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It is speculated that the phrase may come from women chatting while sewing. " Chewing the fat " or " chew the rags " [ 1 ] are English expressions for gossiping or making friendly small talk , or a long and informal conversation with someone.
Early appearance of "Bob's your uncle" in print, an advertisement in the Dundee Evening Telegraph on 19 June 1924 "Bob's your uncle" is an idiom commonly used in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries that means "and there it is", or "and there you have it", or "it's done".
An early reference to Sir Walter Scott as the "great Scott" is found in the poem "The Wars of Bathurst 1830" published in The Sydney Monitor on 27 October 1830, still during Scott's lifetime; the pertinent line reading "Unlike great Scott, who fell at Waterloo", in reference to Scott's poorly-received The Field of Waterloo.
The whole nine yards" or "the full nine yards" is a colloquial American English phrase meaning "everything, the whole lot" or, when used as an adjective, "all the way". [1] Its first usage was the punch line of an 1855 Indiana comedic short story titled "The Judge's Big Shirt". [2]
The phrase could also come from the idea of race horses "breaking their legs" (AKA how they're standing) at the starting line, which some riders believed was good luck and would lead to a good race.
Shortly thereafter, the phrase “spill the beans” came to mean “upset a previously stable situation by talking out of turn,” which is similar to the modern use of the phrase.
An ironic or non-literal saying of uncertain origin (a dead metaphor), [1] "break a leg" is commonly said to actors and musicians before they go on stage to perform or before an audition. Though a similar and potentially related term exists in German without theatrical associations, the English expression with the luck-based meaning is first ...
That’s because the first person to say it did so while, you guessed it, jumping from a plane—and his name was Aubrey Eberhardt. Aubrey was a private in the U.S. Army during the 1940s, ...