Why Do We Say that?

I've seen a lot of lecturers come up here and start off casually with "when Sheila asked me to lecture on carrier pigeons," or "Misha is basically forcing me to lecture on wood paneling" and while I think that's a really great way to start I, unfortunately, won't be able to begin like that. The truth is, I came right out and asked them, in fact I pretty much begged. I was so keen to offer my services because if I didn't find an outlet for my obsession soon, I was probably going to lose some friends.

It's a good thing I'm here tonight because people were growing impatient with me and it didn't look like there was going to be an opportunity for me to present my case in the near future. But hey, someone cancelled, so here I am.

My obsession began innocently enough one evening while I was making plans to hang out with my friend Dan, I believe I said something like "so, I'll see you there at 8, right?" and he replied:

"Seen."

"... Scene? Like ess cee ee en ee?"

"No, seen like... I seen that"

"Seen what? What the hell does that mean?"

"It means, like... I understand. If you said 'man, the new Nissans are sexy' I could just reply with 'Seen' instead of saying, 'yeah, I agree... I've seen them'... It's like saying 'Roger that' or 'I hear ya' or something."

"Except you haven't SEEN anything, we're on the PHONE. I might have let you get away with saying 'heard' instead of saying 'I HEARD that', but just saying 'seen' is stupid, you're just picking up something dumb you heard in a dance hall song."

"Ben," he defended himself "I still say 'WORD UP', people make fun of me, but I still say it. I still say 'Groovy' and 'dig it', I just pick up things if I enjoy saying them."

"Look man," I said, "I appreciate the fact that your love of retarded urban expressions runs the gauntlet of the past two decades, but that doesn't mean that it makes any fucking sense. I know it bugs the hell out of you when you get emails from morons where every word is three letters long and includes a number so I'd appreciate it if you'd avoid contributing to the destruction of the English language when speaking with me. Please converse properly and stop insulting me with crap that is illogical."

He mulled this over for a few seconds and then said, "Ok fine, you win, I promise I will never say another expression that doesn't make sense EVER again... on one condition..."

"What condition?" I replied.

"You tell me what 'running the gauntlet' means."

I felt like a total jackass, he got me good AND he got me twice. Not only had I just used an expression that technically, logically and structurally doesn't make any sense to me, but I also used the WRONG expression.

I *should* have said: "runs the GAMUT", but that doesn't make much sense to me either. Sure, I know what it means when I say it, but I don't know WHY.

Immediately dumbfounded I did what any sensible dork would do:

I googled it.

Now I know that gamut is a compound word made up of UT, which, as only a religious scrabble player would know, was the 1st note of the original Latin music scale, which has now been replaced with "do" (a deer, a female deer). It was originally "UT RE MI FA SO LA TI UT" (imagine Julie Andrews making a song out of that) and the lowest C (or UT) was called the gamma. So running the gam-ut was going from the lowest note to the top note in a scale.

Running the gauntlet is something completely different, I must have asked everyone I knew what it could mean, but no one had the answer. Well, my mom did, but my mom is batman and she knows everything so she doesn't count.

Everyone knew that it meant a harrowing ordeal, and we knew that a gauntlet was a combat glove that a knight would throw down on a table to signify that they were ready for a fight. But how exactly does one run a glove, armored or unarmored? And even if you could, why would it be a harrowing ordeal? The best guess was based on someone's childhood wrestling watching, they remembered that back then a wrestler would "run the gauntlet" and be asked to face 5 foes in a row, so maybe five armored fingers for five dangerous tasks?

Nope, not even close, it comes from a 17th century Swedish military punishment, it was called "running the gatalope" (gata means lane and lopp means running a course). It involved stripping the incompetent soldier naked and forcing them to run between two rows of their fellow soldiers who would lash at him with sticks or knotted ropes or, in particularly nasty cases, swords.

I didn't know that, I would hope no one else did, but that didn't stop me from using the expression. And that began my life-encompassing obsession. In conversations with friends, we'd be hanging out and someone would just drop an everyday expression without thinking about it and I'd begin twitching and flailing and snapping and pointing:

"What did you just say?! That! Yes THAT! Why do we say that!? No, I mean WHY, I know what it means but WHY does it mean that?!"

The second you start examining everyday conversations you find that our language is absolutely littered with expressions that, when you separate them out of the established meanings we have associated with them, when you dissect them and examine them as sentences unto themselves... they make NO fucking sense.

I said "it's going to rain cats and dogs" to a co-worker who was a recent immigrant from South America and she was absolutely dumbfounded. Luckily for her I was mid way through an obsession and had recently learned that, to the best of our knowledge, it meant a rainstorm so bad the poor drainage in our old cities would be unable to cope and the streets would flood and drown all the stray cats and dogs. Upon exiting your home you would see their bodies littering the streets, giving you the illusion that it had just rained cats and dogs.

That was the point of no return right there; from that point on this was all I could think about. Like if a friend said "He stole my thunder" when someone took their credit or spotlight I'd have to know why. How can someone have thunder let alone have it stolen? Turns out the original expression was coined by an inventor named John Dennis who created a machine that shook sheet metal to make the sound of thunder for stage productions. He discovered it being used in a play that had not paid him for the right to use his device so he ran through the streets shouting "They stole my thunder! They stole my thunder!"

As I dig into these I'm going to avoid expressions like gamut, where the lack of understanding on my part was due to not knowing a word, as there's little point in trying to figure out all the words I don't know. I became more interested in an arrangement of words I DID know into sentences I technically understood, but for one reason or another were used to mean something different from what that order of words SHOULD mean.

Like, for example, if someone said "that guy is crazy like a fox" I'd immediately run it over in my head and think "ok, yeah, foxes, cunning, sneaky, daring, ok... crazy works."

But "Cool like a cucumber"? C'mon now, Fonzy is cool, but there's nothing cool about cucumbers, right? Get this: a field of cucumbers will be TWENTY degrees cooler than the field of corn next door. As we run out of fossil fuels, global warming ramps up and Freon is banned because of the damage it causes to the environment, we must be sure to remember the mighty cucumber. They're mother nature's air conditioning, invest in them now.

This crap was literally all I could talk about, I'd meet girls at parties and instead of asking them for their number, I'd ask them if they've ever thought about what it means when we say "till the cows come home". We use it when we mean an almost indefinite period of time but technically, it means just after sunrise because if you were having a big party in the barn that lasted all night you'd have to stop when the cows showed up at the door looking to get their morning tit massage.

Seriously, knowing all this did not score me *ANY* digits... not a single date, to this day I am still flabbergasted.

All this fuss because Dan said "seen" instead of just saying "Roger that". Of course, thinking back on it once I was infected with this phrase sickness, all I could think about was... why the hell do we say "Roger that"??? Who the fuck is Roger, what does he care if I've taken out my objective?

Today we have fiber optic telephone connections and telemarketers have headsets so expensive they can actually hear my blood boil on the other end of the phone. Yet my bank still sends me mail addressed to Ben spelt with a D. Imagine how frustrating it must be to not be able to hear where the sniper fire is coming from because you cannot understand the instructions off a hand cranked radio when it's crackling with static and there's gunfire and screaming in the background.

During world war two the radios and conditions were so bad that not only was a full sentence completely unintelligible, but they weren't able to even spell something out to each other because every Dee sounded like a Bee or a Gee or a Vee. The effective if not efficient solution was to have unique sounding code words for letters, so they could spell out words and co-ordinates with these code words. Alpha, for A, Bravo for B, Charlie for C, Delta for D, Easy for E all the way to Niner for N, Tango for T and Victor for V. While this made communication possible, spelling "RECEIVED" would take 5 minutes you don't have when your life is on the line, so you'd start with Roger for R and then hang up and run for you life. Roger became so popular for confirming an order they had to make the code word for R "Romeo" instead, how romantic.

The military is responsible for SO many things we say, that now have absolutely no military associations at all. I remember in school the health teacher would say how important it was to have "three square meals a day"... Why Square? Square like nerdy? Square like on a square plate? It turns out, yes; it's on a god dammed square plate. In the military the troops were pretty poorly fed, only one meal a day would be substantial and contain any meat, which I suppose you'd need if your job involved killing people. These hearty meals were prepackaged like TV dinners and came on square trays. These trays were unique looking enough they could be spotted being unloaded off the supply trucks so excitement would build around camp as soon as they discovered they were getting a "square meal". When things were going well in the army, if you got promoted or if you had a cushy administrative assignment, you would be lucky enough to get three square meals a day.

We say "push the envelope" when someone is trying too hard, but technically pushing postage around a desk doesn't sound like much exertion. Turns out, the envelope in question is not a paper one, but a mathematical one. A device is built to specifications, represented by a curve on a graph (also known as an envelope) to show how fast it can go, at what maximum altitude, how many rotations per minute, how many sensual vibrations per second... But to push that device beyond that spec would be to push its performance beyond the envelope.

When someone says "balls to the wall" we know that means to give 100% effort, but dissect that for a second and picture a man with his groin thrust up against a brick wall and you'll probably think, as I did, that it is not working very hard at all. One friend suggested that it could mean so many people working in a room that they are all pushed up against the walls... but again, there isn't a whole lot being accomplished in that state. Turns out fighter planes had two throttles, one for amount of fuel and one for the fuel mixture, both the throttles had big knobs on the end and when you pushed them both all the way to the front for maximum power, they touched the front dash together and they looked like testicles. It's the aviation equivalent to "pedal to the medal".

Some of you might be out there thinking: "I've never heard that expression before" or perhaps "I heard it meant something completely different". I can assure you that these are age-old expressions that, if you look for them, you'll find in newspapers and books every day. As far as conflicts over origins go, well I had to make an executive decision. As I cross referenced and triple checked my answers across multiple sources I'd encounter more than one plausible origin, so I'd just pick one that I liked, If you don't like it, feel free to give your own lecture.

For example, I love the expression "the whole nine yards", but had a terrible time finding out what the hell it means. When I asked people for their opinion the general consensus was that it has to do with American football. Of course it doesn't take a real genius to realize that nine yards in the NFL is diddlysquat, hell nine point nine nine nine yards is nothing, they bring out those measuring chains and if it's not ten, it's nothing.

The answer I love and the one I use is that war planes have ammo belts that were nine yards long, and to give something "the whole nine yards" means to give it every shell you've got. But as I double-checked it some sources said they could find no evidence of a plane or jet that has nine yards of ammo, nor did anyone think the military would use such an imprecise measurement, they'd say "all 800 shells" or something. Other suggestions say that cement mixers hold enough cement to lay nine yards of sidewalk, or that it's nine yards between the jail cell wall to the cell block, and so on and so on. It turned out to be impossible to get a definite answer but I'm going to stick with the ammo story anyway, cause it seems to rings true (which is an expression that means that a bell rings at exactly the musical note it was supposed to).

Unfortunately the same thing happened when I looked up "dressed to the nines", some suggest that it takes nine yards of fabric to make a really expensive suit, or the perfect Scottish kilt, or that the expensive seats at the front of the theater that were filled with the exquisitely dressed upper class cost nine pounds while the cheap seats at the back filled with the common riff raff cost just one.

Some sources said that Cloud Nine is actually the ninth level of cloud, from stratus, past altocumulus, up to cirrus and finally up to number nine, cumulonimbus, except the complete list of nine could very well be a complete list of ten, or seven, or twelve, depending on which school of meteorology you study in.

Maybe you took a "Nine Day Wander" after high school, maybe or you think that a certain musician is nothing but a "Nine Day Wonder" or maybe you just wonder why "cats have nine lives", either way there's no real origin for any of them. Nine is just one of those numbers that gets used in countless expressions just because it had a nice ring to it. Even "nine inch nails" was admittedly chosen just because of how it sounded. I can't imagine anyone who loves saying "nine ways 'till Sunday" is enough of a math dork to get a hard on for the obscure fact that if you divide a perfect number by nine, you always get remainder 1... It's just a word that works well in a sentence; there is no real reason... Unlike the number thirteen, which is unlucky because Judas was the thirteenth person to arrive at the last supper.

Seven is lucky for no specific reason, sure we've got seven days of the week, seven seas and seven planets (or so we thought back then), but we've also got seven sins and seven heads on a hydra. It's just another obsession with a number without real documentation, I can tell you that playing craps with dice when you roll for sevens USED to be called "crabs"... but I can't tell you the reason for either name.

Gambling has tons of expressions in our everyday language, like we say someone is a "dead ringer" for a celebrity, but this has nothing to do with a bell that has been killed, a ringer in this sense is a competitor that's being substituted for another, and dead means dead-on accurate, like a doornail, so accurate that you can't tell the poor performer from the shoe-in that's secretly replacing it.

But a shoe in is not a shoe like the one on your foot, it's shoo like what you say to an animal to make it run away really fast, but this time you're on it and you're shooing it to the finish line so you can make a buck.

We say "Pass the buck" when someone is dodging their responsibility at the workplace, but the buck in question had nothing to do with revenue or male deer, the buck was the marker to indicate who was dealing in poker. So to pass the buck didn't mean you were running away from your job, it actually meant your job was completed and it was someone else's turn to deal now. When "the buck stops here" you're not really the one who is in control, you're just the last dealer and the game is over when the buck is passed to you. Because the marker was frequently a silver dollar, a buck eventually came to mean currency.

When the chips are down it's your poker chips, not Ruffles or Doritos, and when they're all down on the table that means everyone knows how much you've risked. But the chip on your shoulder isn't a poker chip or a potato chip, it's a chip of wood, and apparently daring someone to knock it off was how badasses started fights before they had invented soccer.

If you're armed to the teeth you're not a badass who might bite someone, you're a pirate who's got so many knives and guns that when you go into combat, you've run out of pockets and belts so you have to put one in your mouth.

When we say there isn't enough room to swing a cat, it's got nothing to do with swinging a cat around by its tail no matter how much my hatred of the vile creatures leads me to love the idea. The cat in question is a cat of nine tails (there's that nine again) and there simply isn't enough room to torture someone below deck on a pirate ship, so you have to do it "above board".

But, when the waves got rough, you'd want to be below deck, so if you're "under the weather" you've taken refuge at the absolute center and absolute bottom of a rocking ship because it would be the least moving point, so technically it means sea-sick, not a cold or a hang over.

When someone is drunk, they can't do laundry, let alone hang it out to dry, so how exactly did "Three Sheets to the Wind" come to mean inebriated? The sheets in question are not bed sheets or sheets of plywood, they are the ropes that tie down sails on a ship, and thus having all three sheets dangling in the wind means you are completely out of control.

We tell children to mind their "p-leases and thank-q's" but originally it was more minding your business than simply being polite. A bartender had to keep track of how many pints and quarts a group of sailors would consume in an evening with a board with notches for p's and q's.

As I'm sure you've noticed, many of these expressions don't make sense because one word has been taken out or changed because of the broken telephone of the ages. "Falling off the wagon" makes NO sense, unless of course you know the original expression was falling off the WATER wagon, as opposed to jumping on the bandwagon, which was actually a politicians wagon with a band on it that they would take with them from town to town to raise excitement for their campaign.

A few months back I was at Trampoline Hall and the lecturer was really upset with the expression "every now and then" because despite the fact that it refers to EVERY now, EVERY single now, now now now now now... AND then... we use it to mean "once in a while", but the expression was "every OTHER now and then" which is ambiguous enough to not offend.

It's not: "get your goat"... what would that accomplish exactly? It's "get your goad" which while being a grammatical traffic accident at least makes sense because to goad someone is to prod them into doing your bidding. So go ahead and get my goat, see if I care.

We say that Mary "can't hold a candle to" Jane, and while you might think this might have something to do with "carrying a torch" for someone (an old mourning tradition) it should have been "can't hold a candle *FOR* Jane". Carpenters and doctors and other such skilled tradesmen would, during an emergency, have to work at night and need some peon to stand there and hold a candle for them so they could see. Sadly, some people can't even do that right and are thus unfit to even "hold a candle to" a task.

When someone talks about giving someone "the cold shoulder", I always thought of the other expressions "being as cold as the other side of the pillow", or "shrugging someone off", both of which make sense to me. But no, it's technically "the cold shoulder *of beef*", which is the unpleasant and gamey cut that rich families would feed unprepared to unwanted houseguests to make them leave.

But even if you're poor you should never have to eat humble pie, because it doesn't exist. It was UMBLE pie, which is made of guts and nastiness and is apparently as unpleasant as it sounds. It was only fit for consumption by the lowest rung on the ladder of society, so if you had that for dinner, you had pretty much conceded your place in life.

And while eating crow is actually eating crow, crow is guts and other nastiness, not the bird. The crow was named the crow because it ate crow.

Chewing the fat isn't missing any words or meaning, it meant literally to chew on fat. Apparently the Inuit would sit and chew chunks of raw whale blubber while sitting around conversing, to help pass the time.

Of course I learn this after being reprogrammed in high school to never say the word Eskimo again because that was actually the Inuit word for eater of raw meat... which really isn't insulting as much as it is historical fact.

Just like how I was programmed to never ever say the word oriental, you had to say "South East Asian" because oriental was in the dictionary as "strange or foreign". But of course oriental is the opposite of occidental, meaning east vs. west, and it's only in the dictionary as "strange" in the same ignorant white-guy way that in the same way that French is in there for tongue kissing, English is an oddly spun ball and Greek is doing it somewhere you're not supposed to.

I remember once in the lobby of a university residence I saw a mural on "expressions of hate" and how you should change your speech to help better the world. It demanded that the expression "a good rule of thumb" not be used in papers or course materials because it was spawned by an old English law that allowed a man to beat his wife as long as he didn't use a rod thicker than his thumb. It also said we had to stop using the expression "spade a spade" because it was clearly racist and built upon the racial slur "spade" for a black man, as in "black as the ace of spades".

But there never was any such English law; a "rule of thumb" was more likely when a tailor would say "it's good enough to use your thumb to measure an inch if it saves time", hell you could probably find more evidence of laws being passed by Judge Tom Thumb than any officially sanctioned wife whupping laws. The expression spade a spade predates slavery by a half century, the spade was one you dig with, the original expression meant to keep things simple, and stop "calling a spade a bloody shovel."

If a complete lack of logic won't stop a sentence that's fun to say from digging its claws into our speech patterns than it is pretty obvious that we're not going to stop saying things because the sentence may or may have not had some kind of sinister context back in history.

I've always been of the opinion that you should never worry about the WORD someone is using so much the meaning the person is intending.

Like, we'll say that we're going out to "paint the town red" when we want to party, but that came from the Romans who would take over a village and celebrate the victory by forcing the survivors to paint the walls of their houses with the blood of their dead family members. I can't imagine a more sinister origin than that, but no one would think of forcing people to not say that because the origin is much more obscure, what kind of rational is that to decide what's allowed and what's not?

These origins, as much as they are fun to learn, are irrelevant. I had never heard of Lord Robert Salisbury nor did I have any idea that his appointment of his Nephew Arthur Balfour as the secretary of Ireland was highly scandalous and criticized, but that's shouldn't stop me from saying "bob's yer uncle" because it's a really fun thing to say.

So to recap, in case you missed it, Roger is not a person, Bob was.

Expressions don't make sense, and I just needed to accept that. With the advent of digital camera, in 20 years will someone have to do a lecture explaining what "shake it like a Polaroid picture" means? If I were to suggest to my imaginary wife that we go upstairs for a little "wardrobe malfunction" would it pass innocently over my future children's heads while ensuring action for later in the evening, or would even my future wife wonder what the hell I was talking about? Who knows, it all depends on whether or not these sayings catch on, if enough people enjoy the sentence that it develops a life of its own.

If even the most prolific expression across ALL languages, "OK", doesn't really have a definite origin, why care about any? The most common theory is that it started as a newspaper editing joke, once the paper was perfect and ready to be sent to the printers they would write "Oll Korrect" on the final copy, but they found evidence of the expression before newspapers, before the OK Corral, before the OK Club.

So in the end, I'm sorry. I've just wasted 20 minutes of your time: I teased you into caring about why we say the things we say, I caused you to wonder about the origins of things you utter every day, I forced you to consider the possibility that these sentences don't actually make any sense, and then I turned around and tried to tell you that you shouldn't care in the first place.

But think about it, logically, technically, if you came over and "cleaned my clock", shouldn't I thank you? I mean, it was getting pretty hard to read... do you think you could take me to the cleaners when we're done?

This phenomenon of Illogical sentences that are common expressions is not unique to English, every language has its share. We do however take it to an obscene level because we also manage to pack in more irregular verbs than anyone. Someone decided that "I runned" didn't flow properly so they invented "I ran", this kind of evolution might make English one of the hardest languages to learn on the planet (when you consider that German for example, has NONE) but it is this evolution and diversity that makes English so special, because whether you're a drunken Irishman using Texas sized fighting words, or an over-educated white Canadian singing along to Notorious B.I.G... It's ALL still English. A language with a life of it's own, and a few split personality disorders.

So lets all stop being language snobs, don't correct someone when the mix up their "Me and You's" or their "Him and I's" what's the point? If everyone picks it up fifty years from now you'll be the one who sounds like an idiot. You have every right to remain skeptical of an expression you think is just flash in the pan...

(Which by the way comes from sunlight reflecting in a prospectors tray being mis-identified as gold)

(Which also spawned "it didn't pan out")

Sorry...

When all is said and done, I think you should steer clear of fad expressions, but you should try to remember that they are just a pop culture obsession away from being added to the Oxford dictionary anyway. So the next time someone says something that might make you think "gosh that's stupid" try to take a step back, think about how it feels rather than how it thinks, try it on for size, and remember that language is always changing based on what we enjoy saying.

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