Idioms keep their shape long after the practice behind them disappears, which is why so many of them sound like nonsense. These ten have origins that can actually be documented.
Phrase origins attract invented explanations more than almost any other corner of language. A backronym is easy to remember and impossible to check, so it spreads, while the real answer tends to be a dull fact about medieval bread law or a specific bad night at the theatre. The ten here are drawn from areas that kept good records: statute books, naval practice, the London stage and the felt-hat trade. Where the usual explanation is likely rather than proven, the wording says so instead of pretending otherwise.
Every question in this quiz is listed below with its correct answer and the reasoning behind it. Play first if you would rather not see the answers — or read through as a study sheet.
Play it insteadAnswer: B. A law that officials read aloud to order a crowd to disperse
Why: The Riot Act of 1714 required an official to read out a fixed passage to any gathering of twelve or more, who then had an hour to leave before facing arrest. It stayed on the statute book in Britain until 1967.
Answer: A. Ships returning to port with their flags still flying
Why: A ship's colours were its flags, and keeping them hoisted on the way home signalled victory. Lowering them was the recognised sign of surrender, which is where "striking the colours" comes from.
Answer: D. Indigenous nations of North America
Why: English colonists in the seventeenth century described Haudenosaunee peacemaking in which weapons were literally buried once terms were agreed. The phrase entered English almost immediately as a figure of speech.
Answer: C. A punishment of running between two rows of men who struck the offender
Why: The word came into English from Swedish gatlopp, meaning a lane-run, and was reshaped by the unrelated gauntlet that means a glove. That is why throwing down the gauntlet is a completely separate phrase.
Answer: B. An offender found with blood still on their hands
Why: The term appears in Scottish legal writing as redhand from the fifteenth century, describing someone taken at the scene of a killing or a poaching. It only became a general phrase for being caught in the act much later.
Answer: A. Horatio Nelson
Why: The story has Nelson raising a telescope to his blind eye at Copenhagen in 1801 so he could honestly claim not to have seen the signal to withdraw. The attribution is traditional rather than firmly documented, but it has stuck for two centuries.
Answer: D. The theatre
Why: The playwright John Dennis built a new device for stage thunder in 1709; his play failed, and when he heard his invention used for a production of Macbeth he protested that they had stolen his thunder. The device outlasted the play by a wide margin.
Answer: C. Mercury used in the making of felt hats
Why: Mercury compounds were used to treat the felt, and long exposure damages the nervous system. The phrase was already current before Lewis Carroll wrote his Hatter, who is never actually called mad as a hatter in the book.
Answer: B. Bakers added a spare loaf to avoid penalties for short weight
Why: Medieval English law fixed the weight of a loaf and punished bakers who sold light, so throwing in an extra was cheap insurance. The count of thirteen to the dozen is recorded in England from the fifteenth century.
Answer: A. Daniel
Why: At Belshazzar's feast a disembodied hand writes on the wall, and Daniel reads it as a warning that the kingdom is finished. The words are usually given as mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.
A Germanic language wearing a French coat and carrying a Latin dictionary. Why English spelling is a mess with reasons.
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