Posted on 01/30/2019 4:21:04 AM PST by sodpoodle
Interesting.
Well, if it didn’t happen that way it should have......
“He didn’t have a Pot to piss or a window to throw it out of. “
That’s the only quote I used. And the Indians used brains and or oak leaves to tan hides. I believe the Europeans did the same.
History is not boring.
The insidious way they teach it in school is boring.
Probably to keep people ignorant
Fiction.
Next question.
Sometimes at the medieval markets, unscrupulous vendors would try to pass off an inferior animal (like a common cat) for a chicken, which was considered a delicacy.
Since the transaction took place with the animal handed over in a sack, the buyer couldn’t really tell what he got until he opened the sack - if he was ripped off, that’s how the expression “letting the cat out of the bag” - meaning the truth finally comes out - originated.
I also read that they used urine in the time of Napoleon to "corn" black powder, since the individual ingredients, mixed together, would settle out over a long march, and wouldn't burn properly. I believe this was partly because urine contains nitrates. YMMV
A “threshhold” was a wooden barrier on a threshing floor designed to keep in the loose grain.
The canopy and side curtains of beds were to keep out drafts in the unheated rooms.
The flowers at a wedding were symbols of the bride’s purity. But flowers at funerals were indeed used to mask disturbing odors in the days before embalming was common.
But these are fun too ...
It was the full load of ammunition for early fighter planes. The ammo belts were 9 yards long
Anatoly Lieberman is the author of Word Origins And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday.
Potassium nitrate, the oxidizer in black powder was originally gotten from farm animal waste ( they hit a jackpot if they found a cave full of bat guano). I knew they corned BP with a liquid and then dried it in the sun then broke it up in different size grades to get better performance.
Didn’t know they used urine for Corning
My Mom used a large wooden spoon or a sandel to tan my hide.
Nope. The phrase predates fighter planes. There isn’t any universally accepted origin for it.
“Since the transaction took place with the animal handed over in a sack, the buyer couldn’t really tell what he got until he opened the sack - if he was ripped off, that’s how the expression “letting the cat out of the bag” - meaning the truth finally comes out - originated.”
You mean it wasn’t how “Buyer Beware” came about?
And “Flash in the pan” was from old musketry where the powder was put in a “pan” to be ignited with a flint and had a flash hole drilled through to the chamber which ignited the main powder charge. Thus the resultant “poof” always preceded the actual blast from the musket. When the powder flash happened but failede to ignite the main charge it was a “flash in the pan” of brilliance followed by...nothing.
I’ve read that the “Whole NINE yards” was the phrase meaning a WWI machine gun crew fired the entire belt from an ammo container that wss NINE YARDS (27feet) long. It was the advent of the Machine Gun that lead to the slaughter on the “Western Front” of WWI.
Maybe Dutch?
Either way it’s a good read! Thanks!
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