Halcyon Days and Other Time Idioms

All aboard the Dollywood Express. We're on our way through the great smoky mountains to see one million blooms, flower sculptures, fresh flavors, live music, incredible resorts, and more . Next stop is the Flower and Food Festival, April 18th through June 7th. And just ahead, the new night flight expedition is coming soon. So plan your trip at Dollywood.com. Here we go . Is there a goose in a wild goose chase? When did we start saying 24-7? And who was the first member of the Mile High Club? We'll go the extra mile as we discussed Herrings and true origins of common idioms, and even address the 800-pound gorilla in the room with some malaphores and anti-proverbs on this episode of Words Unraveled. Welcome to another Words Unraveled. I'm Rob Watts from the YouTube channel Rob Words. And I'm Jess Seferas, author of etymology books, including useless etymology, and today we are back with another idiom extravaganza . Yes, indeed. We are going to be going the extra mile in this episode to explain the origins of some famous say Mm-hmm I certainly have an axe to grind here, so I'm looking forward to Getting in full swing by any chance. Do you know by the way what is being swung in in full swing? Actually, I haven't got I mentioned I haven't got a clue what is being swung when we're in full swing. Because of the frequency with which it is used, my first thought was sports, but it's like way older than that. It's probably the swing of a sword. The earliest instance of in full swings is in a 16th century text with a bunch of Protestant history and martyrology by an English historian who wrote about the time of Antichrist or the dissolution of the church whose full swing containeth the space of 400 years. But because it's been around so long, it seems to have picked up the notion of other swinging things like bells in some case too. Aaron Powell So when it's talking about the full the full swing of something, it's it's almost like the the full sort of cycle of the the slash of the blade, maybe from start to finish. The earliest instances we have of swing as a noun tend to be around swords, like large long swords, and to be in full swing is to be in the full arc or motion of the sword. But there have been a bunch of like there are a good amount of idioms from the same notion that could also apply to other things. Like to have swing and sway was popular for a while, meaning to exert physical and social power over something, which sounds more like a bell to me, right? And then we've got like in a swing, which means the same thing as in one fell swoop, or to bear the swing, which means to have full sway or control, and then to have one's swing, which means to have freedom of action or scope or license. Right. Dark one. Speaking of another slightly weapon based idiom, I mentioned an axe to grind. Oh yeah. We've had axe idioms before, haven't we? Because we we could uh recently fly off the handle from those. Yes. There is a frequently cited source of this idiom, and it is not considered correct. The most likely source is an American newspaper essay written in 1810 by Charles Minor, who was a journalist and a politician, and he wrote a short piece called Who Will Turn the Grindstone and it spread very rapidly into school books and things, moralistic stories and whatnot. And the story goes that one winter morning a man is carrying an axe and he approaches a young boy and asks whether his father has a grindstone, and he does, and but he's not around, so the man compliments the child, says he looks strong, calls him a fine little fellow, and asks if you would mind turning the stone while he sharpens the blade And so he agrees. He's like, Yeah, I can do that. I'm so strong. And he keeps going and going. And then his hands start to blister. He realizes he's late for school. And then the guy's like, thanks, bye. And so the idea here is that if you have an axe to grind, you have an ulterior motive for your flattery or whatever else you're doing. And it it was very immediately applied to politicians, right? Aaron Powell Okay. So actually it has become a slightly removed from that idea now. Now it's sort of like having a chip on your shoulder or something. There are plenty of people who say that it is being used incorrectly because when people say like you you know, you've got a grievance of some kind that has nothing to do necessarily with the original story and up until relative. It should be like a hidden agenda for what you do. Exactly. And it is used that way sometimes, but often with that sort of chip on your shoulder thing. Now, the thing that I would note here is that somebody in the comments is gonna be like, actually, that's a Benjamin Franklin story. But it isn't. A lot of quotes end up, of course, misattributed to Ben Franklin, but this is actually pretty fair. So Charles Minor, who published the story, published it under the pseudonym Poor Robert the Scribe, which looks a lot like Franklin's f persona poor Richard, of the poor Richard's almanac. So it was mixed up just a little bit. But the po the story was published after Ben Franklin passed away. Debunked by Jay-Z. Where should we go next? We could go up the river. So this is I don't think we use this phrase actually very much in the UK, but I came across it and thought it it was an interesting trade off with the phrase sell down the river, which we'll also we'll also talk about. But up the river refers to Sing Sing Prison and that's why, you know, to t go up the river or to be up the river is to be be in jail and Sing Sing is up the Hudson River from New York City. And I was looking well, firstly I was looking at why Sing Sing was called Sing S ing, a bit of a strange name. And it comes from actually I'll I'll tell you what, I'll read it from their own website, from the the museum's website there. Sing Sing comes from the name of the SintSynx, a Native American people who inhabited this area for thousands of years. It roughly translates to a stony place . And so actually it was the name of the village in which the ground so in which the grounds of the prison , which was previously called something else. Yeah, it was called Mount Pleasant State Prison before it was called Sing Sing, but they started calling it Sing . But actually the village isn't called Sing Singh anymore. They changed the the name of village in nineteen oh five to disassociate it from the name of the prison. And obviously the place is still there. It's called Osining, which means you know also s something very similar to what SintSinks meant, but Synth Sinks were the were the people, um, after which the area was named. But on their website, Sing Sing Prison lays claim to two other idioms as well And it also lays claim to the last mile, which is interesting, because that's a phrase that is used in telecommunications to refer to laying sort of the last mile of of cable, the the final connection being the most difficult bit. It's used in other circles as well. But also it was used a long time ago to talk about pilgrimages and how the last mile could be the most difficult. I read some lore about it, you know, people tak ing their shoes off for the last mile. I don't know if that's actually actually true. But in Sing Sing's case, or in you know, in the case of prisons where the death penalty is carried out, the last mile is the final walk from your cell block or wherever. I don't know. Do you go straight from your cell to to the chair or to wherever you know the the sentence is being carried out. Yeah. That's the last mile. Fortunately, I don't know. Yeah. I and and very few people who've done it uh are available to tell us. That's the last mile. And then you've got the the green mile, by the way. I was thinking the green mile, did that phrase exist before the Stephen King book of that name and the the film based upon that book. Uh no it didn't. No. The Green Mile is about the linole um floor in the floor prison. Yeah, in the Stephen King book. The prison's called uh Cold Mountain Penitentiary. It's a fictional in uh Louisiana. Yeah. And that final walk along that green linole um to the electric chair. Yeah, I I I I after looking at Mile, uh the Green Mile and the last mile, I ended up looking at a load of other mile based um idioms, which I'll I'll get in I I will force you to have to listen to me talking about though. I've got like Mile High Club and Go the Extra Mile, both of which have got really interesting origins. But uh we should talk about sell down the river now. I've talked about up the river. This one is also quite dark. Yeah, it's it is very dark. It refers to the practice of slave owners selling troublesome slaves further down the Mississippi River, where basically the further south you went, sort of the more supposedly more cruelly slaves were treated, so it would essentially be a a a punishment to be sold down the river. My understanding is it's also in real life it was the Mississippi and the Ohio River, but it's often a affiliated with the Mississippi in particular, thanks to Uncle Tom's Cabin, b which was the most popular, the best selling American novel of the nineteenth century. And the phrase is in there, is it? Uh yes, absolutely. The they specifically it it is about cruel slave owners. It's a it's a uh an abolitionist novel by Harriet Beecherstow. I see. Yeah so we've got down the river and and up the river you don't really want you don't really want either You were a marathoner, right? You ran one recently. I've not done one since I ha since I became a father. And I've piled on the pounds, basically. I've just sat at home eating and and and cleaning up mess. Uh so I haven't I haven't done any big runs for a while. Last time you were at my house you looked like you were we we went running and and you looked like you were ready for a race. That's true. Actually, we had got a half marathon scheduled, but I managed to duck out of it by going off to England. Oh, I see that's doing it. But I I did not do it. And uh she had a horrible time with it as well, because it was in the south of France and it was very windy. Very, very windy. Um the go go the extra mile is is from the Bible. Specifically is from uh a a passage of the Bible that has given us lots and lots of different phrases. Because it's from the Sermon on the Mount. Oh, interesting. I didn't realise that. No, I didn't either. This is why I thought I'll mention it, because it's quite it's quite surprising. So I'll just read the a bit from the this is the King James Version because the phrase goes back to sort of about the 1600s, so it's nice to use a historical version of the the Bible. And it's uh Jesus saying, This isn't it, Sermon on the Mount. Ye have heard that it hath been said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, ding, there's one. But I say unto you that ye resist not evil, but whoever s shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also ding, turn the other cheek. And if any man will sue thee at the law and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. We haven't idiomized that one, I don't think. Maybe some people say that. But then and whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile , go with him twain . So that means is go two miles. And it's a reference to a practice among the ancient Greeks and the Romans of compelling civilians to carry soldiers' equipment or or officials equipment, right? So at any one moment a Roman soldier can say, You there, carry this and the the sort of story that gets told is that they could compel them to carry it a m ile, uh, a Roman mile being a thousand yards. And what Jesus is saying here is if you're ordered to carry someone's stuff a mile, carry it two . And this whole passage is all about I mean it's sometimes called antitheses. This whole piece is about Jesus contrast ing his maxims with the actual law and saying this is what the law says you should do, this is how you should actually behave. And it's produced all of those idioms. Idiomatic Jesus. Yeah. I feel terrible about going from that origin story to the next one I'm going to go to. It's a mile high club, Jess. It could be dark. To give someone turned the lights off in the toilets. Yeah. Exactly. All right. So when did we first start saying this? Obviously after the invention of airplanes. Yeah, yes. But okay, hold on a second. There though, Jess. Oh yeah, and batteries. So the the phrase ta takes off, if you will, uh in the nineteen sixties. So yeah, with with sort of widespread use of commercial aeroplanes. But pot entially the first entrant into the Mile High Club was a guy called Lord Darby , who was wagered. So this this is in the what's called the the betting books, so like the w literally a book that recorded wages that people made of a gentleman's club in London that's still going. It's called Brooks es . And in there is written Lord Chumley has given two guineas to Lord Derby to receive five hundred guineas whenever his lordship and it genuinely says f a woman in a balloon 1,000 yards from the earth. Oh my God, that's amazing. Yeah, exactly. So we don't know whether uh Lord Darby took up the wager, or more importantly, took up a lady in a hot air balloon because hot air balloons had just been invented then. Obviously there were no airplanes in seventeen eighty five air balloon. And supp supposedly he went through with it. But there's no there's no record in this book of whether or not the the weight the um yeah the pair of very readily basket . Why are we ro gaining so much height? It is very hot in here now. It's very, very hot . But Jessica, you go to I I'm actually blushing. This is I've done this to myself. You know, um if you go to mileshighclub.com , well firstly the first thing you have to do is you have to uh say you are over the age of eighteen. Okay. T to to to get in. But actually the you know, it's a it's a a very simple website, very innocuous, um about the Mile High Club. To anyone who doesn't know, the Mile High Club is is the the phrase used for the collective of people who have had sex i in an air aeroplane or or in some means of transport more than a mile high, right? So balloons, etcetera. Yeah, yeah. It tends it tends to be aeroplanes, you know, if you're in a passenger plane flying at 35,000 feet or whatever, you're safely a a mile above the ground, so you know have at it and you get to join the mile high club. But the person that mileshighclub.com credits with being the first member of the Mile High Club is a guy called Lawrence Sperry, who invented the automatic pilot. The story goes that he took a certain social ite up for a flight. This was in nineteen sixteen, a woman called Mrs. Waldo Polk, who was married, but her fellows out of town. And she was she was trying to get her pilot's license and actually in the end she did. More than one way to get things. She earned it, I'm sure. I'm sure she earned it. But anyway, apparently while they're flying over New York, Mr. Sperry decides he wants to show off his automatic pilot. And uh with great confidence he activates it. And they get up to something. They get up to something. And during the getting up to something, he accidentally knocks the automatic pilot off. And they come down in the South Bay off Long Island. And are recovered from the water without any clothes on. Amazing. Amazing. This is the story of the first member of the Mile High Club. Although he wasn't actually flying high enough technically to join the Mile High Club. So they they call him that, but really he wasn't. But but he's you know potentially the first person, the first pilot anyway, to have sex in an aeroplane. It did not end well for him. And there's accident reports since then of of similar ideas , you know, being people being pulled from the wreckages of planes with no clothes on. I'm sure. Uh yeah. It's one way t it's one way to go. If it had gone well, we probably wouldn't know about it Well this is true yes, exactly. Uh it is that's true. It's only once where they come crashing down to earth. There's a really funny newspaper headline. So I couldn't actually find the newspaper itself, but everywhere this newspaper headline is quoted, which is aerial petting ends in wetting. Lovely. Oh dear. Quite quite the going down at the end. Anyway, in 2007, Singapore Airlines uh banned people having sex on its well I mean was it already banned? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So Singapore Airlines officially asked passengers in the suites of its brand new A380 super jumbos to stop having sex in them. They couched the language a little bit more than that. They said, all we ask of customers wherever they are on our aircraft is to observe standards that don't cause offense to other customers and crew. Nothing different applies to our Singapore Airlines suites customers. But then a spokesperson was also quoted, if couples used our double beds. The hady these lush, and this probably still do, double beds in the suites on the Singapore Airlines A380. If couples use our double beds to engage in inappropriate activity, we would politely ask them to desist. The reason given is that though these seem private, these suites, they are not soundproof. Yeah. Anyone can hear what hear what you're doing in there. That's a bit of a s a sidestep from idiom origins, but uh I went down something of a rabbit hole with that one. I'm uh I'm taken aback. Taken aback. Okay, so w we know about this one 'cause I think we mentioned it before, but I I I forget 'cause there's a lot of sort of falsehood around this one. But we're not in the air now, we're on the water, right? We're on the water, yes. So I think we did bring this up in our nautical idiom episode or our nautical word origin episode, but taken aback is a nautical term. The first instances of it mean the the taken aback means that a sail is suddenly pressed back against the mast or filled from the opposite side, which prevents further progress. Even the first instances of taken aback in more general contexts, meaning to be shocked or surprised into inaction, referenced the nautical origin. I was taken aback, as the sailors say. What I like about this one as an idiom is that it doesn't immediately read as being idiomatic, right? It's it almost reads as one of those like conversational colocations, which is when we pair words together, even though we don't necessarily need to be using those words together, like when we say pay attention, we could just as easily say give attention, but over time , because we say things used together, some of those words used together, it is more common to hear pay attention. But this is an actual idi idiomatic phrase that isn't just that. Yeah, because we don't use a back in any context other than other than that that couplet, right? It's a fossil word. Well, kinda. Yeah, sort of. Semi fossilized. Yeah. Because you can say like flung a back or something, but we just we don't very often. And why wouldn't it still be used in sailing, right? Because that could still happen, right? Your sail could it suddenly be blown in the opposite direction to the one it was going in, right? Presumably it still happens. I wonder if the phrase is knowingly used in sailing circles. Let us know if you do know Your mile adventure could also be termed a wild goose chase. I guess we found things along the way. We're gonna ring the Shakespeare bell with this one, right? Yes, we do. Well, kind of. In the late 16th century, that this is frequently this is used in Romeo and Juliet. Mercutio says to Romeo, Nay, if our wits run the wild goose chase, I am done, for thou hast more of the wild goose in one of thy wits than I have in my whole five. God, I love that line. So he's saying Romeo's wits are scattered and unpredicta ble like a wild goose chase. But did you know that there wasn't a goose involved at all? Is that not implied by the phrase wild goose chase is that that you don't catch the goose? There was something called a wild goose chase that before this that did not involve geese. It's a type of horse race where one horse sets the course and the others have to follow its offid erratic lead at prescribed distances in a pattern that ends up looking like a flight of wild geese. So you've got this one horse in the lead and all of the other ones trying to do the same thing spread out behind it, set in certain distances apart, and the erraticness of the horse race and the fact that it's unpredictable is the like it's a the sixteenth century gate guides to gentlemen's recreation described rules, and in none of them is there an actual goose involved. Also, chasing a goose on a horse would wouldn't wouldn't be very useful, right? I would like to see it. So so that's funny, isn't it? Right? What animal is associated with a wild goose chase of the horse. It's a horse. Right. So we were discussing before we started recording w what mediums we might like to cover and both of us turned up with the same one that we should talk about next. Red herring. A red herring, of course, is something that that misleads you or distracts you from something relevant or an important question. Yeah, like a false clue. There are tons of these in mysteries. Like murder on the Orient Express has a ton of them in it because you're trying to figure out which of these people who all had motive actually killed Ratchet until the big reveal at the end. And then like the usual suspects has like major red herrings throughout until you reveal who Kaiser Sose is. Things like that. But anyway, there aren't actual live fish that are called red herrings, but it is a name for fish, typically herring, that is kippered by curing it in brine and heavily smoking it until it is reddish brown. And then they were very stinky. And that's the that's the key part here, right? I've been to one of these um these buildings where they do the smoking and they're just all sort of it's just it was just a ceiling of of dangling fish. I remember them being a very bright yellow colour, but but yeah, the ones we're talking about here, they were they are just known as red herring. You know, it's not it's not a description of a herring. These the this fish prepared this way was known as red herring. And we have to bring the horses back for the origin of the the idiom surrounding red herring, describing something as a as a red herring, because that that stinky fish as you described it was used uh to create trails for hunting dogs to follow so that hunters could train their horses to follow the dogs. So you've got a person on a horse following a dog following a fish. You'd like go out in the morning and like smear fish along the trail and then the dog would go after it. But the the misleading part, do you know where that part came from? I mean I I just assumed and and what I read about it, said that it's because there is ultimately no game at the end of it, right? The dog gets to the end of the trail and there is nothing to kill. So there are a few instances that explain exactly why it became a misleading thing that takes you off of the tra il. Because, you know, that would just imply like following the trail to nowhere. But it's not following a trail to nowhere, it's following the wrong trail. So the the earliest instance we have of it is in in that context is in eighteen oh seven in an article by William Cobbett. Yeah. Yes. Okay, so I I'm so I'm gonna s I'm gonna tell you what I read about this. Okay. Uh so I read a debunking of of Oh okay. Of his piece. Well, it is apocryphal. Politically motivated. Yeah. Yeah. Well it's also it's also it's a politically motivated piece of fiction. Mm-hmm. And so the idea so I if you're going to go where I think you're going to go, which is the idea that it's deliberately used to distract hor uh distract the dogs. So I was reading in the OED here. It was it it says specifically, it says there's no actual evidence of that practice and that the eighteen oh seven article is a misleading piece of basically political propaganda. That's what I was gonna say though. So the the story it's a little different. So so Cobbett wrote this piece. He had an anecdote which is entirely apocryphal, probably from his childhood, where he used a piece of cured and salted herring to lead dogs off of a hair's trail. And he uses that story to criticize the London press for publishing false news accounts about Napoleon that distracted from more important and fac fact based narratives. So he is saying that the London press is being i is is essentially following the path of this red herring. Right. Okay. So the phrase having the meaning it has perhaps goes to that article, right? Even even if that actual practice described in it maybe maybe never happened. Exactly, yes. The OED does sort of connect it to that. The the other there's one other possibility and it it's it's by no means what we use to uh what inspired the wider use of that idiom, but there is also a story from the seventeenth century about a clergyman who bequeathed a trunk to his servant saying that it contained something that would cause him to drink and inside was very smelly red herring . And so it's just a just a deception there. Very salty as well. But yes, the notion with Cobbit is that the he is using it idiomatically or the the story idiomatically to describe the press publishing distracting news accounts. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Oh, I like that. That's that's good. But yeah, probably they probably did not drag fish away from the trail actually to distract the hounds. I'm sure someone did, maybe, I don't know, but I in in England now, England and Wales, I guess it isn't I don't know about the rest of Britain. Um the only type of fox hunting you're allowed to do is trail hunting, right? You're not actually supposed to you you're not supposed to hunt foxes. You're supposed to h heluntp trails. Yeah. But obviously, if you're out with a load of hunting dogs and they encounter a fox, there's a fairly good chance they're gonna go after the fox. Right. You mentioned the wild goose chase which does get a reference in Shakespeare. Another one that gets referenced in Shakespeare is Halcyon Days. Oh yeah, what is Halcyon? Yeah, so what is what is Halcyon? Or rather, what is a Halcyon? Which I think is kind of interesting. Because I I think I'd always imagined it as being an adjective, but in this case it's it's not. It's talking about a specific thing, it's talking about a specific organism, it's talking about a specific bird, it's talking about the kingfisher, a halcyon is a kingfisher. Although the name Hcyal on goes back to ancient Greek, where there is a myth surrounding the kingfisher, which is that it is able to through magic calm the sea itself for fourteen days while it nests. Well not the sea water. Right. So so your your halcyon days refers to this period of seven days either side of the winter solstice usually, when there is a period of calm and therefore a period of prosperity. And that phrase goes back to uh you know way before Shakespeare was using it. It goes back to the the fifteen hundreds. So actually I suppose not way before Shakespeare was using it. But it's very early has this transferred meaning of, you know, your own personal sort of calm period or prosperous period, or or you know, not even just a personal one, just any any period of time when things are just a bit more relaxed, everything is a bit be calmed. Obviously, kingfishes cannot calm the water, but but so goes the story. So halcyon is from the Greek word for a kingfisher, right? Yeah. Well so the halcyon, which is the this mythical Greek bird. The bird is probably a kingfisher, right? And we do call like the Latin name for the kingfisher invokes the word halcyon as well, so Halcyon is a kingf isher. Here's a funny thing . A kingfisher in French is called a martin pess ure, which means a martin fisher. There's also a phrase that I don't think I've ever heard being used, but it came up in my research because it is in the same breath as the use of halcyon days in the Shakespeare quote. So it's Joan of Arc uses it in which is it? Henry the Something Which one is it? Henry yeah, Henry the Sixth, part one . Joan of Arc or Joan Lapuch La Pucelle, Joan the Maiden, says Expect Saint Martin's summer halcyan days. So this phrase Saint Martin's summer refers to a period of unusual warmth at the end of autumn . Specifically, St. Martin's Day is the eleventh of November now, although in the old time calendar it was uh October the thirty-first. So it's sort of quite similar to the idea of an Indian summer, which is another origin that we've talked about before, but maybe we c you can remind us of it. So one of the theories behind why the French call a kingfisher St. Martin's bird or a Martin Fisher, which they do, is because the Kingfisher supposedly has this ability to calm the waters and calm the sea, much like the calming weather that comes with St. Martin's Day. The theories around AD and Summer are also relatively vague too, but the the notion is probably that it was first seen in this this warm spell after the first frost was first observed in areas of the of what is now the United States occupied by Native Americans in the Mississippi River Valley or in in Appalachia. There we go. Because before you'd explained it to me last time I had thought the India in question was the country India. I I'd never questioned why. You don't. We also have the dog days of summer, if we're going back to warmer months, and we've talked about this one before, also known as canicular days. The notion is that the season is attributed to the influence of the dog star Sirius in the sky, which is visible during late summer. Canicula does mean doggy, right? Or or related related to Canis? Is it uh it what's the name of the dog star? It's something like that, isn't it Canis Majoris. What what what else have we got, Jess? Very briefly, if we're talking about time, this is this is way out of left field, you might say. Um, but uh I would love to note that 24-7, I learned this today. 24-7 was not a thing that people said until the 1980s. Oh, really? And it is well, okay, according to the OED anyway. But the OED cites the following quote from Sports Illustrated as the first instance of 24-7 or 24-7-365. Jerry Ice Reynolds, one of the SEC's two best freshmen by the end of last season, a basketball player, calls his jump shot 24-7-365 because it's good 24 hours a day, seven days a week, three sixty-five days a year. And people did say things like that, like twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, but the shortening to 24-7, although probably conversational at that point, isn't recorded in print until the nineteen eighties. That's amazing. We've had twenty four hours to the day and seven days to the week for a very, very long time . Yes indeed. It had to have come from America that it Oh yeah. It does sound like, you know, shortened uh American slang. Anyway, could we talk about malephors and anti proverbs really quickly? Yeah, absolutely. I I c you know, I whenever I need to come up with a malaphor, I never can . But let's we can combine a couple that we've already done, like uh to sell down the extra mile or something like that. The typical one you hear is we'll burn that bridge when we come to it. There we go. So this is mixing up your well, I suppose mixing your metaphors, but not in the sort of broader sense, but very s you know, in terms of actually mixing the words of two metaphors together, right? Aaron Powell It's a blend of like malaprop ism and metaphor for a malaphor. And usually a malaphor is considered to be an error, uh, like an unintentional use or blending of terms. Like it's not rocket surgery or something, but they're often used in an intentional and humorous way, like uh the eight hundred-pound gorilla in the room or s stirring the apple cart. Stirring the apple cart. Let me do some intentionally funny malaphores, which I found in Giles Brandreth's wordplay book. Uh I can read him like the back of my book. The The Sacred Cows Have Come Home to Roost with a Vengeance. Very good. Oh, so you can have more than two in there. That's interesting. We can stand here and talk until the cows turn blue. Very good. But the other one , which there's a lot of overlap here, is the anti-proverb, which is a dark twist on a proverb, which is also often idiomatic. So uh there where there's a will, there's a lawsuit. This one's really dark. It's time to sw allow the bullet. Oof. And then it's easy as falling off a piece of cake. I like that one. That doesn't sound too that sounds more malefory than anti-proverbial. That's about all I had on that. I just think they're fun. It's a very very funy diversion. Ver fun diversion. Give us your best ones in the comments. I was looking up where the phrase seven year itch comes from. I'm sure a lot of people are aware of the play The Seven Year Itch, which was, you know, George Axelrod's play of nineteen fifty-two, but it became a a a movie in 1955, and it's more famous for that. And the key aspect of it is that you know, seven years into a relationship, people get itchy feet, which is probably something else we should go into. And and basically the there's a sweet spot seven years into a relationship where you're most likely to be unfaithful. Actually so I can read a quote from the play actually, an awful lot of customers are going to get an awful big kick out of Tom Mueller's small amorous interlude with the gal who lives upstairs when events conspire to give him the seven year itch after a happy marital span of a like number of years. But the phrase does not originate in the play nor the the film. And it doesn't ? It's about a a century older. So it's from in the earliest citation is from the 1830s, so it's the first time it gets written down. And I don't think it's a stretch to guess what it originally refers to , but it it does refer to skin complaints, right? It's it's US slang for scabies or some other skin complaint that was said to last for seven years or to keep coming back every year for seven years. So it's known as the seven year itch. And then later people notice this sort of sweet spot in or whatever the opposite, a sour spot in a relationship about seven years into a marriage where you do start to get uncomfortable, dissatisfied, and your eyes may start to wander. And so that's how it's got the meaning it has now. We don't really talk about scabies as the seven year rich anymore. Both of them are unpleasant in different ways In a recent episode I talked about idioms that Brits use that Americans don't. I'm not sure if we explained where that came from though. We did mention other uncle related idiomatic phrases, but I don't think that we talked about this one. So where does that come from? For the context, we use Bob's your uncle uh to mean like and there you have it, you know, and and you know from that moment everything is is easy. It's in the in the bag, so to speak. And so the story that gets told is that the Barb in question is the British Prime Minister Robert Gascoigne Cecil, third Marquis of Salisbury, who rather nepotistically, quite literally, appointed his nephew Arthur Balfour to the position of Chief Secretary for Ireland in eighteen eighty seven. However, that's the story that gets told. But the phrase doesn't actually appear in print until the nineteen twenties. So what is going on there? So it's actually more likely that there is no bob no single Bob. But there is 'cause there are older uses going back to like the seventeen hundreds. Of Bob just meaning good, it's just like slang for something being good. Uh there's a quote here from seventeen twenty one. Yesterday at Marlebone, although they spelt it Marybone. Okay. Yesterday at Marleybone they had me all bob as a robin. So that's you know, you know, in a in a good mood. I see the logic there. It's rhymey and there's a a little idiom bobber than a bobtail. So Bob's your uncle it's probably just invoking the idea of something being good, right? Um the but the uncle reference is really obscure and not not clear where it comes from because it it doesn't really make any sense for the the nepotistic hiring of a prime minister's nephew what almost four I was wondering if there could be some sort of like rhyming slang something, something. It does sound like it, doesn't it? I I would bet you any money. Oh no, I was gonna say I bet you any money it's in the Grosser's dictionary of Vul the Vulgar Tongue. I wrote these notes a while back and I can see actually I've ha I did take a note saying yes, the word bobbish is in the dictionary of the voice meaning smart, clever sprice. That can't be right. Spruce? Sprice. I don't know. Anyway, I mean smart or clever. Excellent. Yeah. There was another phrase about uncles that you you told me about. Oh yeah. We talked about crying uncle, which means it it it's from an Irish word, it's not the word uncle, it's it's an Irish word that sounds like uncle that means like mercy. Yeah, I remember you telling me about that one because I actually hadn't heard the phrase crying uncle. That's like if the bully the playground bully has your arm twisted behind your back and you're you're crying uncle because you've lost You're actually just begging for mercy. I see. Speaking of schoolyard terms, have you heard of the phrase goody two shoes? To be to be called a goody two shoes? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I've come across that one a lot. I mean not so much these days, right? I mean you'd be more likely to call someone like a try hard or something like that than a than a goody two shoes. Is is the goody thing is that anything to do with the way that in the States they used to refer to like wives as goodies. Exactly, exactly. It is a polite Puritan American way to address a woman, which if you read the play, you know, The Crucible, I saw Goody Proctor with the Devil, that kind of thing. It's exactly what I was thinking about. It's exact and in fact that that quote. The term goody two shoes is from a different story. It's from the 1766 children's story, The History of Little Goody Two Shoes. Uh so the story, Goody Two Shoes is Marjorie Meanwell, who is an orphan who's so poor that she has only one shoe until a wealthy gentleman gives her a new pair of shoes, and she's so excited. She tells everyone she has two shoes, and she becomes little goody two shoes. She's curious and clever and she loves reading, but the village doesn't have many books, so she carves a set of letters out of wood and uses them to teach the other kids to read, read and spell. And then she adopts an abused raven named Ralph and then a lamb and then a puppy and a dove and a skylark. And she grows up to be a teacher, and her wealthy patron, Sir Walter Walter Weldon, makes her the mistress of her own school. And she's kind and helpful to everyone and predicts the weather using her weather glass, which unfortunately leads everyone to arrest her for being a witch, but then the patron defend s her and she's released. And then after that she starts taking care of a rich widower when he gets sick. And when he recovers, they get married and they live happily ever after. So it's a little bit of a sermon. Be a good girl and there is a universe where that life is your life, isn't it? Like teaching the kids to read, adopting a pet raven, getting accused of being a witch. This is all very just Harris behaviour. It is. is, it The the the unfortunate part of it is that it's very much like be a good girl and you'll go from being an impoverished orphan to marrying a rich man and she's always re rescued by these charitable men. But very much so otherwise. I love her. It was always harsh to criticize someone for having two shoes. I mean it's not it's not so try-hard. Right. How dare you have properly shod feet? So Jessica, we reached the the last mile of this episode. I think the full swing of this episode has come to a close. The full is it swish and swing? Sway swinging and and s swayway.. Sw