Idioms- origins

Hi everyone!!!

After a busy and kind of frustrating week, I'm back here to post the origins of a few idioms...

So...here they are...

On the grapewine

In the 1850s in the USA, just after the telegraph had been invented, hundreds of miles of telegraphs lines were being built everyday. In 1859, a man called Coronel Bee tried to save time by using trees to carry the lines, instead of wooden poles. The trees continued growing and the wires stretched and broke, hanging down to the ground like grapevines. During the American Civil War Coronel Bee’s telegraph became a joke, and they used the expression to refer to inaccurate messages or misinformation.

To let the cat out of the bag

During medieval times, baby pigs (piglets) were usually sold tied up in bags. This was a way of keeping the animals calm and stopping them from escaping. If you opened the bag, the piglet would often jump out and run away. Some dishonest traders would catch cats, put them in the bag and sell them as piglets. Thus, letting the cat out of the bag means revealing a secret to the wrong person.

Can't hold a candle (to someone)

Before electric lights, if someone needed to do something important in the dark, such as doctor performing an operation, or a musician playing a difficult piece of music, they needed a helper to hold a candle to provide light while they worked. Holding the candle is, of course, an easier job. Even so, the person who held the candle still needed to understand a little about what the doctor needed to see, and therefore the job was often done by an apprentice. To say that one man cannot hold a candle to another is like saying that he is not even good enough to be his apprentice.

Worth its salt

During the time of the Romans, salt was extremely useful, both for preserving meat and to make food taste better. But it was also very rare. Many Roman soldiers received some salt as part of their pay (the word “salary” comes from the Latim “salarium”, meaning of salt) and it is probably among the Romans that a soldier was worth his salary, i.e. a useful soldier.

Wearing your heart upon my sleeves

The expression dates back to one of William Shakespeare’s plays, Othello, in which one of the characters says: “I will wear my heart upon my sleeve”. The character was using the expression to mean that he would pretend to be open about his emotions, telling Othello everything he felt in order to deceive and eventually destroy him. Although this usage is slightly different from the modern one, the expression developed and became more general in meaning over time.

Well...long post, isn't it?

Hope you all have a great weekend!!