Where 10 Everyday Sayings Really Come From

The popular story is that wounded soldiers, operated on without anaesthetic, were given a bullet to clamp between their teeth so they wouldn’t scream or bite through their own tongue. It’s a vivid image, and you’ll see it stated as fact all over the place.

Trouble is, there’s not much evidence anyone actually did this — soldiers were more likely handed a leather strap, and the phrase itself only shows up in print in the late 1800s. Rudyard Kipling put it in a novel in 1891, and that seems to be roughly where the modern sense of “grit your teeth and get on with it” takes hold. The battlefield-surgery tale is a good story stitched on afterwards.

This one is about as old and honest as they come. Before roads and railways, trade moved on rivers and canals, and in winter those froze solid. Small ships called icebreakers would go ahead and crack open a channel so the goods could get through.

Writers picked up the image early — you can find it being used figuratively back in the 1500s, and Shakespeare’s contemporaries were already using it to mean making a social start. Clearing a frozen path so everything else can follow is a pretty good picture of what you’re doing at an awkward party, when you think about it.

You’ll sometimes hear that this comes from an ancient Greek voting system, where you dropped white or black beans into a jar and knocking it over would reveal the result early. It’s a neat theory. It’s also almost certainly wrong — there’s no trail connecting it to the modern phrase at all.

The plain truth is duller and more recent. “Spill the beans” is American slang that appears in the early 1900s, meaning to upset a situation or blurt out something you shouldn’t. “Spill” had already been used to mean “talk” or “let out” for a while. No ancient Greeks required.

The classic explanation involves a market swindle: a trader promises you a piglet in a bag, but slips a worthless cat in instead, and the con is blown the moment the cat gets loose. Charming — and again, there’s no real evidence for it, and cats in bags don’t stay quiet the way the story needs them to.

What we can say is that the phrase turns up in English in the mid-1700s meaning exactly what it means now: revealing a hidden truth. The market-fraud origin is a folk explanation that arrived later to make sense of a saying people were already using.

A story goes around that old portrait painters charged more to include your arms and legs, so a cheap sitter got just a head. People love this one. There’s no evidence for it, and portrait pricing didn’t work that way.

The real origin is more mundane and more recent: the phrase is American and shows up around the 1940s, right after the Second World War, when a great many people had quite literally paid with an arm or a leg. It likely grew out of older expressions like “I’d give my right arm for it.” No painters involved.

Here’s a myth that turns out to be mostly true. Hat-makers really did go mad — not as a figure of speech, but from mercury poisoning. Felt hats were made using mercury compounds, and long exposure attacked the nervous system, causing tremors, slurred speech, and confusion. The condition even had a name: “mad hatter disease.”

The one wrinkle: the phrase may predate the mercury connection, and some argue “hatter” is a corruption of an older word. But the industry’s reputation for unwell workers was real, and Lewis Carroll’s Hatter in Alice in Wonderland made the image stick for good.

The grim version says people were once so afraid of being buried alive that coffins were fitted with a string leading to a bell above ground — ring it, and you’d be “saved by the bell.” Safety coffins did genuinely exist. But the phrase almost certainly has nothing to do with them.

It comes from boxing. A fighter who’s about to be counted out can be rescued when the bell rings to end the round, giving him a reprieve. The expression appears in boxing writing around the turn of the twentieth century, which fits that meaning and nothing else.

You may have heard this comes from an old law that let a man beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb. It’s repeated with total confidence, sometimes even in serious settings. No such law ever existed, and historians have looked hard.

The far likelier source is the honest one: the thumb has been used for rough measuring and estimating for centuries — a thumb’s width is about an inch. “Rule of thumb” simply means a practical, approximate method rather than an exact one, and it’s been used that way since the 1600s.

This is one of the great unsolved puzzles of American slang, and half the fun is how confidently people give you the wrong answer. It’s the length of a machine-gun ammo belt in a fighter plane, they’ll say. Or the fabric in a suit, or a kilt, or the capacity of a cement truck. Pick one.

The honest answer is that nobody knows. Careful researchers have traced it back only to the 1950s and ’60s, and the earliest examples don’t line up with any of the popular tales — the “yards” don’t seem to be nine of anything in particular. If someone tells you they know for certain where it comes from, they don’t.

Finally, one with a clear and rather charming origin. Old fairground stalls and carnival games handed out cigars as prizes — this was back when a cigar was a perfectly normal thing to give an adult. Come close to winning but fall short, and the operator would call out, “Close, but no cigar.”

The phrase spread from American fairgrounds in the first half of the twentieth century, and it still carries that faint whiff of the midway — the near-miss, the barker’s shrug. No debunking needed on this one.