Origins of sayings

A person at work said today "Oh, he's not happy. They've sent him to Coventry"

they meant by that that the person wasn't being talked to by everyone else.

Where did that saying come from?

Why Coventry?

There must be loads of sayings out there.... where do they all come from?

Heres another "Well I'll go to the foot of our stairs"
This means the person is suprised by something someone has told them, such as

Man A : I saw a monkey eating a ferret in the high street today.
ManB : Well I'll got to the foot of our stairs! Did you really?

Where do all these saying come from and just how local are some of them?

brilliant thread!!!!!!!! i love these sorts of things!!!

cant think of any sayings but i know the word posh comes from many years ago when people used to travel by boat.
the more financially endowed people obviously got the best accomadation on board which was the prt side on the way there, and the starboard side on the return journey...

Port Out Starboard Home.....POSH!

About being sent to Coventry: i heard that it doesn't derive from Coventry the place, but from the Covin-tree from which Coventry took it's name. The Covin-tree was an oak which stood in front of the castle in feudal times. The tree was used as the gallows and those to be executed were sent to the covin-tree.

Probably a load of rubbish though

"he let the cat out of the bag"

in medieval times, naughty salesmen would sell a cat (which was quite cheap and easy to come by) and claim it was a pig(ALOT more expensive). someone who revealed the salesman's lie would 'let the cat out of the bag'... .. not alot of people know that.

interesting stuff, nice start skully

might be a tad but anyways, when was the *why did the chicken cross the road* gag first used??

As far as I know, the saying being sent to coventry originates from the british civil war, when they used a large church in coventry as a military prison. Being sent to Coventry just meant being sent to jail.

There's page here about it

I live on the same street of said church (St Johns) and can see it from my balcony

It was more than that. Because the civilians of the town were a different side to the prisioners (Roundheads and Cavaliers). Therefore when they were sent to the prision they locals would refuse to communicate with the prisioners - hence being "Sent to Coventry"

Ok then, how about

"Well I'll be blowed"

.... no you smutty people thats not a line from a porn film. Its an expression of suprise.

not sure about i'll be blowed but "blimey" comes from "Blind me"... why you'd want to be blinded i don't know but...

I think it was "blind me God" originally and it was used as a way of saying that the thing they were seeing wasn't something a good Christian should hence they asked God to blind them.

and here i was thinking it was the Greeks...

It was actually the Sumerians. *insert Monty Python soundtrack here*

My Nan had a saying for everything. One of her sayings was 'if it rains on the day of your funeral it means you were a good person' and it was raining cats and dogs on her funeral.

'Raining Cats and Dogs' now where does that come from?

on the theme of flying animals

why isnt "not enough room to swing a cat"?

Foot of our stairs thing is a northern saying. We all know how weird northerners are

Swing a cat. Cat is short for cat-o-nine-tails, throughly unpleasent hooked whip thing. I think the having no room had something to do with slave ships.

Carrots. Vitamin A will help with night vision but not really all that much when you've got a decent diet. The see in the dark thing was from propoganda during WWII. Allied pilots had an uncanny ability to hit targets in the dark, to make people grow/eat their own vegitables there were propoganda posters around crediting it to carrots. It was actually because they had newly invert radar in teh nosecones of the planes.

Different kettle of fish. I have a feeling that kettle is an old word for bucket, anyone got any light on this?

yup kettle is an archaic term for bucket,although i have ni idea where the saying comes from......??

I know the saying "Sweet F A" reffers to Sweet Fanny Addams (And not sweet F**k all like I used to) But I cant remember the stoty behind it! Can anyone jog my memory?

Not a saying, but rather a name.

Scouse - the name for Liverpudlians, is from the dish Lobscouse which sailors originally took with them on voyagers...

Saved by the bell.

In the olden days medical technology wasnt that good and they often buried people alive, but they only discovered this later when they opened some of the caskets and found nail marks on the inside So to solve this problem they ran a thread out of the coffin to a bell outside the grave. If the person was still alive and woke up, all he had to do was ring the bell to be saved. There would be a person walking around the graveyard at night listening for the bell which is also where the saying "graveyard shift" came from

he "Kicked the bucket" i cant remember where it came form in full but it has something to do with war, hospitals and death

The wooden frame that slaughtered animals were hung from is known as a bucket. The death spasms of the animals caused them to kick the bucket.

yuk

willy nilly
Meaning

Two slightly differing but related meanings. 'Whether you like it or not' and ' in a haphazard fashion'.

Origin

The origin centres around the first of those meanings. The earlier form was 'will he, nill he' or sometimes 'will I, nill I'. The expression also appears as 'nilly willy' or 'willing, nilling'.

The early meaning of the word nill is key to this. In early English nill was the opposite of will. That is, will meant to want to do something, nill meant to want to avoid it. So, combining the willy - 'I am willing' and nilly - 'I am unwilling' expresses the idea that it doesn't matter to me one way or the other.

The Latin phrase 'nolens, volens' means the same thing, although it isn't clear whether the English version is a simple translation of that.

There's also a, now archaic, phrase 'hitty, missy' that had a similar derivation. That comes from 'hit he, miss he'.

The earliest citation is from Middleton 1608:

"Thou shalt trust me spite of thy teeth, furnish me with some money wille nille."

Pipe Dream
Meaning

An unrealistic hope or fantasy.

Origin

The allusion is to the dreams experienced by smokers of opium pipes. Opium was widely used by the English literati in the 18th and 19th centuries. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the best known users, and it would be difficult to claim that the imagery in surreal works like Kubla Khan owned nothing to opium. Lewis Carroll, although not known to be an opium user himself, makes many clear allusions to drug use in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Arthur Conan Doyle goes a step further by making his hero Sherlock Holmes an opium addict.

It's strange then that 'pipe dream' comes from none of these sources but has an American origin. In his 1896 play, "Artie - A Story of the Streets and Town", the American columnist and playwright George Ade penned the line: "But then I was spinnin' pipe dreams myself, tellin' about how much I lose on the board and all that." From the context it seems clear that the phrase wasn't coined for that play, but that Ade would have expected his audience to have prior knowledge of it. He goes to no effort to explain it in the play and the meaning wouldn't have been clear otherwise.

There's no earlier known printed version though, so it seems clear that the phrase came into being soon before 1896, most probably not far from Ade's place of work, which was downtown Chicago.

Turn a blind eye

Meaning

To refuse to take notice of a situation.

Origin
Admiral Nelson is supposed to have said this when wilfully disobeying a signal to withdraw during a naval engagement. Tales of that sort, especially when they are about national heroes like Nelson, tend to be exaggerated or entirely fictitious. That doesn't appear to be the case here though and there's very good evidence to show that Nelson was indeed the source of this phrase.

In the naval battle of Copenhagen in 1801 Nelson lead the attack of the British fleet against a joint Danish/Norwegian enemy. The British fleet of the day was commanded by Admiral Sir Hyde Parker. The two men disagreed over tactics and at one point Hyde Parker sent a signal (by the use of flags) for Nelson to disengage. Nelson was convinced he could win if he persisted and that's when he 'turned a blind eye'.

In their biography, Life of Nelson, published just eight years later, Clarke and M'Arthur printed what they claimed to be a Nelson's actual words at the time:

"Putting the glass to this blind eye, he [Nelson] exclaimed, I really do not see the signal."
The first recorded use of the phrase in the form we normally use it today is in "More letters from Martha Wilmot: impressions of Vienna, 1819-1829." These were reprinted in 1935 and this quotation is recorded as being sent by Ms. Wilmot in 1823:
turn a blind eye and a deaf ear every now and then, and we get on marvellously well."
The manner of use of the phrase in that quotation suggests that it was well understood at the time.

"Round the bend" to mean someone is mad

This one comes from the shape of driveways going up to buildings. Stately Homes had straight drives at the time but Assylums for the mentally ill had curved ones so that as you came up the driveway you couldn't see where you were going. It was supposed to be so the mad person being taken there would stay calm until the last moment when it was too late and they were at the door.