Did you ever hear an expression—maybe a new one, maybe one you had heard a hundred times before—and suddenly wonder, “Where the heck did that come from?” Whether it’s a rule of thumb or you’re turning a blind eye, there are plenty of idiomatic expressions—from the everyday to the truly bizarre—that have historical origins.
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Before we get into that, though, just what sorts of sayings are we talking about? According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, an idiom is “an expression in the usage of a language that is peculiar to itself in having a meaning that cannot be derived from the conjoined meanings of its elements.” Which is a long-winded way of saying that an idiom is an expression that means something different than what the words that make it up mean on their own—raining cats and dogs, for example.
Because they generally come about through common usage rather than pedagogy, the history and origins of idioms can be notoriously difficult to track down – no one really knows why we say that it’s “raining cats and dogs,” for example, though plenty of people have theories. Some sayings, though, we know precisely where they come from … or we think we do. Even where these 6 strange sayings are disputed or of uncertain pedigree, however, they all either have their origins in persons and events from history, or have been tied to them.
His name is mud.
This one actually shows up in National Treasure 2, when Nicolas Cage’s character explains the origins of the phrase to his allies. Dr. Samuel Mudd treated the broken leg that John Wilkes Booth suffered in the course of assassinating President Lincoln—an action he was bound to do by his Hippocratic oath, but also one which landed him in prison. As a result of his association with the treasonous actions of Booth, the saying “his name is Mudd” came to mean that one’s reputation was ruined.
There’s just one problem with this widely-held theory—the phrase “one’s name is mud” to mean that one is unpopular or disgraceful shows up at least as early as 1823, a decade before Samuel Mudd was born and more than four decades before he would set Booth’s broken leg. More likely, the saying is related to another colloquialism, that of “throwing mud” to mean “making accusations,” which dates back to the 1700s.
Read them the Riot Act.
When you were a kid, your parents may have “read you the riot act” when you were misbehaving. This phrase comes from a very real Riot Act, passed in England in 1714. The historical Riot Act gave authorities the ability to order any group of a dozen or more people who were “unlawfully, riotously, and tumultuously assembled together” to disperse. If the individuals did not comply within an hour, they could be forcibly removed and arrested. The order to disperse had to include a reading of a particular portion of the act itself, hence “read the Riot Act” became a shorthand for a stern reprimand or threat of punishment.
Turn a blind eye.
To turn a blind eye to something, as you might be able to guess from the words themselves, means to ignore or disregard it. The historical origins of this one are hazy, and the Oxford English Dictionary records instances of the idiom dating back as far as 1698, but the most common attribution for the phrase’s origin is connected to a specific event which occurred during the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801. The story concerns Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson, who had been blinded in one eye. As the tale is told, when Nelson received the signal to discontinue his maneuvers, he held the spyglass up to his blind eye and said “I really do not see the signal,” choosing to go against orders and press the attack.
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Run amok.
This is an interesting one. Almost all of us have known something to “run amok” – that is, to behave in an uncontrollable or disruptive fashion. Everything from children to pets to machines may “run amok” in this way. The phrase, however, has its origins in Southeast Asia, where it describes a very specific form of unusual behavior in which a person, with no apparent motive or instigation, suddenly begins violently attacking most everyone they can reach.
The earliest accounts of this phenomenon in English come from the journals of British explorer Captain James Cook. Perhaps most fascinating, however, is that the technical definition of the “amok” syndrome is still listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. For a somewhat more contemporary (and uniquely American) variant, you can also look at the phrase “going postal,” which was coined in response to a string of workplace shootings which took place at post offices from 1970 through 1997.
White elephants.
Today, we have “white elephant” gift exchanges—where people, ostensibly, bring in unwanted presents or things they can’t use and exchange them—just about every Christmas, whether at work, with our families, or elsewhere. This term also traces its origins back to Southeast Asia, where many monarchs believed that a white elephant was a sacred animal.
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Bestowing a gift of such a creature was both a blessing and a curse—it showed the monarch’s favor, but the recipient was also left with a large animal that was expensive to feed and care for and which they could not get rid of or put to much use. The use of the phrase to mean an expensive burden or unwanted gift first found its way into the West as early as the 1600s, and some have traced its modern popularity back to circus entrepreneur P. T. Barnum, who spent an exorbitant amount of time and money acquiring a disappointing white elephant from the King of Siam.
That's beyond the pale.
These days, something “beyond the pale” is out of bounds, whether those bounds are of good taste, good judgment, morality, whatever. It’s an odd one, because it has its roots in a word that is no longer in common use, though its homonyms still are. Thus, “beyond the pale” has nothing to do either with being white in color nor with buckets (pails), but instead is tied to an archaic use of the word “pale” to mean a pointed stick – a usage we still have in derived forms, like “impale.”
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These pointed sticks were often used as boundary markers. However, the use of the phrase to mean “out of bounds” probably has a more specific historical origin, when the word “pale” was used to describe defended territories within other countries. For example, England had a “pale” in the territory of Calais, which was within the boundaries of France in the 14th century. Venturing outside these defended territories was dangerous, and so going outside could be considered “beyond the pale.”
