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Where expressions come from. Share yours.

FunkHead

FunkHead

Supporting Member
Mar 10, 2007
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19,733
#1
Here's one:

"Mind your P's & Q's".

This came from when there was a fight in a pub. The P's were pints and Q's were Quarts. So you would "mind them" to keep them from getting spilled.

I often hear an expression and wonder where it came from. I think there should be a book dedicated to this subject. Maybe there already is one?

Let's hear yours.
 
#6
'Dude, it's on rollers'.
A saying we use to express being surprised/shocked/enlightened.
Source: when I was in my late teens, we took a buddy from Nebraska waterskiing. He wanted to help launch the boat into the water, so he jumped up on the trailer to help me. I showed him what we were going to do.
In an attempt to be proactive, he released the pin on the crank as we sat near the boat launch waiting for our turn. The safety hook was already unlatched, so the boat slid off the trailer, landed on the concrete, and broke in two places. No waterskiing for a couple weeks.

As soon as he realized what was going on, he yelled 'dude, it's on rollers.'

-Mike
 
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#7
FunkHead said:
Here's one:

"Mind your P's & Q's".

This came from when there was a fight in a pub. The P's were pints and Q's were Quarts. So you would "mind them" to keep them from getting spilled.
Click to expand...
I thought that expression came from typesetting. When you look at a printing block the letters are reversed, and lower case p's and q's are mirror images, so they'd be easy to mix up.
 
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#9
"Real quick" or "Right quick" as in "Can you help me with this real quick?" This expression drives me crazy and I've never heard of where it came from. It seems like everyone says it in North America.
Another one you hear a lot "You know what I mean?" which is often used by people in interviews when no, you do not "know what they mean" so it can be very frustrating.
 
#10
"Etymology" (or closely related - technically that's the study of the origin of words, not phrases, at least according to the dictionary I just checked.)

Most of the tales you will find are suspect or outright wrong. "Urban legends" that sound plausible but don't hold up to closer examination.

There are entire books on this subject, some in conflict, and some phrases have no well-established origin (though they have many, many tales - but the tales fall down when someone establishes that the phrase was in use before the items in the tales existed, for instance) - i.e. "the whole nine yards" is murky as heck, but rife with plausible-sounding tales if you don't examine them too closely.

So, for instance, in typesetting the 4 letters you have to be most careful of are pqdb - not just pq. All 4 of those can be mixed up - this calls into question that story for "Mind your P's & Qs"
 
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#14
I can't take credit for this one, but it's my all-time favorite and it did come from someone I know. It originated in her family, when she was a child. The expression is 'ELK!' which means 'I have to go to the bathroom.' Usually it is used on car trips. Say, if the passenger spots a Rest Area sign, all they have to say is 'elk' and the driver knows it would be good to stop at the rest area. Similarly, the driver can ask 'Elk?' and the passenger can say yes or no.

Here's how it came to be:

Many years ago, 'Janie' and her two young siblings and their parents were taking a road trip somewhere in the American west, and came across a Wapiti National something, or Wapiti Campground, or whatever. 'Wapiti' is kind of a funny word to say, and it also sounds a fair bit like 'want potty,' which would likely be commonly said during a road trip with three young children. So, since 'want potty' sounds like 'wapiti,' and 'wapiti' is an elk......
 
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#16
FunkHead said:
Here's one:
"Mind your P's & Q's".
This came from when there was a fight in a pub. The P's were pints and Q's were Quarts. So you would "mind them" to keep them from getting spilled.
Click to expand...
Interesting theory, but I don't think so...

I believe it comes from the days of hand-set metal type. (I've done it...)
Since all the letterforms are reversed, it is quite easy when setting or, moreso, when redistributing individual characters, to confuse a 'p' with a 'q'.
Thus, it means "pay attention..."

Another expression from those times is "Out of sorts" to describe a busy and harried time.
Characters like checkmarks, boxes, pointing fists, etc do not live in fonts like all the numbers and letters - they're kept in a separate box and are 'sorted' individually.
When a printer is busy, there will be a lot of jobs where the type has been set, printed, but not yet redistributed into individual fonts.
When this occurs and you need a checkmark or something for a new job and there aren't any when you go look for one in the box where it's supposed to be, you are "out of sorts."

As a group, those decorative but otherwise useless characters are called "dingbats."

So there you go - three terms from the printing trade for the price of one reply...
 
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