Have you thought about were saying like flying by the seat of your pants, raining cats and dogs, or saved by the bell came from? In the English language, we have lots of interesting statements. I would love to ask my friends from other parts of the world if they have these strange sayings.
Raining cats and dogs did not come about because of cats and dogs, it was more because houses use to have thatch roofs, that the small animal like mice, birds and other animals would go there for comfort and shelter but when heavy rains came down so did the roofs with the animals that sheltered there. Many parts of the world had a variant of this phrase used in many different languages. Romanian: plouă cu broaşte (“raining frogs”) Swedish: Det regnar småspik (“It is raining small nails”) I thought this one was funny in a kinda gross way. French: il pleut comme vache qui pisse (“it is raining like a peeing cow”)
One I use in my life is for crying out tears, I know that is just something I started Saying, so like many phrases, someone just started using them and they stuck.
Flying by the seat of your pants was used in reference to pilots in the 1930’s using their intuition with the parts of the body that had the most contact with the plane, due to planes not having the gauges that they have nowadays.
Saved by the bell was one that boxers would have the advantage of the bell ringing to end the round when the fight was not going so well. It was an old tale that it was to do with people being buried alive in the coffins. This was a debunked explanation.
Things that I would hear in my life as a child.
Find a penny pick it up and all the day you’ll have good luck, or a penny for your thoughts.(Canada no longer has pennies in circulation, February 4, 2013, they announced that the Canadian mint would no longer be making pennies) Did you know there is a flip side to that saying? Money used to be thought of as gifts from the gods, which brought with it good luck and bad, if you picked up a penny that was on the tails side it was thought to bring you bad luck. This makes me think how much value was put on a penny, now a penny so worthless, it is more expensive to make than the value of it’s use.
One I have used is it is just a hop skip and a jump away… I don’t even know where this came from, likely something my grandmother said. Where she got it, hmm who knows.
How about they are under the weather or was someone’s nose out of joint. Was something out of sorts. What did you hear or use in your life?
First photo, Photo by Johannes Rapprich from Pexels
This is where it starts 