Days Gone By

To ‘rack one’s brains’ is to strain mentally to recall or to understand something. The term is used whenever something or someone was under particular stress. The rack was a medieval torture device. The crude but, one presumes, effective racks often tore the victim’s limbs from their bodies. It isn’t surprising that ‘rack’ was adopted as a […]

In colonial days, candles were expensive and took a long time to make, so often reeds were dipped in tallow and burned instead. When visitors came, it was the custom for guests to make their exit by the time the lights went out. Therefore, if your host didn’t want you to stay very long, he […]

Second String – in sports today it means not used as one of the regular players on a team. In medieval times, an archer always carried a second string in case the one on his bow broke Join Amazon Prime – Watch Over 40,000 Movies & TV Shows Anytime – Start Free Trial Now Historical […]

Show your true colors –  is a term from nautical history.  Pirate ships would approach their intended victim showing a false flag to lure them into a false sense of security. When it was too late for the victim to escape they would show their true colours-the jolly roger Amazon.com – Read eBooks using the […]

Toe the line means to was to position one’s toes next to a marked line in order to be ready to start a race, or some other undertaking.  In the early days of the British Parliament, members wore swords in the House of Commons. To keep the members from fighting during heated debates, the Speaker […]

Put up your Dukes – means to put up your fists and prepare to fight. There are various thoughts as to how ‘dukes’ came to mean ‘fists’. The most commonly repeated suggestion is that it derives from the Cockney rhyming slang – Duke of Yorks = forks = fingers/hands. Another suggestion is that on the early […]

Long in the Tooth – means old, especially of horses – Horses’s teeth, unlike humans’, continue to grow with age. They also wear down with use, but the changes in the characteristics of the teeth over time make it possible to make a rough estimate of a horse’s age by examining them.The term was later coined […]

You’re no Spring chicken – Before incubators, chickens couldn’t be raised during winter. New England growers found that those born in the spring brought premium prices in the summer market places. When these Yankee traders tried to pass off old birds as part of the spring crop, smart buyers would protest that the bird was “no […]