Origins - where do sayings come from?

I was watching an episode of Pawn Stars about the B-17 bomber and learned something pretty cool. Ya'll are familiar with the saying "The whole nine yards." Well, it apppears to have come from the ammunition belts that fed the B-17's 50 calibre machine guns. The belts were 9 yards long.

What other sayings do you know the history of?

SV fascinated me with the origin of the phrase colder than the balls on a brass monkey. I'll let him do it again.

I always heard that the threatening phrase, "Your name is mud," refers to Dr. Mudd, who fixed Booth's injured leg, not knowing that he had injured it while assassinating Lincoln.

I wonder if the saying "Break a leg" refers to Booth's also.

"Yankee" has an interesting derivation:
Seems that after the Duke of York seized Nieuw Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed it for himself, the city experienced a big immigration of Brits. They seemed to all be named John and to like cheese, or so it seemed to the Dutch. So they contemptuously referred to them as "Jahn Kaes" (John Cheese), which came out as "Yankees."

I thought about that every time Fidel Castro denounced "Yankee Imperialism."

"Never look a gift horse in the mouth" was because it's customary to check a horse's teeth and gums before finalizing the purchase, as the horse's mouth is an excellent sign of its condition. If you receive a horse as a gift, it would be considered rude or ungrateful to check its mouth.

Gladly, except recent nosing around the Internet has now cast quite a bit of doubt on my story.

Let me explain:

It's not really "my" story - I read it a few years ago on the website of songwriter Amanda McBroom (she wrote "The Rose", among many other songs). Now, I've found the tale repudiated by a few sites. Here is something from the Oxford Dictionary website:

What is the origin of the term 'brass monkey'?

The story goes that cannonballs used to be stored aboard ship in piles, on a brass frame or tray called a 'monkey'. In very cold weather the brass would contract, spilling the cannonballs: hence very cold weather is 'cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey'.

There are several problems with this story, as follows:

The term 'monkey' is not otherwise recorded as the name for such an object.

The rate of contraction of brass in cold temperatures is unlikely to be fast enough to cause the reputed effect.

The phrase is actually first recorded as 'freeze the tail off a brass monkey', which removes any essential connection with balls.

It therefore seems most likely that the phrase is simply a humorous reference to the fact that metal figures will become very cold to the touch in cold weather.

Damn! And it seemed like such a great story at the time.

Signor V.

I am always amazed at how quickly wors can morph into completely different meanings, e.g. "nuke" comes from nuclear, and the initial phrase to "nuke 'em" meant to use nuclear weapons on another country. This has now morphed into all kinds of uses, for instance in sports if one team wins by a large margin they say they "nuked" the other team.

Another one is "gay." First it simply meant cheerful, then it meant homosexual, but now among twenty somethings it means it can means something stupid, as in "that idea is so gay."

A ton of common phrases we regularly use come from Shakespeare, including "give the devil his due," "night owl," "vanish into thin air," "method to my madness," "hot-blooded," "wild goose chase," and my personal favorite, "in a pickle."

There are many others.

Shakes and the Bible are the two main sources of sayings we usually use.

There are aparently a number of ideas about where "rule of thumb" comes from.

I also think Ben Franklin made up several.

"Pull the wool over your eyes": In 17th Century England (and elsehwere) it was common for men to wear large wool wigs. Thieves would pull the wig over the victim's face, and while he was blinded and struggling, grab his goods.