phrase, which means to destroy someone’s chances or hopes, can be traced back to a sixteenth-century event which may or may not have happened. Either way, the expression has retained currency. King Eric of Sweden had arrived to attack an enemy town. To show their contempt for the King and his small band of soldiers, the town’s burghers hung a goose from a tower and then sent a message to him that asked, in effect, ‘What do you want?’ ‘To cook your goose,’ came the reply, whereupon King Eric’s men set fire to the town, literally cooking the symbolic goose in the process.
Curiosity Killed the Cat
Not everyone is familiar with the 1980s pop band of the same name, but surely most people know that ‘curiosity killed the cat’. In fact, this proverb is related to a sixteenth-century saying, ‘Care killed the cat. A cat has nine lives, but care would wear them all out,’ at which time ‘care’ meant sorrow or worry. This warning that worry could lead you to an early grave was the accepted version of the phrase until as recently as the early twentieth century, when ‘curiosity’ rather than ‘care’ became the downfall of the cat. Whether or not ‘satisfaction brought him back’, as the saying goes, remains to be seen.
Draw in Your Horns
To ‘draw in (or pull in) your horns’ is an idiom that describes a decision to exercise self-restraint, or draw back from a previous position, in the interests of self-preservation. It is commonly used of a pragmatic response to a change in financial circumstances. The expression, thought to date back to the fourteenth century, refers to snails’ habit of retracting their horn-like eye stalks to protect them from imminent danger.
Drop like Flies
People dying or becoming ill or incapacitated one after the other in quick succession are often said to be ‘dropping like flies’. The origin of the phrase is unknown, although it is easy to imagine that whoever coined it may have been thinking of the extreme brevity of the fly’s life when drawing the comparison. It has been suggested that the expression is linked to the fairy tale The Brave Little Tailor, by the Brothers Grimm, in which a boy kills several flies with ease and makes a belt out of them, but the phrase doesn’t appear in the story.
Eager Beaver
The ‘eager beaver’, that industrious, ambitious and often over-zealous fellow at work, can be a boon to productivity. At the same time he often has the unwelcome effect of making his colleagues look sluggish by comparison. Hence, the mildly derogatory connotations of the expression. Clearly the phrase is rooted in the widespread perception of the beaver as a tireless and enthusiastic worker, what with all that impressive dam-building, and phrases such as ‘busy as a beaver’ and ‘beaver away’ came into use in England as early as the eighteenth century. ‘Eager beaver’ itself was first recorded in use in the 1940s, by the army of a country that bristles with the creatures – Canada.
Grin like a Cheshire Cat
To grin like a Cheshire cat is to smile broadly and without inhibition. We can thank Lewis Carroll for the popularity of this expression. In his 1865 classic book Alice in Wonderland, his fictional cat is most commonly remembered for its almost complete disappearance – save for its grin. While Carroll certainly boosted the saying’s currency, there are published instances of it in the work of the eighteenth-century English writer John Wolcot. Beyond this, the origins of the phrase are hard to pin down. To start with, the Cheshire cat isn’t a breed of cat, but one idea is that the cats in Cheshire were grinning with satisfaction at living in a dairy-farming county famous for its cheeses as well as producing plenty of cream. Another version of the cheese theory is that in Cheshire, cheese was once sold in a mould that looked like a grinning cat. Staying with Cheshire but forgetting the cheese, another school of thought is that the paintings of grinning lions that once graced the signs of various inns throughout the county gave birth to the ‘Cheshire cat’. Why grinning lions is another question.
Have a Gander
When about to take a close look at something we might say we’re going to ‘have a gander’, a phrase that has been with us since the early twentieth century. A gander is, of course, a male goose – but just what does a goose have to do with it? Well, back in the seventeenth century ‘to gander’ meant to ‘stretch your neck to see’, as the male goose would. Now, if you were to have a gander at a gander as it waddles about, peering at everything and sticking its beak into other people’s business, you’d see why we still associate the bird’s name with an inquisitive look. The only difference is that we stopped using the verb ‘to gander’ long ago – instead we have, or take, a gander.
High Horse
Someone who gets on their ‘high horse’ is behaving overbearingly in a superior manner. Many an opinionated know-it-all has been told to ‘get off your high horse’. The phrase dates back to the eighteenth century and alludes to army officers’ practice of riding horses whose size reflected the riders’ position in the military. A high-ranking officer rode a higher horse than an officer of more modest rank.
Hold Your Horses
If you’re told to ‘hold your horses’ you’re being advised to wait, hold on a moment, exercise a little patience. The phrase dates back to nineteenth-century America, first appearing as the rurally inflected ‘hold your hosses’. Originally rooted in a literal instruction to a horserider to hold steady to stop the animal getting too excited, it soon became used as a more general piece of advice not to become agitated oneself. The first such recorded instance occurred in 1844, when it was employed in an attempt to placate someone on the verge of losing their temper.
In the Doghouse
Many a man reading this will know what being ‘in the doghouse’ is all about – any man, that is, who has endured his partner’s wrath as a consequence of his actions. Forgetting a wedding anniversary or a birthday is a perfect example of such a lapse in standards. Just as a misbehaving dog is banished to the doghouse, the misbehaving man will find himself in disgrace and languishing in the metaphorical doghouse. Bad boy!
In Peter Pan, the children’s father, Mr Darling, is particularly unpleasant to the family dog, Nana, despite her acting as a nurse to the kids. As punishment for his rotten ways, his wife sends him to live in Nana’s Doghouse. J.M. Barrie wrote the book in 1904, and from that moment on the phrase ‘in the doghouse’ acquired a new meaning. No infallible means of getting out of the doghouse has been found, though flowers, jewellery and getting on all fours like a real dog and begging have all been attempted.
Jinx
When you feel you’re in the grip of a ‘jinx’, or jinxed, you’ve succumbed to a superstitious belief that bad luck is on the cards or that a spell of some sort has been cast on you. The word is thought to come from iunx, the Greek word for the wryneck bird. This species was very much bound up with superstition and witchcraft simply because of the way it behaves when in the resting position, staring and twisting its neck slowly, as if very suspicious.
Keep the Wolf from the Door
To ‘keep the wolf from the door’ is to have enough food and money to avoid starvation and financial ruin – in short, to get by. The wolf has long been associated with a ravenous
