in Italian, both "thumb" and "inch" are "pollice", and in French both "thumb" and "inch" are "pouce". I had to give it a 5 on the bsometer because I'm sick of hearing this fake etymology being repeated as fact 😂.
Another fake acronym is used to explain the word "Pommy" (Australian term for an English person) The claim is that POM stands for "Prisoner Of (the) Motherland". Nonsense and the acronym doesn't even work. A much more believable (but still conjectured) explanation is from wordplay. English immigrants were called "Jimmy Grants" (play on immigrant) and this became "Pommy Grants" (play on pomegranate, maybe because they go red sunburn, or maybe just wordplay for fun) which then just became Pommies. I don't know if that's true but it's much more believable than the rather forced acronym one.
It would never occur to me that "rule of thumb" could possibly have anything to do with common law. Not least because similar expressions exist in different languages not spoken in common low countries. For example, in German a rough estimate is often characterized as "Pi mal Daumen" (literally "Pi times thumb").
I can't think of any particular idiom at the moment but there is the famously false origin story of why Americans speak English and not German. The story goes that Congress voted on making German the official language to further state their independence from England, and that it did not pass by one solitary vote. This is a 5+ on the BSometer. No such vote was ever taken.
Re: Store High In Transit, my instinct after many decades is immediately to write off any attribution to acronym, with the exception of ACTUAL acronyms, such as SCUBA and RADAR. Every other one I've followed has yielded a dead end. Hint: the real ones are all nouns. Thus there is no verb formed by Forced Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. (Although I DO suspect that the common term may have come about from the idea of giving a young lady a poke, but that's for a different video.)
Indeed. Acronyms as a concept are relatively new. Many of these idioms go back to a time with greater illiteracy. Abbreviations and acronyms would be useless if you don't know how to spell to begin with.
My favourite acronym is one invented by a school friend during a brainstorming session in Design & Technology class... Animal Care aRound & On the North Yorkshire Moors: ACRONYM.
@@CortxVortx I never thought about it, but you may have a good point there. It could be a coincidence, just because acronyms started at about the same time the US started to become a big power. But I can't think of any genuine instances coming from NZ, AU, and the like.
Anyone else wondering if our host here is RobWords' dad? There's more than a little family resemblance, and often the apple doesn't fall far from the tree!
Rule of Thumb : put your arm out and your thumb up. The number of thumbs the sun is above the horizon is how manyhours of daylight you have left. Remarkably accurate summer or winter !
I doubt that, because this varies a lot depending on the season, in England the sun is not very high in winter even at exactly 12 pm (as the Greenwich meridian goes through England, 12 pm is almost exactly the true noon).
A useful rule, and reasonably accurate, but not the origin of the expression "Rule of Thumb." The inch-wide thumb joint was a useful approximation for a rule(r). Simple as that.
@@georgedunn320 Apart from everybody's thumb is a different size. The Sun's ' Rule of Thumb' works because people with bigger thumbs tend to have longer arms so with the arm extended it roughly 'equalises' the scale. It also takes into account the seasonal changes as the Sun's arc is lower during the winter. The only difficulty is you need to be able to have a reasonable approximation of the Sun's position, which isn't always possible with inclement weather.
@@rfvtgbzhn Feel free to doubt it ... then try it over a number of different days in different seasons. Your phone will tell you 'official' sundown; but this presumes a view of a flat horizon, which is not often the case in England or most of the world.
Being buried alive wasn't really a thing, but in the Victorian era it was widely feared. The idea was that certain people were prone to catalepsy, and in this state the victim was unable to move. Somehow it would be assumed that the person was actually dead and would be buried, only to revive and discover they were trapped in a coffin underground. Whether this was an actual possibility or not, people believed it as possible, and the idea found its way into the literature of the time. A case in point is "The Premature Burial" by E.A. Poe. This plot device was used as late as the 1940's in the episode "Dead Ernest" of the radio series "Suspense". It should be noted that while the fear of being buried alive may have been irrational, modern social media has spread far more irrational fears.
I've come across this as an origin story for the idiom "saved by the bell", complete with drawing of a coffin with a bell ringing mechanism supposedly from the 1800s. Is that false as well?
@andrewyam7938 The "Safety Coffin" was apparently a thing, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_coffin. The article isn't too specific on how many of them actually saw use other than in demonstrations, but it does say (without citation) that "there are no documented cases of anybody being saved by a safety coffin." Anyway, this sounds like a question for Caitlin Doughty, the "Ask a Mortician" gal. I agree that it seems implausible that this would be the origin of "dead ringer" or "saved by the bell" or any other idiom.
I feel like "Bob's your uncle" should be a bit higher, since the modern phrase has always had a pretty egalitarian implication to me: "this is a convenient and straightforward method that nearly anyone can use". Whereas the alleged origin is about corruptly benefiting from a rare and unearned privilege. Completely different vibes.
How does he come up with always unique and interesting ideas... I don't know! 🔥 But we need more of that newsletter. It's too good but not frequent enough. 😛
So here in the states, I had always heard the idiom about drinking and the wagon as “he fell off the wagon”. This would refer to a habitual drunk, who stopped for awhile then fell back into his old habits.
You have a statement in the dead ringer story that I would question. You stated that no one was ever buried with a ringer. In fact during the Victorian period there were several patents granted for various signalling devices for buried people to alert those above ground. I have no information as to how often these patented devices were actually used, but the fear of being buried alive was common during that period and it beggars belief that none of the devices were ever used in an actual burial, even if only once. However it is certainly true that there is no recorded instance of an incorrectly buried person resuscitating in a coffin, and attempting to alert the world in any way. It has never happened because as you pointed out, despite Victorian fears, it is relatively easy to detect any signs of life before burial. Of course that is not the same thing as saying that living people have never been intentionally buried alive. During crimes, and also during war crimes, there is a long history of living people being buried who were attempting to make noises as they were being buried, but rather than provide a bell, those doing the burying would simply shovel faster in order to silence the noise more quickly.
I have watched a couple of videos by that guy in the blue shirt and found him, let's be kind, to be unreliable. He announces things confidently that are BS and is just annoying.
The funniest I ever heard was from my own dear mother, who told me that a pratt was a camel's bottom. It took years before I realised she'd just been trying to stop us from saying something a bit rude.
I've heard of this nonsensical "rule of thumb" cited in connection with domestic punishment. But there is a really useful rule of thumb for estimating distances. You stretch your arm out, make a fist with your thumb up, aim your view with one eye shut at whatever it is you want to approximate the distance to like a tree or a building, and then switch eyes. The object "jumps" to the side and you estimate the distance it jumped (at the destination) then multiply by 10. So if your view jumped the width of a building that you know is about 15 meters wide then you'd be about 150 meters away. if the jump is about the width of a door, then more like 8 meters.
I remember a similar technique taught to me during an astrophysics class, being used to calculate distances on the horizon (can't remember how it goes exactly and I've thrown away the lecture notes unfortunately). And another one, a relic from the cold war about measuring the size of an atomic explosion with your thumb to see if it is feasible to run away.
@ Yeah, they tend to do some shenanigans with pi in approxiamtion too that would not be ok in other fields... In one exercise noticed a pi and a 3 in the same formula- "close enough, we can reduce that"....
Another rule of Thumb, which also might be the origin: The distance between your eyes is roughly 1/10th of the length of your arm. Thus ifor measuring a distance, you visor over your thumb and alternately close your eyes, the distance that the thumb "jumps" at the target distance is about 1/10 of the distance to that object. If you have objects there whose size you can estimate, that gives a good estimate of the distance.
It would have never occurred to me that "the dark side of the moon" phrase was due to a once held medieval religious belief that the opposite side of the moon was forever unlit, until some one ranted at Scott Manley (a space channel) for it. This combines a mistake about notions in the Medieval era, with a mistake about the use of the word dark. The Medieval era continued the accepted ancient Greek astronomers explanations. So the moon was lit on whatever side faced the sun (obviously), and the small sun went around the enormous earth (???). Dark commonly means unknown or unseen, among other meanings.
I am deeply supicious of the phase 'freeze the balls off a brass monkey'. Supposedly from a brass ring used to hold cannonballs, but so many 'nautical' origin stories were made up, and this one sounds just a little bit too convenient
Before I heard the trope about chastising ones spouse, I always thought that rule of thumb related to the fact that a thumb joint is roughly about an inch.
I recall a newspaper article from decades ago that had a list of "phrase origins." I had long been interested in word meanings and was at first delighted. But the explanations seemed really suspect. The final straw was "son of a gun" originating from the practice of British sailors in bringing their wives on board ship to birth their babies on the gun deck. How anyone, especially a newspaper editor, could let such crap reach print is beyond me.
"throwing the baby out with the bath water" is still used in German every then and now. The wording sounds like one of the clunky translation I would do.
Do an April Fools episode where you give your own bogus origins of phrases, each more implausible than the last! Maybe one of them will pass into folk etymology like the 'rule of thumb'...
Curious as to "make ends meet." Clearly currently means "barely get by," and originally I figured it came from something along the lines of connecting two ends of a string or rope, and if that was the goal, then clearly that is much better than just getting by. I wonder if it is more likely from "ends meat" being the worst or scrap. Just hypothesis without any research.
Most states are based on "English Common Law" which I've heard referred to as "Anglo-Saxon Law". The one state that doesn't follow "English Common Law" is Louisiana, which I've heard is based on "Napoleanic Law" (because it was French at one point.) Louisiana Lawyers feel free to correct me.
Weirdly, this is the first time I’ve heard of “on the wagon” as an idiom, despite being very familiar with its counterpart “off the wagon”. I’m curious which came first?
5:33 1 inch = 2.54 cm. This would be rather thick for a thumb. I think an average male thumb is more like 2 cm wide, which is about 0.8 inches. So you'd measure 4 in as about 5 in if you asssume that the thumb is 1 in wide.
@MB-st7be People like to believe in things having "ancient" or "mediaeval" origins. The idea of an expression going back hundreds of years to some bizarre mediaeval practice is just more appealing as an explanation than "It's a modern boxing term".
Hello Gideon (both of your versions) and thank you. The "baby and bath water" warning's Italian version is "baby and the dirty water" and (though nonsensical as it sounds) I'd always thought it refers to the water in which the newborn baby is being washed for the first time. As for Tyburn, the story I know tells us about the poor fellow (often a Papist) having the right to be offered a drink and share it with the hangman at every tavern along the way to Tyburn before being executed, hence the wonderful ballad "The parting glass". Does any of it sound familiar or reliable to you? Cheers, cheerio, have a gorgeous day, slán and ciao!
I feel like some of these stories ought to survive out of sheer entertainment value rather than out of truth value, e.g. the deadringer. 5 on Bsometer but 5 on hilarity.
I never thought of _Red Herrings and White Elephants_ as an academic compendium of well-researched facts. It's witty and creative, for sure - but fiction nonetheless, in the tradition of _Boke of Seynt Albans_ and _Poor Richard's Almanack._ One is, of course, free to choose and pick what one wishes to believe in. And many still believe that the contents of those books are the gospel truth. Which is fine-until they start correcting _me_ when I write - in perfectly good English, I might add - _a flock of geese_ or _a flock of crows_ or _a flock of ravens_ - you get the idea 🙄 Likewise with _throwing out the baby with the bathwater._ Much like _cutting one's nose to spite one's face_ or _don't eat yellow snow,_ the meaning is pretty obvious. BTW, when I say the meaning is obvious, I don't mean only to me. If I do a literal translation into any of the handful of languages that I know, the meaning of those phrases is retained. The phrases are evocative, funny, and memorable-they would've caught on without the suggested incidents having actually occurred. Any "true story" retrofitted to such phrases ought to be _taken with a grain of salt._ Then there are phrases that are _not_ immediately obvious to an ESL/EFL learner. With the _rule of thumb, red herring,_ or _white elephant,_ you do need to know the history and the prevalent culture to grok them. And that's where the opportunity arises for some TH-camrs to upload videos about their origins, and others to debunk them 😜 _L’éléphant blanc est un hareng rouge._ _Quoi ?_ _Le cadeau encombrant n’est qu’une fausse piste._ _Ah, d'accord._
The only stick that I use with my wife is the rooster 🐓 . Greetings from Casablanca. I hope you are having a whale of time in Thailand. Fare thee well for now and stay mellow.
I processed fish in the 80's. Pollock. But there was a lot of bycatch. Some bags were mostly herring. One day, down the conveyor came a red(!) herring. At this point I'd seen 10's if not 100's of thousands of herring and I got pretty excited thinking I had seen the root of the idiom. It was an improbable event that might lead one astray. But that's not what Kevin Stroud says and I wonder what the book you hold has to say.
I always thought that Bob's your Uncle, came from to explain to the kids when the wife had a lover. Who is this guy. Well it's Uncle Bob. However, ot came from my own imagination. Iscthere any bases to that?
Fascinating as always Gideon (and FYI I can testify from experience that domestic violence was still considered a 'private matter' in certain parts of the U.S. as recently as 1987).
7:00 um no . Its because of a shared bath between big families. The smallest children go last and often the water is so dirty you ouldnt see what was in the tub
I think in England they still bathe once a year, don't they? There's this problem where they can only use boiling hot or ice cold water so most don't bother.
0:03 from what I know it was clearly legal in some counties or towns. For example I read that there is a local law that said that it's allowed to beat your wife, exceot on sundays. It is technically still in force, but superseded by state law that now makes wife beating a crine, no matter on what day.
I think it goes back to supposed biblical allowances of "educating" your property- that includes wives, children, slaves and servants. Spare the rod and all that....
I believe safety coffin designs, at least, were documented but dead ringer never sounded like it was in the same world as those things. Always appreciate sober assessments of these strange origins. So often they don't ring true but it's difficult when someone's trying to spread the meme disease to have a chance to look things up and find accurate information. Ever valuable, thank you (in my dialect, we mean it when we say thank you ;) )
About the baby thing: yes, it sounds quite ridiculous if you really think it through, but it was true that ever family member was bathed in the same tub and that the children were the last ones, so if you forget them, you would throw them out with the bath water. Of course this is unlikely to really haplen, but hyperbole is a thing in language. So I get why people believe it, I would give it a 3 max on the BSOmeter.
![Write Your Life And Become A Better Storyteller - Mark W Travis [FULL INTERVIEW]](/img/n.gif)
My grandfather, who was a master shipwright by trade, explained the _Rule of Thumb_ as being a tradesmen's saying, if you needed to mark off an inch, and you didn't need to be exactly precise, a craftsman would just use the width of his thumb as his gage, because most men's thumbs are about an inch wide,
give or take a smidgeon,
and each craftsman would know how much of a smidgeon off _His Thumb_ would be to be nearly exact...
or close enough.
if they needed precise measure they'd actually use a ruler, of course.
Here's an enduring one: "posh" is said to have emerged as the acronym "Port Out. Starboard Home" (familiar to viewers of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) allegedly printed on the tickets of high class passengers on ocean liners, because this would ensure that the more well-heeled passenger would have the better (more shady) climate on both outward and return journeys between Britain and the colonies. No tickets have *ever* been found with this marking, and there are no records of the practice by Cunard or any of the other liner operators. Does anyone seriously think that the ocean liner nerds would overlook a detail like this?
More plausibly the word "posh" is a homophone with "poche" (Fr. pocket/purse/wallet), presumably an anglo-Norman reference to a bulging pouch of coins. "Look at that posh over there!" (i.e. someone who clearly has plenty of money). Posh is therefore not an acronym but a *metonym* (or synecdoche) - the pouch *stands in for* the wealthy individual who carries it.
@@BrennanYoung it's actually named after Posh Spice. The fanciest Spice Girl.
@ omg and ginger is named after Geri Halliwell
Hmm, an interesting idea. I'm going to stick with the Romany origin of posh, though. French _poche_ came into Middle English but as _pouch,_ and _posh_ didn't appear till the 1830's in a slightly different sense of money. 'Posh' in Victorian low slang meant a small coin and then money in general. It most likely came from Romany _posh horro_ or 'poshoro', 'half copper'=halfpenny. By 1890 'posh' seems to have become society slang for money too (or so A. Barrère and C. G. Leland say in their _Dictionary of Slang,_ London, 1890). Their dictionary is also the first to define 'a posh' as a 'a dandy'. So I think it's likely the dandy comes from the money. There's also the possiblity the OED suggests that the posh dandy sense comes from Urdu سفيد پوش /safīd pōsh/ meaning a man dressed in white and therefore 'a well-dressed man' (nowadays this can mean 'white-collar'). As every Indian Army officer spoke Urdu as his language of command, this is plausible (perhaps it was originally pronounced as if it were 'poshe' and then assimilated to the posh of money). But there doesn't seem a lot of evidence and I think the money sense of posh is more likely, closer to your _poche_ idea.
Now THAT has the ring of truth to it. I haven't done the homework, but that's how things actually work. Thanks.
@@BrennanYoung I like this. The "poche" explanation, I mean.
A good test for folk etymology (spurious derivation) is that if an explanation fits PERFECTLY into an acronym it's spurious because language mutates.
Moreover, slang of such olden times that literacy was a select accomplishment is perforce the product of oral transmission. Londoners need look no further than the Norman Rue duRoi (King's Road) becoming "Rotten Row."
And everybody knows that "golf" stands for Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden.
yes, it must be true.
Or "Flog" spelt backwards.
I don't want to miss the boat on your American idiom video and the whole nine yards. I usually prefer to hear these things straight feom the horses mouth, but you can't have your cake and eat it too.
As it happens, I work on a tugboat and play the bag pipes. Being late for work and actually missing the boat can equate to loosing a weeks work. The pipe band I joined had a kilt made for me . With all the pleats and over laps ,my kilt used nine yard of cloth.
'Safety coffins' with strings and bells actually were a real thing historically. But they were from the 18th and 19th century, rather than medieval times, and were really just a rare gimmick that undertakers would sell to people who were terrified of being buried alive. There's no evidence anyone was ever saved by one. I've heard some other very silly idiom origin stories- there seems to have been a long standing cottage industry of concocting them. Two that come to mind are for 'left on the shelf' and 'raining cats and dogs'. The claim for 'left on the shelf' was that children in medieval and Tudor homes would sleep on shelves, so that being 'left on the shelf' meant that an unmarried woman was still sleeping on a shelf in her mum and dad's house. It doesn't really stand up because kids didn't actually ever sleep on shelves as a rule, and because there's a much more obvious and straightforward comparison to be made with unwanted goods being left on a shelf in a shop or pantry It's just about plausible, I guess, so it's maybe a 3 on the BSometer. The 'raining cats and dogs' story is a solid 5, though. The claim is that in medieval times family pets would be made to sleep up in the rafters to keep them out of the way, and if it rained heavily on the thatch they'd start falling down into the house. I don't even think it's worth explaining why this is nonsense. It makes even less sense than the baby and bathwater story. As far as I can tell, 'raining cats and dogs' is possibly a survival of a mostly lost kind of joke where people would compare heavy rain to improbable objects. Apparently similarly improbable idioms relating to rain sometimes turn up in historical sources in both English and Welsh. I seem to remember one of the Welsh ones was 'raining old women'. Sometimes something that seems surreal and funny doesn't have a secret meaning- it's just supposed to be surreal and funny.
"On the wagon" leads to the related idiom "falling off the wagon". Which is interesting, because it seems "on" in the original phrase wasn't about physical location, but in "falling off the wagon" it's been taken as meaning located on an actual wagon.
I'm a NY attorney and have never heard about that wife beating story. It's true that the main US law fundamentals come from old English law. As a matter of fact, it's quite common in the US to refer to "English law" as the ancient law of the time of Hadley v. Baxendale. Regarding tolerance towards some brutal acts: in the hierarchy of homicides, you have first degree murder (the most serious), second degree murder, sometimes third degree murder, then you have voluntary manslaughter. Voluntary manslaughter is not as serious as the other types of homicides mentioned and it includes someone killing his/her spouse caught in the act of adultery. The third-party lover can be killed too and that'll qualify as voluntary manslaughter. This is considered to be a crime justified by provocation...
Thanks for your insight
you had me at "bsometer".
That may be a keeper!
Throwing the baby out with the bath water got me to laugh. That was a good segment. "On the wagon" is one I haven't heard in decades. When I did hear it I associated it to like some sort of death wagon -- for example plague victims -- a Monty Python "bring out your dead". Interesting video. I enjoyed it very much.
I always assumed that "rule of thumb" came from using your thumb (or similar) to approximate a measurement in lack of a proper "rule" (as in ruler). But maybe that's because in my language, the word for our old (now obsolete) inch measurement is basically the same as the word for thumb.
Considering the idiom baby/ bath water was a critique of religious reform, it may have been making an allusion to the rite of baptism. Like, don’t forget the child in the baptismal font when you leave church kind of a thing.
Besides, have people never dealt with babies? Their vocal prowess tends to make their presence known.
I have an idea that “On the wagon” while referencing the temperance movement and its associated Christian revival movement, is referring to the term band wagon. Meaning, the term band wagon, which comes from circus slang, also means a growing movement. In this case, the growing temperance movement, and a nod (or a pejorative toward) revival movement, as they resembled a circus by travelling, setting up in large tents, being spectacles etc.
In truth there is never one source for an idiom because people use them from their own life references or they wouldn’t use them at all.
I think the fake "rule of thumb" origin is ridiculous. It's obviously related to measurement. Look at how closely related the words "thumb" and "inch" are in many languages. They're even identical in some languages. For example, "thumb" in Spanish is "pulgar" while "inch" is "pulgada"; in Italian, both "thumb" and "inch" are "pollice", and in French both "thumb" and "inch" are "pouce".
I had to give it a 5 on the bsometer because I'm sick of hearing this fake etymology being repeated as fact 😂.
This comment deserves to be pinned
Another fake acronym is used to explain the word "Pommy" (Australian term for an English person) The claim is that POM stands for "Prisoner Of (the) Motherland". Nonsense and the acronym doesn't even work. A much more believable (but still conjectured) explanation is from wordplay. English immigrants were called "Jimmy Grants" (play on immigrant) and this became "Pommy Grants" (play on pomegranate, maybe because they go red sunburn, or maybe just wordplay for fun) which then just became Pommies. I don't know if that's true but it's much more believable than the rather forced acronym one.
Don't hit your wife, kids, or pets.
It would never occur to me that "rule of thumb" could possibly have anything to do with common law. Not least because similar expressions exist in different languages not spoken in common low countries. For example, in German a rough estimate is often characterized as "Pi mal Daumen" (literally "Pi times thumb").
And this is the funnier version of "über den Daumen peilen" ("aiming over your thumb") which has the same meaning.
@@ulrichhartmann4585Let's not forget the German word for heuristik, "Daumenregel"
I can't think of any particular idiom at the moment but there is the famously false origin story of why Americans speak English and not German. The story goes that Congress voted on making German the official language to further state their independence from England, and that it did not pass by one solitary vote. This is a 5+ on the BSometer. No such vote was ever taken.
Re: Store High In Transit, my instinct after many decades is immediately to write off any attribution to acronym, with the exception of ACTUAL acronyms, such as SCUBA and RADAR. Every other one I've followed has yielded a dead end. Hint: the real ones are all nouns. Thus there is no verb formed by Forced Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. (Although I DO suspect that the common term may have come about from the idea of giving a young lady a poke, but that's for a different video.)
Indeed. Acronyms as a concept are relatively new. Many of these idioms go back to a time with greater illiteracy. Abbreviations and acronyms would be useless if you don't know how to spell to begin with.
My favourite acronym is one invented by a school friend during a brainstorming session in Design & Technology class... Animal Care aRound & On the North Yorkshire Moors: ACRONYM.
In my experience, if a word is claimed to be an acronym, said claim originated in America.
@@CortxVortx I never thought about it, but you may have a good point there. It could be a coincidence, just because acronyms started at about the same time the US started to become a big power. But I can't think of any genuine instances coming from NZ, AU, and the like.
Anyone else wondering if our host here is RobWords' dad? There's more than a little family resemblance, and often the apple doesn't fall far from the tree!
Rule of Thumb : put your arm out and your thumb up. The number of thumbs the sun is above the horizon is how manyhours of daylight you have left. Remarkably accurate summer or winter !
I'll try that out.
I doubt that, because this varies a lot depending on the season, in England the sun is not very high in winter even at exactly 12 pm (as the Greenwich meridian goes through England, 12 pm is almost exactly the true noon).
A useful rule, and reasonably accurate, but not the origin of the expression "Rule of Thumb."
The inch-wide thumb joint was a useful approximation for a rule(r). Simple as that.
@@georgedunn320 Apart from everybody's thumb is a different size.
The Sun's ' Rule of Thumb' works because people with bigger thumbs tend to have longer arms so with the arm extended it roughly 'equalises' the scale. It also takes into account the seasonal changes as the Sun's arc is lower during the winter. The only difficulty is you need to be able to have a reasonable approximation of the Sun's position, which isn't always possible with inclement weather.
@@rfvtgbzhn Feel free to doubt it ... then try it over a number of different days in different seasons.
Your phone will tell you 'official' sundown; but this presumes a view of a flat horizon, which is not often the case in England or most of the world.
Being buried alive wasn't really a thing, but in the Victorian era it was widely feared. The idea was that certain people were prone to catalepsy, and in this state the victim was unable to move. Somehow it would be assumed that the person was actually dead and would be buried, only to revive and discover they were trapped in a coffin underground. Whether this was an actual possibility or not, people believed it as possible, and the idea found its way into the literature of the time. A case in point is "The Premature Burial" by E.A. Poe. This plot device was used as late as the 1940's in the episode "Dead Ernest" of the radio series "Suspense". It should be noted that while the fear of being buried alive may have been irrational, modern social media has spread far more irrational fears.
I've come across this as an origin story for the idiom "saved by the bell", complete with drawing of a coffin with a bell ringing mechanism supposedly from the 1800s. Is that false as well?
It may have been widely feared but it's not the origin. "Saved by the bell" is from boxing. When the bell rings your beating stops.
@andrewyam7938 The "Safety Coffin" was apparently a thing, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_coffin. The article isn't too specific on how many of them actually saw use other than in demonstrations, but it does say (without citation) that "there are no documented cases of anybody being saved by a safety coffin." Anyway, this sounds like a question for Caitlin Doughty, the "Ask a Mortician" gal. I agree that it seems implausible that this would be the origin of "dead ringer" or "saved by the bell" or any other idiom.
@@LetThemTalkTV I think more usually, the count stops.
I feel like "Bob's your uncle" should be a bit higher, since the modern phrase has always had a pretty egalitarian implication to me: "this is a convenient and straightforward method that nearly anyone can use". Whereas the alleged origin is about corruptly benefiting from a rare and unearned privilege. Completely different vibes.
How does he come up with always unique and interesting ideas... I don't know! 🔥
But we need more of that newsletter. It's too good but not frequent enough. 😛
Many thanks. Newsletter is in the pipeline
@@LetThemTalkTV Perfect timing. Thank you!
So here in the states, I had always heard the idiom about drinking and the wagon as “he fell off the wagon”. This would refer to a habitual drunk, who stopped for awhile then fell back into his old habits.
You have a statement in the dead ringer story that I would question. You stated that no one was ever buried with a ringer. In fact during the Victorian period there were several patents granted for various signalling devices for buried people to alert those above ground. I have no information as to how often these patented devices were actually used, but the fear of being buried alive was common during that period and it beggars belief that none of the devices were ever used in an actual burial, even if only once.
However it is certainly true that there is no recorded instance of an incorrectly buried person resuscitating in a coffin, and attempting to alert the world in any way. It has never happened because as you pointed out, despite Victorian fears, it is relatively easy to detect any signs of life before burial.
Of course that is not the same thing as saying that living people have never been intentionally buried alive. During crimes, and also during war crimes, there is a long history of living people being buried who were attempting to make noises as they were being buried, but rather than provide a bell, those doing the burying would simply shovel faster in order to silence the noise more quickly.
Thanks, Gideon! Fascinating video!
I have watched a couple of videos by that guy in the blue shirt and found him, let's be kind, to be unreliable. He announces things confidently that are BS and is just annoying.
The funniest I ever heard was from my own dear mother, who told me that a pratt was a camel's bottom. It took years before I realised she'd just been trying to stop us from saying something a bit rude.
I've heard of this nonsensical "rule of thumb" cited in connection with domestic punishment. But there is a really useful rule of thumb for estimating distances. You stretch your arm out, make a fist with your thumb up, aim your view with one eye shut at whatever it is you want to approximate the distance to like a tree or a building, and then switch eyes. The object "jumps" to the side and you estimate the distance it jumped (at the destination) then multiply by 10. So if your view jumped the width of a building that you know is about 15 meters wide then you'd be about 150 meters away. if the jump is about the width of a door, then more like 8 meters.
Arists use their thumb to gauge the size of objects when painting, I always figured that was connected.
I remember a similar technique taught to me during an astrophysics class, being used to calculate distances on the horizon (can't remember how it goes exactly and I've thrown away the lecture notes unfortunately). And another one, a relic from the cold war about measuring the size of an atomic explosion with your thumb to see if it is feasible to run away.
@ I feel like astrophysicists should use more precise units than thumbs
@ Yeah, they tend to do some shenanigans with pi in approxiamtion too that would not be ok in other fields... In one exercise noticed a pi and a 3 in the same formula- "close enough, we can reduce that"....
I'm guilty of propagating the story that "Elephant & Castle" was the result of the poor pronunciation of "Infante de Castile".
That's funny, I once told that one believing it to be true.
Another rule of Thumb, which also might be the origin: The distance between your eyes is roughly 1/10th of the length of your arm. Thus ifor measuring a distance, you visor over your thumb and alternately close your eyes, the distance that the thumb "jumps" at the target distance is about 1/10 of the distance to that object. If you have objects there whose size you can estimate, that gives a good estimate of the distance.
Lots of fun as always. I like the way you include American English. They say I'm a dead ringer for Dustin Hoffman (except much taller)
As a rule of thumb it would always be a good idea to take a look when Gideon posts a new video.
I was so devastated to hear that the common explanation for 'bob's your uncle' was untrue lol
Rule of thumb was also used by miller's to decide whether the grain was ground too coarse or fine enough for flour
It would have never occurred to me that "the dark side of the moon" phrase was due to a once held medieval religious belief that the opposite side of the moon was forever unlit, until some one ranted at Scott Manley (a space channel) for it. This combines a mistake about notions in the Medieval era, with a mistake about the use of the word dark. The Medieval era continued the accepted ancient Greek astronomers explanations. So the moon was lit on whatever side faced the sun (obviously), and the small sun went around the enormous earth (???). Dark commonly means unknown or unseen, among other meanings.
I am deeply supicious of the phase 'freeze the balls off a brass monkey'. Supposedly from a brass ring used to hold cannonballs, but so many 'nautical' origin stories were made up, and this one sounds just a little bit too convenient
Yes, that story is nonsense too. Wikipedia says it comes from Chinese souvenir of monkeys made in brass. I'm not convinced by that theory either.
Before I heard the trope about chastising ones spouse, I always thought that rule of thumb related to the fact that a thumb joint is roughly about an inch.
I recall a newspaper article from decades ago that had a list of "phrase origins." I had long been interested in word meanings and was at first delighted. But the explanations seemed really suspect. The final straw was "son of a gun" originating from the practice of British sailors in bringing their wives on board ship to birth their babies on the gun deck. How anyone, especially a newspaper editor, could let such crap reach print is beyond me.
"throwing the baby out with the bath water" is still used in German every then and now.
The wording sounds like one of the clunky translation I would do.
"De baby met het badwater weggooien" is used in Dutch as well.
Rule of Thumb was derived from the thumb being pressed into a wax seal. Hence "rule of thumb"
Dubious
I have never heard some of these stories before.
Do an April Fools episode where you give your own bogus origins of phrases, each more implausible than the last! Maybe one of them will pass into folk etymology like the 'rule of thumb'...
Curious as to "make ends meet." Clearly currently means "barely get by," and originally I figured it came from something along the lines of connecting two ends of a string or rope, and if that was the goal, then clearly that is much better than just getting by. I wonder if it is more likely from "ends meat" being the worst or scrap. Just hypothesis without any research.
I had heard of dead ringer but never believed it. By the way, when my dog died I waited until rigor mortis went off to make sure he was dead.
Most states are based on "English Common Law" which I've heard referred to as "Anglo-Saxon Law". The one state that doesn't follow "English Common Law" is Louisiana, which I've heard is based on "Napoleanic Law" (because it was French at one point.) Louisiana Lawyers feel free to correct me.
Weirdly, this is the first time I’ve heard of “on the wagon” as an idiom, despite being very familiar with its counterpart “off the wagon”.
I’m curious which came first?
5:33 1 inch = 2.54 cm. This would be rather thick for a thumb. I think an average male thumb is more like 2 cm wide, which is about 0.8 inches. So you'd measure 4 in as about 5 in if you asssume that the thumb is 1 in wide.
Thanks ever so much for posting another bobby-dazzler video.
Merci beaucoup.
"Paying through the nose" is another one. It has nothing to do with viking tax collecting methods. A very edutaining (sorry!) video. Thanks.
There was a patent for a bell to be rung by someone wrongfully buried.
He shows it at 14:14
"Saved by the bell" has also been said to originate from "buried alive" tales...
That's hilarious! The bell at the end of a boxing match makes way more sense. Who even thought, aha it must be the graves thing!?
@MB-st7be People like to believe in things having "ancient" or "mediaeval" origins.
The idea of an expression going back hundreds of years to some bizarre mediaeval practice is just more appealing as an explanation than "It's a modern boxing term".
Poor drowned babies back then😢
It was sad
nothing worse than soiling one's velvet shoes stepping on a discarded baby. tsk tsk.
Hello Gideon (both of your versions) and thank you. The "baby and bath water" warning's Italian version is "baby and the dirty water" and (though nonsensical as it sounds) I'd always thought it refers to the water in which the newborn baby is being washed for the first time. As for Tyburn, the story I know tells us about the poor fellow (often a Papist) having the right to be offered a drink and share it with the hangman at every tavern along the way to Tyburn before being executed, hence the wonderful ballad "The parting glass". Does any of it sound familiar or reliable to you? Cheers, cheerio, have a gorgeous day, slán and ciao!
I feel like some of these stories ought to survive out of sheer entertainment value rather than out of truth value, e.g. the deadringer. 5 on Bsometer but 5 on hilarity.
Someone should write a book of 'dumb etymologies'!
I never thought of _Red Herrings and White Elephants_ as an academic compendium of well-researched facts. It's witty and creative, for sure - but fiction nonetheless, in the tradition of _Boke of Seynt Albans_ and _Poor Richard's Almanack._ One is, of course, free to choose and pick what one wishes to believe in. And many still believe that the contents of those books are the gospel truth. Which is fine-until they start correcting _me_ when I write - in perfectly good English, I might add - _a flock of geese_ or _a flock of crows_ or _a flock of ravens_ - you get the idea 🙄
Likewise with _throwing out the baby with the bathwater._ Much like _cutting one's nose to spite one's face_ or _don't eat yellow snow,_ the meaning is pretty obvious. BTW, when I say the meaning is obvious, I don't mean only to me. If I do a literal translation into any of the handful of languages that I know, the meaning of those phrases is retained. The phrases are evocative, funny, and memorable-they would've caught on without the suggested incidents having actually occurred. Any "true story" retrofitted to such phrases ought to be _taken with a grain of salt._
Then there are phrases that are _not_ immediately obvious to an ESL/EFL learner. With the _rule of thumb, red herring,_ or _white elephant,_ you do need to know the history and the prevalent culture to grok them. And that's where the opportunity arises for some TH-camrs to upload videos about their origins, and others to debunk them 😜
_L’éléphant blanc est un hareng rouge._
_Quoi ?_
_Le cadeau encombrant n’est qu’une fausse piste._
_Ah, d'accord._
future etymologists coming back this video for history of "Bsometers"
your hair looks great...also great vid...
The only stick that I use with my wife is the rooster 🐓 .
Greetings from Casablanca.
I hope you are having a whale of time in Thailand.
Fare thee well for now and stay mellow.
The story i heard about the bell was Chinese and had something to do with people being poisoned by blowfish
I processed fish in the 80's. Pollock. But there was a lot of bycatch. Some bags were mostly herring. One day, down the conveyor came a red(!) herring. At this point I'd seen 10's if not 100's of thousands of herring and I got pretty excited thinking I had seen the root of the idiom. It was an improbable event that might lead one astray. But that's not what Kevin Stroud says and I wonder what the book you hold has to say.
Kevin Stroud is a very reliable source. He does his homework.
@@LetThemTalkTV No doubt! But so are you and, well, sometimes.....
I have the same book !
I always thought that Bob's your Uncle, came from to explain to the kids when the wife had a lover. Who is this guy. Well it's Uncle Bob. However, ot came from my own imagination. Iscthere any bases to that?
Why do English people use phrase "it's raining cats and dogs"?
It's funny you ask that question because I was planning to answer it in an upcoming video.
some of these stories I hear so often from credible sources tat you could be wrong
I have a question, did people try to make English the dominant language in the world in the past.
Fascinating as always Gideon (and FYI I can testify from experience that domestic violence was still considered a 'private matter' in certain parts of the U.S. as recently as 1987).
That's interesting
watched the whole video, but still don't know what BS is short for. I'm not English, you know.
Apologies: BS = bullshit = nonsense
Хорошо.
Saved by the bell 🛌
Bob's your uncle and granny is your fanny !
7:00 um no . Its because of a shared bath between big families. The smallest children go last and often the water is so dirty you ouldnt see what was in the tub
I think in England they still bathe once a year, don't they? There's this problem where they can only use boiling hot or ice cold water so most don't bother.
I think you're confusing us with the French.
Once a *year*? Who are you, Jeff Bezos?
Oh amazing Gideon e need to learn the english expressions and it's so funny to learn that ! Thanks a lot !
Robert is your mother's brother...
0:03 from what I know it was clearly legal in some counties or towns. For example I read that there is a local law that said that it's allowed to beat your wife, exceot on sundays. It is technically still in force, but superseded by state law that now makes wife beating a crine, no matter on what day.
Which countries?
@LetThemTalkTV I meant counties. Must be autocorrect or something.
@@LetThemTalkTV I don't remember about which one I have read it exactly, but it was definitely a county in the US
I think it goes back to supposed biblical allowances of "educating" your property- that includes wives, children, slaves and servants. Spare the rod and all that....
Well you definitely didn't give the mistakes you fell for yourself low bs scores, now, did you? 😅
Brilliant mate!
Am so early, wow!
I believe safety coffin designs, at least, were documented but dead ringer never sounded like it was in the same world as those things. Always appreciate sober assessments of these strange origins. So often they don't ring true but it's difficult when someone's trying to spread the meme disease to have a chance to look things up and find accurate information. Ever valuable, thank you (in my dialect, we mean it when we say thank you ;) )
Safety coffin designs do the exact opposite though. They are reinforcements keeping the dead down rather than weaknesses letting the living out.
But you don't look much younger in the BS video.
About the baby thing: yes, it sounds quite ridiculous if you really think it through, but it was true that ever family member was bathed in the same tub and that the children were the last ones, so if you forget them, you would throw them out with the bath water. Of course this is unlikely to really haplen, but hyperbole is a thing in language. So I get why people believe it, I would give it a 3 max on the BSOmeter.
posh
exactly
Thanks. I guess.