If you happen to be a bootlegger, your profession recalls the Wild West outlaws who sold illegal alcohol by concealing slender bottles of whiskey in their boots. If you're on cloud nine, you owe a nod to the American Weather Bureau's classification of clouds, the ninth topping out all others at a mountainous 40,000 feet. If you opt for the hair of the dog the morning after, you're following the advice of medieval English doctors, who recommended rubbing the hair of a dog into the wound left by the animal's bite. Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_module_version 0.0.5 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA19203 Openlibrary_edition

Red Herrings and White Elephants - AbeBooks Red Herrings and White Elephants - AbeBooks

Mad hatter... pie in the sky... egg on your face. We use these phrases every day, yet how many of us know what they really mean or where they came from? The Origins of the Phrases We Use Everyday - The biggest selling non-fiction book of the decade..... Mad hatter . . . pie in the sky . . . egg on your face. We use these phrases every day, yet how many of us know what they really mean or where they came from? According to the OED however, red herrings were used to lay trails for hounds to follow, which enable the hunters to exercise their horses by following the hounds. There is apparently no evidence that false trails were laid using red herrings to distract the hounds. This was a idea that emerged during the 19th century. Bold as brass": Brass is hard, brass is shiny, brass is eye-catching. Brass is, in a word, bold. Is the word "brazen," originally meaning made of brass but now also meaning "bold and without shame" supposed to be just coincidental and having nothing to do with the origin of this phrase?Origin: From the Burmese belief that albino elephants are sacred. They can’t be used for work and they must be lavished with the ultimate amount of care. If the King of Siam wished to get rid of a particular courtier, he gave a gift of a white elephant. The courtier dared not offend the King with a refusal although he was fully aware that the cost of upkeep of such an animal was ruinous. I never questioned the origin of While Elephants, Red Herrings, or any of the other many ideomatic phrases that we use everyday, but a friend of mine bought me this book and I was blown away! What does either a Red Herring (a false or misleading clue) or a White Elephant (something useless, usually pointing to public buildings, that becomes a burden, much like our country's facilities...) has anything to do with their respective meanings? Just as the foreword of the book implied, such sayings are part and parcel of the everyday English and most native speakers are familiar with them, seldom giving them a thought.

Red Herrings and White Elephants by Albert Jack | Goodreads

somewhere here, i believe, i saw this book/writing/words and took note. i am now tending to it and i enjoy it...a kind of look-see at idiom...so many that are nautical, which is nice. beep beep. At coffee mornings, fetes and similar events in the village where I grew up there was often white elephant stall, which had all sorts of odds and ends that people want to get rid of. This is not the kind of book that you can just sit down and read. It is absolutely mandatory that you have someone nearby that you can tap on the shoulder and ask if they know what a red herring is or a white elephant.

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Penelitian tingkat keberhasilan kelompok usaha bersama peningkatan peranan wanita di bidang kesejahteraan sosial dalam pengentasan kemiskinan Teachers of the language, especially one teaching ESL (English as a Second Language), would benefit from the book as well. At the first sign of boredom your class shows in an English course (you should be able to notice the blank looks and nodding heads), swipe Red Herring and White Elephants out and start to ask them why certain phrases are so. Red Herrings and White Elephants. The Origins of the Phrases We Use Every Day : - signed or inscribed book Aided by the alliteration in b (bold – brass), the phrase (as) bold as brass arose from a long-established figurative use of the noun brass, sometimes in association with the adjective bold. Origin: This phrase refers to smoked herring. In many parts of 19th century Britain such fish have a very strong smell and were usually known, not as kippers, but as red herrings. Because of their smell, they were good at masking other smells. As a result, they could easily cover the scent of a fox. A red herring pulled across the trail could divert the hounds onto a false path. Thus, by analogy, the phrase came to be used to describe any false trail.

red herring in Traditional Chinese - Cambridge Dictionary red herring in Traditional Chinese - Cambridge Dictionary

If you happen to be a bootlegger, your profession recalls the Wild West outlaws who sold illegal alcohol by concealing slender bottles of whiskey in their boots. If you're on cloud nine, you owe a nod to the American Weather Bureau's classification of clouds, the ninth topping out all others at a mountainous 40,000 feet. Mad hatter . . . pie in the sky . . . egg on your face. We use these phrases every day, yet how many of us know what they really mean or where they came from?

But the roots of “dicey” lie, not in the clouds, but on the gambling tables (or the floor of an RAF hangar). “Dicey” comes from “dice,” the plural of “die,” the little spotted cubes of chance used in many games. A mission that was “dicey” to the RAF pilots was fraught with danger, and their safe return was as uncertain as a roll of the dice they often used to pass their time on the ground. This sense of both chance and danger has carried over to our modern use of “dicey” to mean “seriously risky,” often with overtones of disaster if the effort fails. A delightful compendium of anecdotes on everything from minding your p's and q's to pulling out all the stops, Red Herrings and White Elephants is an essential handbook for language-lovers of all ages. It is interesting to note that most of the sayings do not even originate from the English language, and are cobbled up from Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Greek, French, Swedish, Norse (when it's raining cats and dogs or when someone went berserk), Hindustani (when someone has gone Doolally), Jewish (when you tell someone to eat his heart out) and even Gaelic (when you declared something as phoney), just to name a few. Example: The London Bridge became a white elephant. The bridge was relocated to Havasu City Arizona, where it now remains as a tourist attraction. Dicey": From some Mr. Dicey. I doubt it. The derivation from "dice" just sounds much more plausible.