“The Final Solution” is one of the most chilling phrases associated with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. It’s a euphemism for genocide. “The Final Solution” was immortalized by a memo…
“It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!”
The word “chiffon” started out as a French term for a rag or small piece of cloth. Several centuries ago, fabric and clothing manufacturers adopted it as the name of…
“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…
“A boy’s best friend is his mother.”
When Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho was first released to movie theaters on June 16, 1960, it wasn’t immediately embraced by critics. For example, in a review published the next day…
“Never let them see you sweat” was launched into our language on this day in 1984…
In 1984, the Gillette Company launched a new series of TV commercials for its Dry Idea antiperspirants that introduced what eventually became one of the famous ad slogans of all…
“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”
On February 7, 1968, American bombs, rockets and napalm obliterated much of the South Vietnamese town of Ben Tre — killing hundreds of civilians who lived there. Later that day,…
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…
The ironic dual anniversary of two famous Clinton quotations
Hillary Clinton looms so large in the political landscape today, it’s hard to remember when she didn’t. But, in fact, she was relatively unknown to most Americans until January 26,…
The origin of the movie cliché “We have ways of making you talk!”
The threatening words “We have ways of making you talk” are now a familiar cliché in movies. It’s usually said for comedic effect, often with a heavy foreign accent, like:…