Interested in Slang origins? Post your faves:

[CanuckAmok]

My two favourites both originated in the British Navy:

1) "Three square meals a day". The plates on which food was served aboard ship were traditionally square, so they could be stored on end horizontally, and not roll around in choppy seas/high list. One of the expressions describing life in the Navy was that conditons were hard, but at least you got three 'square meals' a day--quite an incentive for potential recruits who were lucky to eat once a day as civilians.

2) "Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey". It's not what you think! In the 18th Century, as the British Empire expanded tropically, the ships being built for warmer climate duty were fitted with brass fixtures instead of wood, as often as possible, because wood tended to rot and needed more care in the tropics. One of the fixtures routinely replaced by brass examples were "monkeys". A monkey is the square rack which sits on the deck and contains a pyramid of cannonballs.

If a brass monkey-equipped ship experienced unusually cold weather, one of the things that would happen is that the monkeys would contract enough, from the cold, that the cannonballs would be squeezed up and the pyramids would collapse, spewing cannonballs all over the deck. Hence, the expression.

[Goldmund]

1. I have some naughty ones that I was thinking someone could verify:

"conniving" came from "cunt", since women were thought of as conniving. (please no lectures on sexism, etc -- I don't think that women are any more conniving than men, I'm just talking about lingual origins)

Since cats are conniving as well, we have the expression "pussy cat".

I was told this by a person that I trust 100%, and she says she read it in a book on epystemology.

Anyone else hear this?

[CanuckAmok]

4. that's true. Same root for "cunning"...n/t

[retread]

7. Oh please!!! This is a "joke" right? You don't know how hard it is to

hold "the lecture on sexism, etc." Especially in light of this blatant example.
The Latin word conivere means to "shut the eyes," and by extension, "to shut the eyes
to wrongdoing." That image apparently remains preserved inside the Latin word's
English descendant, connive.

[Goldmund]

8. Blatant example?

Of sexism on my part, I presume?

Tell me you're joking.

[CanuckAmok]

12. It's "cunning", not "conniving"

n/t

[Shananigans]

2. "shiznit"

What the heck is this supposed to be? I mean if someone says "you are the shiznit, I am assuming that is good...right? ;)

WERD!

[Goldmund]

3. It's "shit"

Do you know what Snoop uses to whiten his clothes?

Bleeach.

[Lurker Number001976]

5. Paying through the nose

I saw on the History Channel the other day that the origins of the term came from England during the times of Viking invasions. The Danegeld, or protection money the inhabitants of England had to pay in order to appease the Vikings was collected yearly. A common punishment for those who couldn't come up with their share was getting a piece of their nose cut off, or a nostril slashed.

[myrna minx]

10. Welcome to DU , Lurker Number001976

:hi:

[Lurker Number001976]

14. Thanks!

[Maeve]

6. You have to be really careful with these

Or you find yourself passing on junk explanations--like that "Life in the 1500's" e-mail that made the rounds awhile back.
http://www.snopes.com/language/phrases/1500.htm

[cryofan]

9. "Saved by the Bell"

Originated in medieval Europe. Apparently drinking vessels were made of a material which sometimes poisoned people. This material would cause people to go into a coma like state for hours or days. Often, they were pronounced dead and buried in a coffin in the graveyard. But if poisoned they would wake up to realize that they were buried alive. Then some graves were dug up and relocated, and they noticed that a large percentage of the coffin had large scratch marks and other damage on the inside. And so they started burying people with a string running from the coffin to a bell up in the graveyard. The job of the nightwatchman was to listen for the bell.

[jpgray]

11. Nebuchadnezzar--male genitalia

Don't ask me how that works, but that's Victorian slang.

[Astarho]

13. Parting Shot

came from the "Parthian shot". A common Parthian cavalry tactic was to charge the enemy and then retreat. The enemy thinking they were winning would follow and then the Parthians would turn in the saddle and fire their arrows backward at their pursuers.