Consequently, a system was devised to answer this concern (which, by all accounts, may have had some basis in reality). At this time, there was a great deal of concern about the possibility that someone might be mistaken for dead, and consequently be buried alive. The popular etymology for saved by the bell is that it traces back to the 18th century. Unlike the previous idioms, there are a couple of different stories concerning how this term came into play. However, nobody seems to be sure how exactly we went from saying “Pardon my French” when we actually said something in French to saying it when we swear. However, the less educated would not have spoken any language but English, and therefore would not have had any idea what was being said. But then, why apologize for one’s French? Well, because when the phrase was first coined, the speaker actually was speaking French.Īpparently, back in the 1800s, it was common for the educated to slip little French phrases into their speech. This phrase is generally used as when someone swears, which is then followed by a remark of “Oh, pardon my French.” Of course, whatever was just said is pretty much guaranteed to have not been said in French-usually it’s just in plain old English. Pardon my French is another exceedingly common phrase, despite the fact that it really doesn’t make very much objective sense. By the 1890s, the phrase had begun to be used in a less exactly literal manner, with the eventual end result that we now use take a rain check in all sorts of situations that don’t have anything whatsoever to do with baseball. These tickets became known as rain checks. At that time, if a baseball game was rained out, the relevant teams would reissue tickets for the delayed game. The expression originates, believe it or not, in sports-specifically, in 1870s baseball. This idiom dates back to the late nineteenth century. Top 10 Weird Histories Behind English Words 10 Take a Rain Check And if it doesn’t make more sense…well, at least it’s probably a good story. Once we add the correct context, fill in the backstory, then it often makes much more sense. But that doesn’t mean that the sense isn’t there, only that we are far enough removed from the original time and culture that the phrase traces back to that it sounds strange to our ears. The thing about most of these bizarre quirks of language is that we typically lack the context necessary to make any real sense out of them. How exactly does the literal phrase “raining cats and dogs” logically translate to “it’s raining really hard,” after all? It doesn’t. How could it not be? The idiom is by definition a phrase that cannot be understood literally-you simply have to know the meaning, which seldom, if ever, appears to possess any logical connection to the literal words used. However, the greatest offender in terms of sheer bewildering incomprehensibility would surely be the idiom. There’s plenty of peculiarities built into our grammar rules and everyday expressions, many of which make next to no sense, to the frustration of many individuals trying to learn English for the first time. It’s messy, it’s chaotic, and the rules sometimes just straight-out make no sense. Let’s face it: English is a weird language.
0 kommentar(er)
