Introduction: In this article, Jessica Edwards describes the meanings and origins of idioms (figurative phrases) our ancestors used. Jessica has had a lifelong interest in her family’s history – especially on her father’s side, which goes back to the first settlers in Pennsylvania, Jamestown and New England – and has documented and added more than 21,000 people to her family tree!
Idioms (figurative phrases) have been used throughout the centuries and may appear in what was said or written by our ancestors. Understanding these idioms will help you better understand what your ancestors were saying – and finding out the history of these sayings can be quite entertaining!
Below is a list of 24 common phrases, followed by a chart showing their meanings and date of publication – or (if mentioned in correspondence) the date they were written. Can you put them in chronological order from oldest to newest? The answers appear in the following chart.
Happy Hunting!
Idioms:
| _____ A) A piece of cake |
| _____ B) A taste of your own medicine |
| _____ C) Add fuel to the fire |
| _____ D) Big cheese |
| _____ E) Blessing in disguise |
| _____ F) Bring home the bacon |
| _____ G) Burning one’s boats |
| _____ H) Call it a night |
| _____ I) A dime a dozen |
| _____ J) A piece of cake |
| _____ K) Actions speak louder than words |
| _____ L) Apple of someone’s eye |
| _____ M) Bigger fish to fry |
| _____ N) Can’t cut the mustard |
| _____ O) Caught between a rock and a hard place |
| _____ P) Clam up |
| _____ Q) Come hell or high water |
| _____ R) Costs an arm and a leg |
| _____ S) Couch potato |
| _____ T) Cut to the chase |
| _____ U) Dead ringer |
| _____ V) Don’t judge a book by its cover |
| _____ W) Every dog has his day |
| _____ X) For the love of God (or something else) |
Answers (oldest to newest):
| Idiom | Meaning and Origin |
| A taste of your own medicine | When someone receives the same treatment, usually negative, that they gave someone else (in “Aesop’s Fables,” written sometime between 620 and 564 B.C.) |
| Add fuel to the fire | Something that worsens an already bad situation (first used about 1 A.D. by Roman historian Titus Livius in his “History of Rome”) |
| Burning one’s boats | To act in a way that destroys any chance of returning to the way things were (in 711 A.D. the Muslim army entered the Iberian Peninsula; their commander, Taria bin Ziyad, ordered his boats to be burned so that his men would have to conquer the country or be killed) |
| Apple of someone’s eye | To be loved and adored (attributed to King Alfred the Great of 885 A.D. in Wessex, England, in his translation of Pope Gregory’s “Pastoral Care”) |
| Bring home the bacon | To make money (supposedly came from a story dated to 1104 in Great Dunmow, in Essex, England, of how a couple so demonstrated their marital devotion to the Prior of Little Dunmow that he awarded them a flitch – side – of bacon) |
| Big cheese | The person in charge (first appeared in English in roughly 1200 A.D.) |
| Every dog has his day | Everyone gets their chance to do something big (recorded as being said by Elizabeth I in a letter to her brother sometime during her reign from 1558 to 1603) |
| Actions speak louder than words | It’s better to do something than just talk about it (by John Pym, the English parliamentarian, recorded in 1628 in Hansard, in the record of the proceedings of the UK parliament) |
| Bigger fish to fry | I have more important things to do (first published in “The Memoirs” by English writer and gardener John Evelyn in 1660) |
| Blessing in disguise | Something good and beneficial that did not initially seem that way (in James Hervey’s hymn “Since All the Downward Tracts of Time” in 1746) |
| Caught between a rock and a hard place | Making a choice between two unpleasant choices (in Homer’s “Odyssey,” which was written down sometime between 750-650 B.C.) |
| Call it a night | Going to bed (it was originally “call it half a day,” first recorded in 1838, which referred to leaving one’s place of employment before the work day was over) |
| Come hell or high water | You are willing to do everything to accomplish it no matter what obstacles in your path (the first printed reference comes from an Iowa newspaper, the “Burlington Weekly Hawk Eye,” dated May 1882) |
| Dead ringer | Someone the same as someone else (this idiom was used in the “Manitoba Free Press” in October 1882 to describe a horse that was substituted for another, similar in appearance, in order to defraud the bookies) |
| Can’t cut the mustard | Can’t keep up with the competition (it first appeared in the 1889 edition of the “Ottawa Herald” referencing President Cleveland, saying he “couldn’t cut the mustard” |
| Clam up | To stop talking (first seen in the 1910s in print) |
| Cut to the chase | Skip the irrelevant parts, and go straight to the main point (believed to have come about in the era of the silent films in the beginning of the 1920s, when audiences preferred the chase scenes to those scenes involving dialogue (shown as captions on screen) |
| For the love of God (or something else) | Consider what I’m saying (usually said in frustration; “Pete” and “Mike” were euphemisms for God used since the early 1920s – this idiom used by James Joyce in his 1922 book “Ulysses”) |
| A dime a dozen | Something that is very common (first published in 1931 in the “Northern Miner” newspaper) |
| A piece of cake | Something that is easy to understand or accomplish (Ogden Nash is the first known to have used it, in a poem in his 1936 book “Primrose Path”) |
| Don’t judge a book by its cover | Don’t judge someone or something by how it looks (attributed to a 1944 edition of the “African Journal of American Speech”) |
| Costs an arm and a leg | Something that is overpriced or very expensive (first published in a December 1949 edition of the “Long Beach Independent”: “Food Editor Beulah Karney has more than 10 ideas for the homemaker who wants to say ‘Merry Christmas’ and not have it cost her an arm and a leg.”) |
| Couch potato | A sedentary person who spends a lot of time seated, often watching TV (first seen in an American cartoon in the 1970s that showed two idle and inactive characters which were named “Couch Potatoes”) |
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