Have you ever heard an adult or one of your peers use an idiom or “saying” to describe a certain situation? If you have, you likely understood what they meant, but you also probably questioned the origin of certain idioms. One popular idiom that is used when someone is sick (which is all too common in our school this time of year). Many people describe being ill as being “under the weather”. This idiom likely evolved from sailors, as a sick sailor would often go beneath the bow of their ship to protect themselves from the often-rainy conditions that they experienced, or going “under the weather” to wait out their sickness.
Another popular idiom is used to describe when someone is being urged to tell a secret, or “spill the beans”. This saying, interestingly, evolved from an ancient Greek voting process in which voting men used two different colored beans, one indicating approval, the other indicating the opposite, to vote on certain measures. The beans were placed in a vase, similar to a ballot box, and then were “spilled” at the end of the voting to reveal the secret result of the referendum.
When someone is sure that they’ve accomplished something, they often say that they “have it in the bag”. This idiom traces its roots back to the baseball diamond, more specifically, the 1916 New York Giants (now known as the San Francisco Giants). The Giants were on a monster winning streak and a symbol of this streak was the bag of 72 extra baseballs that they kept on the field to replace lost ones during their games. As a superstition, the team was known to take the bag off of the field as the game reached the 9th inning, believing that they had captured the win in the bag, or that they “had the game in the bag”.
A final idiom that I learned the meaning to was “beat around the bush”, which is used when someone is avoiding the central point of a conversation or circling around it. This idiom was born in Great Britain among hunters, who would beat the area around a bush in order to draw birds out from inside the bush. Therefore, the hunter could be said to be “beating around the bush” before getting to the central point of the hunt, capturing the bird.
