Origin of Words and Phrases

[C-Dawg]

Fascinating!

They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a
pot & then once a day it was taken & sold to the tannery.........if you had to
do this to survive you were "p*** Poor"
But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn't even afford to
buy a pot...........they "didn't have a pot to p*** in" & were the lowest of the low


The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be.
Here are some facts about the 1500s:


Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by June.. However, since they were
starting to smell . .. . brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.


Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the Bath water!"


Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip an and fall off the roof. Hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs."


There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.


The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying, "Dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way. Hence: a thresh hold.


(Getting quite an education, aren't you?)


In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire.. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme: Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old.


Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could, "bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and chew the fat.


Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.


Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the upper crust.



Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a wake.


England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus,someone could be, saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer...

[lime rickie]

Fun factoids, Chris.

[Snowparrot]

Some of htose might be accurate, but Michael Quinion has debunked one in his World Wide Words site:
http://www.worldwidewords.org/index.htm

[Q] From Steve Haywood: So why do we chew the fat while we’re talking? The idea I’ve heard that you might hack off a piece of your bacon for guests as it was curing in the hearth seems preposterous to me. Surely there’s a better explanation?

[A] These days we mean by it that people are chatting or gossiping to pass the time to no very deep purpose. When it first appeared, though, it meant to grumble or complain.

Some wonderfully literal-minded stories have been invented with which to explain its origin, especially in North America, where it has been linked to native peoples, American Indians or Inuit, who would chew hides to soften them, an activity carried out in their spare time. The tale you mention first appeared around 1999 in a widely circulated humorous message with the title Life in 1500 that purports to give the origins of several puzzling expressions. It still annoyingly pops up from time to time and has unfortunately been widely taken to be accurate:

Sometimes people could obtain pork and would feel really special when that happened. When company came over, they would bring out some bacon and hang it to show it off. It was a sign of wealth and that a man “could really bring home the bacon.” They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and “chew the fat.”

Like the other stories in the message, it’s rubbish, of course. For a start, the expression is about four centuries less old than the tale suggests.

The first reference in the Oxford English Dictionary is in a book by J Brunlees Patterson published in 1885, Life in the Ranks of the British Army in India. He suggested it was a term for the kind of generalised grumbling, the bending of the ears of junior officers as a way of staving off boredom, that’s a perennial and immemorial part of army life. It also appears in the famous 1891 British compilation Slang and Its Analogues by John Farmer and William Henley; it is likewise said to be of military origin and mean grumbling. The next examples we have are from the US, dating from the early part of the twentieth century. It became more common over the next decade on both sides of the Atlantic and weakened until it just meant idle chat.

Mr Patterson also records the phrase chew the rag, which at one point he uses in the same sentence as chew the fat and which he obviously considered to be synonymous. This is a little older — an example is recorded in the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang from about 1875: “Gents, I could chew the rag hours on end, just spilling out the words and never know no more than a billy-goat what I’d been saying”. The OED has an example of 1891 taken from James Dixon’s Dictionary of Idiomatic English Phrases, which was published in Shanghai; the author glosses it as “to be sullen and abusive. A phrase common in the army”. Chew the rag is much more widely recorded from the US from about 1895 onwards than is chew the fat and becomes commonly known both there and in the UK in the decades that followed.

The 1875 US example sounds like the modern meaning but the slightly later British ones are in the military slang sense of grumbling. This may indicate independent creation. The dating and geographical distribution of citations leave us with some unanswered questions, too. However, it looks from the evidence as though chew the fat is a modification of chew the rag. If it is, then the origin is probably in the US.

But we don’t need to invoke any literal interpretations, either of chewing rags or fat. It’s enough to compare the steady chomping of the jaws in chewing with the mouth movements of conversation to see where the figurative sense came from. The image of a person biting down on something so uncongenial and unrewarding as a rag, like an angry dog worrying a bit of cloth, is enough to evoke the original sense of grumbling and discontent.

[Snowparrot]

Those are fun, and it gets people thinking about words. Some of them sound accurate, but at least one has been challenged by Michael Quinion on his World Wide Words site http://www.worldwidewords.org/index.htm

See the story about "raining cats and dogs", too!

CHEW THE FAT

[Q] From Steve Haywood: So why do we chew the fat while we’re talking? The idea I’ve heard that you might hack off a piece of your bacon for guests as it was curing in the hearth seems preposterous to me. Surely there’s a better explanation?

[A] These days we mean by it that people are chatting or gossiping to pass the time to no very deep purpose. When it first appeared, though, it meant to grumble or complain.

Some wonderfully literal-minded stories have been invented with which to explain its origin, especially in North America, where it has been linked to native peoples, American Indians or Inuit, who would chew hides to soften them, an activity carried out in their spare time. The tale you mention first appeared around 1999 in a widely circulated humorous message with the title Life in 1500 that purports to give the origins of several puzzling expressions. It still annoyingly pops up from time to time and has unfortunately been widely taken to be accurate:

Sometimes people could obtain pork and would feel really special when that happened. When company came over, they would bring out some bacon and hang it to show it off. It was a sign of wealth and that a man “could really bring home the bacon.” They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and “chew the fat.”

Like the other stories in the message, it’s rubbish, of course. For a start, the expression is about four centuries less old than the tale suggests.

The first reference in the Oxford English Dictionary is in a book by J Brunlees Patterson published in 1885, Life in the Ranks of the British Army in India. He suggested it was a term for the kind of generalised grumbling, the bending of the ears of junior officers as a way of staving off boredom, that’s a perennial and immemorial part of army life. It also appears in the famous 1891 British compilation Slang and Its Analogues by John Farmer and William Henley; it is likewise said to be of military origin and mean grumbling. The next examples we have are from the US, dating from the early part of the twentieth century. It became more common over the next decade on both sides of the Atlantic and weakened until it just meant idle chat.

Mr Patterson also records the phrase chew the rag, which at one point he uses in the same sentence as chew the fat and which he obviously considered to be synonymous. This is a little older — an example is recorded in the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang from about 1875: “Gents, I could chew the rag hours on end, just spilling out the words and never know no more than a billy-goat what I’d been saying”. The OED has an example of 1891 taken from James Dixon’s Dictionary of Idiomatic English Phrases, which was published in Shanghai; the author glosses it as “to be sullen and abusive. A phrase common in the army”. Chew the rag is much more widely recorded from the US from about 1895 onwards than is chew the fat and becomes commonly known both there and in the UK in the decades that followed.

The 1875 US example sounds like the modern meaning but the slightly later British ones are in the military slang sense of grumbling. This may indicate independent creation. The dating and geographical distribution of citations leave us with some unanswered questions, too. However, it looks from the evidence as though chew the fat is a modification of chew the rag. If it is, then the origin is probably in the US.

But we don’t need to invoke any literal interpretations, either of chewing rags or fat. It’s enough to compare the steady chomping of the jaws in chewing with the mouth movements of conversation to see where the figurative sense came from. The image of a person biting down on something so uncongenial and unrewarding as a rag, like an angry dog worrying a bit of cloth, is enough to evoke the original sense of grumbling and discontent.