The word almighty, used in connection with God, appears 57 times in the King James Version of the Bible. Starting in the Book of Genesis, God is variously referred to…
Category: Phrase origins
The 1941 New Yorker cartoon that created the expression “Back to the old drawing board!”
Drawing boards have been used by engineers and architects for more than two centuries. But the saying “back to the old drawing board” is more recent and can actually be…
“All the news that’s fit to print.”
As noted by many sources, “All the news that’s fit to print” — the famous slogan of The New York Times — is linked to the date February 10, 1897.…
“These are the times that try men’s souls…”
During the Revolutionary War, getting soldiers to stay in the Continental Army was one of the biggest problems facing the American commander in chief, General George Washington. Many American soldiers…
The 1984 presidential debate that launched the term “Spin Doctors” – and a famous quip…
Nowadays, most people are familiar with the term “spin doctors.” I think they’ve been more omnipresent than ever during the 2016 presidential campaign, though few people know how they got…
“Back in the Saddle Again”
The idiom “back in the saddle again” was already in use before it was immortalized in song by the singing cowboy star Gene Autry. It was originally applied to cowboys…
An update on the origin of the term “a self-made man”…
If you start looking into claims about the origins of common phrases, you find that many of those claims are myths that have simply been repeated so long that they…
What is the “It” the Greeks had a word for? And what does that saying come from?
You’ve probably heard the saying “the Greeks had a word for it” (sometimes given as “the Greeks have a word for it”). But you may not be aware of how…