“All Hell Broke Loose” and the Wonderful Origins of Everyday Expressions (Pt. 1)

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. There are some of our favorites. “Hair of the Dog, To Paint the Town Red: The Curious Origins of Everyday Sayings and Fun Phrases” is a book that reveals the surprising, captivating, and even hilarious origins behind four hundred of these sayings, including “Read Between the Lines,” “Cat Got Your Tongue,” “Raining Cats and Dogs.” Here with the recurring series is “Hair of the Dog” author Andrew Thompson as he shares another slice from his Ultimate Guide to Understanding these baffling mini-mysteries of the English language.

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Speaker 2: The first expression I’d like to tell you about is “above board,” which means honest and open or legal. If something’s above board, everything’s okay. It reminds me, years ago, is to have a weekly game of blackjack with a group of guys, and people would often cheat. It was all a bit joking, but people that have their hands under the table, and everyone is say, “Get your hands on the table! You’ve got to be above board!” And that’s where that expression comes from. It’s a gaming expression. In card playing, the board was the table, as in a sideboard, and if a player dropped his hands below the table, he could be accused of cheating by swapping his cards or pulling a card out that he had stashed under there. So, to stop any sort of suspicion, people had to keep their hands above the table. So, if the player’s hands are above board, nobody could suggest anything was wrong. A saying that comes from ancient times is “Achilles heel,” which everyone’s heard of. It means a weakness or vulnerability. He might say he’s a great runner, but that’s his Achilles heel when he can’t do long distances, for example. It has its origins in ancient Greek legend. Chillies was dipped into a river by his mother in order to give him a skin of armor and make him invulnerable to his enemies. But she held him by the heel, which didn’t get covered by the water and became a weak point for him. He became this great warrior, but his arch enemy, a guy called Paris, discovered his weakness and killed him by shooting an arrow through his heel. And Homer wrote about this Aeliad, and the phrase became popular in the nineteenth century. The expression “across the board” means it applies to everyone. For example, the government might impose tax cuts across the board. This phrase is from the sporting arena. It was coined in America in the early nineteen hundreds from horse racing at the time. At race meets, a large board would display the odds of horses, and the odds were listed for a horse to win, place, or show, which was to make third. And if a punter placed a bed across the board, he put an equal amount of money on a horse to finish firs, second, or third. So, it was an across-the-board bed that applied to everything—every option. To “add another string to your bow” is another spawling expression which comes from the sport of archery, and it started in medy evil times when, in competitions, often men who were the best shot became widely popular when archery was very popular for fighting and exhibition sports. So, never to be caught short, the best archers would add another string to their bow. They’d attach a second string at the top of the bow that was wound around the handle. If the first string snapped or was damaged, the archer had a backup string to get him out of trouble, and that’s also how the expressions “second string” came about. To “add insult to injury” is an expression that comes from the literary world. It dates way back to twenty-five BC and was from a writer from ancient Rome, and it was from the story of “The Bald Man and the Fly.” In that story, a fly stings a bald man on the top of his head, and the man swats at the fly, trying to kill it, but the fly moves away so that the man hits himself on the head as well. And the fly then remarks, “All you’ve done is added insult of injury,” which is where the expression comes from, to mean making an already bad situation even worse. The phrase began in twenty-five PC. It didn’t pass into English until about the mid-seventeen hundreds. The saying “against the grain” comes from tradesman. It means against the natural flow, or opposed to one’s normal inclination. It has its origins in woodwork and carpentry. When wood is planed, sword, or sanded along the grain, it results in a smooth finish, but when it’s done across the grain, it tends to splinter. Or be rough. So, working “against the grain” is also far more difficult, and that’s where the expression came from. It was first used by Shakespeare in sixteen oh seven. Everyone knows the expression “to aid in a bet,” which is usually used in relation to criminals, with a person held or inciting someone in the commission of a crime. So, you might be convicted of aiding and a betting a crime. It’s got an interesting origin, this one. It’s from the now-outlawed sport—or if you could call it that—of bear baiting. The word “a bet” is from the Norse word meaning to bite, and it was originally called “bear a betting” in the fourteenth century in England, where a hungry bear would be tethered to a pole in a pit and set upon by trained bulldogs. The dogs would bite the bear until was killed, and often in doing so they’d suffer casualties or be very tired, and the owner would urge the dog to continue to keep the spectacle going. So, it was said that he was “a betting” the dog to keep biting. And frase was coined in the eighteenth century to mean what it does today. “To air your dirty laundry in public” means to talk in public about private matters, and this expression came from Napoleon Bonaparte in eighteen fourteen, when he was exiled to the Island of Elba. Is forced to addicate the French throne, and he went there, and despite the island being surrounded by the British Navy, he managed to escape on a boat. After less than a year there, and back in France, he was asked about his experiences on the island, to which he replied, “It is at home and not in public that one washes one’s dirty linen,” and that eventually got corrupted to “air your dirty launder in public.” To come to what it means, “to all hell brogue loose” has become a common expression to mean wild and erratic behavior. Like if a teacher left the classroom for ten minutes, all hell brogue loose with the students. It’s got literary origins as well. It’s from John Milton’s epic poem “Paradise Loss,” which was published in sixteen sixty-seven, and it tells the tale of the biblical Garden of Eden. In one part, just before he cast him out of the Garden of Eden, the angel Gabriel asked Satan why he traveled alone and hadn’t been joined by other inhabitants of Hell, and Gabriel poses the question as, “Wherefore with thee came not all hell?” Brokelues, which is holding wish, obviously mean that’s where the expression began.

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Speaker 1: And a special thanks to Greg for producing the piece, and a special thanks also to Andrew Thompson. “Hair of the Dog to paint the town. Read” is the book? Go to Amazon.com and buy it. The story of our own language and phrases we all know, but don’t know the origins of, here on Our American Stories, folks. If you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we’re asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy-six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com.