Content tagged with “idiom” under “Stuff I Looked Up”

“Bertha is a German name. There are two threads of history for this reference – First, Bertha Heyman was a Prussian con artist who swindled money out of men in eastern America and Canada in the late 1800s. She was a large woman – supposedly 5-foot-4-inches and 245 pounds. There are references to…”

“A ‘pale’ is a pointed stick. It’s used as part of the word ‘impale’ and ‘palisade.’ (It’s from a French word meaning ‘stick.’) As a verb, to ‘pale’ an area meant to drive sticks into the ground to represent the boundaries of it. So a ‘pale’ is sometimes used as a noun to mean a confined, delimited…”

“There doesn’t seem to be a consistent definition for this. It’s not an organized denomination. From Got Questions: Bible churches are those which profess to adhere to the Bible as their standard of faith and practice. However, they are of no particular Christian denomination (non-denominational),…”

“A ‘bill of goods’ is essentially a receipt. When you buy something, you get a bill of goods to prove that you paid for it. However, you should also receive the merchandise , in addition to the receipt. If you buy a car, you get two things: (1) the receipt (the ‘bill of goods’), and (2) the car…”

“A series of mountain resorts in the Catskills of Upstate New York which catered largely to Jewish families. They were popular because they were within train distance from New York City at a time when air travel was new and expensive, and antisemitism was sill prevalent, which caused Jewish families…”

“ A group of advisers or experts. It’s usually used to refer to a group of people supplying advice to another person – so they are a brain trust to someone else. Specifically, three professors at Columbia were known as ‘the Brain Trust’ to FDR during his 1932 presidential campaign. ”

“A ‘bucket list’ is a list of things you want to do before you die (‘kick the bucket’). It’s become an ingrained American idiom, and I’ve also heard it in other parts of the world. I became aware of the term because of the 2007 movie The Bucket List . But surely that film didn’t invent the phrase,…”

“This refers an action performed to achieve some result, without any understanding of the mechanics of how it works, or even if it does work. But Action X is mentally associated with Result Y, and someone believes the causation exists, so they keep performing Action X. A literal ‘cargo cult’…”

“It came from the novel – it’s a phrase invented by Joseph Heller for his 1962 novel of the same time. It did not exist prior to the novel, and took on a life of its own after the novel as an idiom to describe a frustrating loop where two choices are both prevented by the other. ‘You mean there’s a…”

“A principle of fiction that says every story element has to matter to the overall plot, and if something doesn’t further the plot, it should be removed. The principle is often stated as: If a gun appears in Act One, it better go off in Act Three. The original reference was by the Russian playwright…”

“This is an idiom that refers to situations involving secrecy and intrigue. In ancient times, assassins or thieves would wear cloaks which hid their weapons, often a dagger. This enabled the classic scenario of someone pulling a knife from beneath their robes and killing someone, which I suppose…”

“This is an idiom with no settled meaning. Some people consider it an insult, others a term of endearment. The most common usage is by the character of The Joker in the Batman universe. He describes himself as ‘The Clown Prince of Crime.’ But did it predate that? According to a Google NGram search ,…”

“This specifically refers to a biological phenomenon in animals where males will have sex more often if they are presented with a variety of partners, rather than the same partner over and over again. The source is humorous: The President and Mrs. Coolidge were being shown [separately] around an…”

“This presumably refers to a person who has wealth equivalent to a billion U.S. dollars (as opposed to a billion units of some other currency). I went looking for some validation of this, but I didn’t find any explicit definitions. What I did find were a lot of contextual quotes indicating this was…”

“It’s a cycle where problems lead to more problems and a situation spirals into destruction. From Investopia : A doom loop describes a situation in which one negative action or factor triggers another, which in turn triggers another negative action or causes the first negative factor to worsen,…”

“It came from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland . The very first chapter is entitled ‘Down the Rabbit-Hole.’ A white rabbit appears to Alice on a riverbank, says ‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!,’ then disappears down a hole in the ground (the ‘rabbit-hole’). Alice follows him, thereby starting a…”

“This means ‘behold the man’ in Latin. It was used by Pontius Pilate when presenting Jesus to the crowds just before his execution. This moment has become common in art, as a depiction of Jesus with a crown of thorns. Colloquially, it’s become a phrase which represents sacrifice, humility, or the…”

“This is a phrase commonly known to mean ‘jealously,’ but I’m having trouble figuring out why it means this. Shakespeare used the phrase at least twice. In Othello : O beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on. In The Merchant of Venice : How all…”

“This idiom is often used when referring to childhood or youth Halycon is an ancient name for the Kingfisher bird. In ancient times, it was believed the gods had given the bird the power to calm the seas during the time when she laid her eggs. Shakespeare used the phrase as the contemporary idiom in…”

“When we hear the phrase ‘in cold blood,’ it’s often connected to murder: ‘He shot the man in cold blood.’ This breeds confusion. Shooting someone results in blood, so whose blood are we talking about? The shooter or the victim? It’s the shooter. ‘Hot blood’ means you’re angry and looking for…”

“ French for ‘I don’t know what.’ It means some quality that you find appealing, but cannot describe in words. ”

“This is a theory that humans are inherently peaceful and are corrupted by modern society and economic systems. It’s mainly attributed to the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality : …nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when…”

“This is an expression that roughly translates to ‘obligation of the noble.’ It refers to the belief that the privileged people in society are obliged to assist others through charity. While sounding benevolent, in usage, it tends to imply a level of faux altruism, and gives justification for their…”

“A ‘tenter’ is a frame to stretch clothing to dry. A ‘tenterhook’ is the hook that attaches to the clothing to stretch it. Thus, to be ‘on tenterhooks’ means to be stretched to the point of tension. (I’m assuming ‘tenter’ means ‘a thing that tents something,’ like a verb. In this sense, ‘being on…”

“This means to keep something secret, but no one really knows why. ‘QT’ is considered an abbreviation of ‘quiet.’ …but why? There aren’t a lot of answers. Moreover, its punctuation and capitalized a variety of ways: on the QT on the qt on the Q.T. on the q.t. The last two are particularly baffling,…”

“A yoke is the harness that gets put across the backs of horses or oxen so they can pull a wagon or plow. As a symbol, it’s representative of work or subservience. A horse is ‘broken’ when it will accept the yoke without fighting. In ancient times, when an army would win a battle, they sometimes set…”

“‘Pax’ is Latin for ‘peace.’ It’s been used as a prefix for a lot of things: Pax Americana (‘American Peace’) Pax Romana (‘Roman Peace’) Pax Brittanica (‘British Peace’) Pax Americana generally refers to peace among the developed nations of the Western Hemisphere – North America and Europe. The idea…”

“ This is a Biblical reference, from Matthew 7:6: Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces. ”

“This is an idiom of organizations that says a person will be promoted to the point where they become incompetent. Over time, this means that many people will be incompetent at their jobs. If Bob occupies Position A and is competent at it, he will be promoted to Position B which has more…”

“This is a form of the name Philistines, which were a people who lived in what is now Southern Israel in the iron and bronze ages. They may have been formed by seafaring Greeks – several civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean record being attacked by ‘sea people.’ They were portrayed negatively…”

“ From Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra : My salad days, When I was green in judgment, cold in blood, To say as I said then. A salad is green when its fresh. Green implies beginnings or amateurism. ”

“This is Latin for ‘no mans land.’ It’s a concept in international relations that refers to physical land that no nation claims. It can be claimed by occupation (though that might violate other laws). The only major area of unclaimed land on Earth is Antarctica. There are, at any given time, several…”

“This refers to generally poor science, where conclusions are drawn based on dubious or flawed methods. It’s a newer phrase than I thought. It is most closely associated with a 2000 book by Robert Park called Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud . Google Trends only goes back to 2004,…”

“This has two common meanings, one depending on the other. Just after World War 2, ten veterans and their commander went to work at Ford. They had all served in the Army during the war in a unit called Statistical Control, which broke new ground in information management for logistics. After the…”

“A problem that is very hard to solve, and might not have a solution because the requirements keep changing, and it’s a zero-sum game where if someone wins, someone else loses. The title comes from a guest editorial by C. West Churchman in a 1967 issue of Management Science . He entitled the…”

“This is an idiom that means you’re frustrated or mentally exhausted about something. It depends on the usage of ‘wit’ being understood in its classical definition of ‘to be able to know or think,’ which is listed in most etymologies as an ‘archaic’ term from Old English. So, to be at ‘your wit’s…”

“This is a term from IT which means to perform some seemingly pointless activity which (1) is required to complete a larger, more important tasks; or (2) is done as a form of procrastination or incidental to the more important tasks. Often, to complete Task X, a programmer must do Task A, which…”

“This was the depiction of East Asians as an existential threat to the Western World, mainly during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Asians were used as antagonists in movies, novels, and comic books, often portrayed as criminal masterminds bent on taking over the world. This was partially due to…”

“An informal term meaning a sudden unexplained loss of skill in sports, especially sub-skills requiring precision and accuracy. In baseball, this might be a prolonged ‘slump.’ In golf, a sudden inability to putt well. In basketball, an unexplained reduction in the ability to shoot free throws. The…”