{"id":82015,"date":"2021-12-13T10:58:29","date_gmt":"2021-12-13T15:58:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.genealogybank.com\/?p=82015"},"modified":"2022-01-10T10:39:07","modified_gmt":"2022-01-10T15:39:07","slug":"do-you-know-these-expressions-your-ancestors-used-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/do-you-know-these-expressions-your-ancestors-used-part-3.html","title":{"rendered":"Do You Know These Expressions Your Ancestors Used? (Part 3)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em>Introduction<\/em><\/strong><em>: In this article (Part 3), Jessica Edwards continues her discussion of the meanings and origins of idioms (figurative phrases) that our ancestors used. Jessica has had a lifelong interest in her family\u2019s history \u2013 especially on her father\u2019s side, which goes back to the first settlers in Pennsylvania, Jamestown and New England \u2013 and has documented and added more than 21,000 people to her family tree!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Idioms (figurative phrases) have been used throughout the centuries and may appear in what was said or written by our ancestors. Understanding these expressions will help you better understand what your ancestors were saying \u2013 and finding out the history of these sayings can be quite entertaining!<\/p>\n<p>I hope you enjoy this series, and perhaps it will allow you to better understand what your ancestors may have meant in their letters and diaries, or in newspaper articles written about them \u2013 as well as increase your knowledge and vocabulary.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Birds and the bees:<\/strong> this is a frequently used idiom to describe sexual attraction\/education. Its first use in connection with sexuality was perhaps in the mid-16th century, in a diary kept by John Evelyn.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Cream of the crop:<\/strong> this idiom, meaning the best of something, comes from cream being the richest part of the milk \u2013 and it rises to the top. The noun \u201ccream\u201d has been used to mean the best of any collective entity since the 16th century. \u201cCream of the market\u201d was an early expression using \u201ccream\u201d figuratively, and John Ray used the phrase \u201cthe cream of the jest\u201d in his 1678 collection of English proverbs.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Red tape:<\/strong> often used to express frustration with bureaucratic hassles and forms. This idiom is traced back to the 1500s when the practice of sealing official documents with red binding was used to make it difficult for people other than the intended recipient to open them.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Salad days:<\/strong> an older person may use this idiom to describe something having to do with their youth. It seems to have started in the early 1600s when Shakespeare used it in his play <em>Antony and Cleopatra<\/em>, and then it went into dormancy until the 1800s when it likened youth to the short life span of salad greens.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Through thick and thin:<\/strong> this phrase was originally \u201cThrough thicket and thin woods\u201d (British) and means to keep going, no matter how difficult the circumstances. The earliest citation is in Richard Baxter\u2019s religious text\u00a0<em>A Saint or a Brute: The Certain Necessity and Excellency of Holiness<\/em>, from 1662: \u201cMen do fancy a necessity [of holiness] where there is none, yet that will carry them through thick and thin.\u201d The phrase had been in use in Old and Middle English, in the literal \u201cthicket or thin woods\u201d sense, for some centuries before that. The earliest known usage is in Geoffrey Chaucer\u2019s \u201cThe Reeve\u2019s Tale.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Time is money:<\/strong> people use this term to urge someone to work faster or more effectively. A version of this idiom was first printed in 1572: \u201ctime is precious.\u201d Even before that, the Athenian orator Antiphon said: \u201cthe most costly outlay is time.\u201d However, the modern form seems to have originated in a piece written by Benjamin Franklin, in\u00a0\u201cAdvice to a Young Tradesman\u201d\u00a0in 1748: \u201cRemember that time is money.\u201d Also, Charles Dickens used it in <em>Nicholas Nickleby<\/em> in 1839:\u00a0\u201cTime is money\u2026 and very good money too to those who reckon interest by it.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Tit for tat:<\/strong> means retaliation for an insult or an injury. An English saying, this was first recorded in 1558 as \u201ctip for tap.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Tough love:<\/strong> this phrase, to describe a way to deal with someone with a severe addiction or behavior problem, became popular in the last 20 or so years. Using \u201ctough love\u201d to show someone you care by setting severe\/strict limits with them actually was first used in England more than 350 years ago.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Turning a blind eye:<\/strong> means being accused of ignoring facts or situations deliberately. It is falsely attributed to Admiral Horatio Nelson (1758-1805), who was a British naval hero with one blind eye. The story was told that during one battle, the British forces sent him signals to stop his attack on the Danish fleet \u2013 but Nelson supposedly did not want to stop, so he raised his telescope to his blind eye on purpose and claimed he did not see any signal. He continued the attack anyway and defeated the Danes. In reality, however, this idiom is dated back as far as 1698 in England.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Until the cows come home:<\/strong> an old idiom that means doing something for a long time. This dates back to the 16th century, when it was used in literature. It came about because cows are notoriously languid creatures and make their way home at their own unhurried pace. That\u2019s certainly the imagery behind \u201cuntil the cows come home,\u201d but the precise time and place of the coining of this colloquial phrase isn\u2019t known.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Use some elbow grease:<\/strong> means apply more physical effort in doing a chore. This is not a recent term and actually dates back to the 1600s.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Wears their heart on their sleeve:<\/strong> means someone is openly showing their emotions, and likely comes from\u00a0medieval jousts, where a \u201csleeve\u201d referred to a piece of armor which covered and protected the arm. Knights would often wear a lady\u2019s token (also called a \u201cfavor\u201d) around their sleeve of armor. This action also spawned another idiom, \u201cAsking a favor of someone,\u201d for situations when a gentleman would ask a lady that he desired to give him a favor to wear in the joust.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Weathering the storm:<\/strong> describes someone enduring a trial or hardship. This idiom can be dated back to approximately 1650 when alluding to a ship that was able to pass safely through the bad weather.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>You can lead a horse to water, but you can\u2019t make him drink:<\/strong> can be described as both an idiom and a proverb. It was used in about the 12th century and is often considered the oldest proverb of English that is in use today.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Your guess is as good as mine:<\/strong> means that you have no idea about something. This phrase is attributed by various sources as having originated in circa 1300, 1500, and 1902 \u2013 so as to its actual origin, \u201cYour guess is as good as mine.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>More to come!<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>Note on the header image:<\/em><\/strong> \u201cGenealogy\u201d logo designed and copyrighted by Mary Harrell-Sesniak.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Related Articles:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.genealogybank.com\/curiosity-killed-the-cat-or-what-your-ancestor-really-meant.html\">\u2018Curiosity Killed the Cat\u2019 or What Your Ancestor Really Meant<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.genealogybank.com\/genealogy-tip-idioms-through-the-ages.html\">Genealogy Tip: Idioms through the Ages<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.genealogybank.com\/do-you-know-these-expressions-your-ancestors-used-part-1.html\">Do You Know These Expressions Your Ancestors Used? (Part 1)<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.genealogybank.com\/do-you-know-these-expressions-your-ancestors-used-part-2.html\">Do You Know These Expressions Your Ancestors Used? (Part 2)<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In this article (Part 3), Jessica Edwards continues her discussion of the meanings and origins of idioms (figurative phrases) that our ancestors used.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":81885,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12713],"tags":[58073,58053],"class_list":["post-82015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-genealogy-research-tips","tag-genealogy-search-terms","tag-idioms"],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/illustration-1024-2019-featured-graphic-genealogy-logo.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82015"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82025,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82015\/revisions\/82025"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}