“Where do you get all these weird expressions?” my daughter once asked me.
“What do you mean?”
“Some of the stuff you say. When I say it, my friends have no idea what I’m talking about.”
“Give me a for instance?”
“Like ‘Podunk.’ Where does that word come from?”
She got me wondering. I looked it up and found its (speculative) origins fascinating. Go ahead and check it out for yourself here: Podunk
My search also turned up something more: “Slang of the American Civil War.”
In this list, I recognized a number of phrases I still say. Expressions used 150 years ago, during the Civil War. When I think about it, most of them came from my mother, whose ancestors hailed from western Pennsylvania. At moments like these, the era of Civil War feels like the not-so-distant past. Here are just a few expressions I still use.
Time to bite the bullet.
Enough of these carryings-on.
I finagled my way in.
He was fit to be tied.
We’ll get there by hook or by crook.
If I had my druthers.
What a rigamarole!
Finally, have you ever wondered about the phrase: I heard it through the grapevine? It turns out “grapevines” were telegraph wires. By Jiminy!
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