The phrase Pull Your Finger Out is associated these days with encouraging someone to get a move on, or hurry up and complete a task more quickly. Like so many English phrases it has a military or naval origin. Loaded cannons would have gunpowder poured into a small ignition hole and held in place with a wooden plug. But in times of battle, when speed was of the essence, the powder would be pushed in and then held in place by a gun crewmember using his finger. Impatient artillerymen, anxious to fire their cannons at the enemy, would shout at the crewmember to ‘pull his finger out’ so that the gun could be fired. It has not been recorded how many digits were lost on the battlefields.
Flash In The Pan is used to describe something or somebody making a great impression at the outset but ultimately failing to deliver any real result. Of military origin the phrase emerged during the use of early flintlock muskets. Sometimes gunpowder would ignite with a flash in the lock-pan but the main charge failed to light, meaning the shot in the barrel did not discharge, so no harm could come to man nor beast that time round. It was a ‘flash in the pan’ and the expression was in regular use by 1741.
To Throw Down The Gauntlet is to lay a challenge, originally of combat but latterly to any form of contest. A gauntlet is a medieval armoured glove, forming part of a knight’s suit of armour. Traditionally a knight would challenge another to a duel by throwing down his gauntlet. If his opponent picked it up it meant he was accepting the challenge and battle would begin. Taking Up The Gauntlet has since been a phrase used for accepting a challenge. The Swedish word ‘gantlope’ (see Run The Gauntlet) was anglicised to ‘gauntlet’ as a result of this tradition, but ‘running the gauntlet’ and ‘throwing down the gauntlet’ are not otherwise connected.
Hanging Fire is often used to describe a pause before beginning a task. Sixteenth-century muskets were always slow to fire their charge due to the delay between lighting the gunpowder in the touch-hole and detonation. This was known at the time as ‘hang-fire’ and the expression was soon used to describe any person delaying or slow to take action.
To Be Hoisted By One’s Own Petard means to become a victim of your own deceit, or caught in your own trap. In medieval times a petard was a thick iron container which was filled with gunpowder and set against medieval gates, barricades and bridges. The wicks, however, were unreliable and often detonated the gunpowder immediately, blowing up the engineer in the process. In which case he was ‘hoisted (blown up) by his own petard (container of gunpowder)’.
To take someone Down A Peg Or Two means to reduce their status among their peers. It is possible the origin of this phrase is found at sea, and the peg used to fly a ship’s colours. The lower the peg, the less impressive the achievement. But there is also a reference dating as far back as the 10th century and King Edred’s anger at the amount that his army was drinking. Aware that he needed his soldiers sober for the great battles against the Vikings, Edred ordered pegs to be put into the side of ale barrels and no man was allowed to drink below the level of the peg in a single sitting. But as soon as this rule was applied soldiers would drink from other people’s kegs and take them down a ‘peg or two’.
Dickens was certainly good at inventing phrases. One of them was Artful Dodger, which is used to describe somebody involved in crafty or criminal practice. One of Dickens’s characters in Oliver Twist (1837) was Jack Dawkins, a wily pickpocket and expert member of Fagin’s gang of thieves. During the story the author gave Dawkins the nickname ‘The Artful Dodger’. Almost immediately the Victorian public adopted the phrase and it was used to describe any crafty rogue.
To have Cold Feet indicates a loss of nerve or to have doubts about a particular situation. This phrase has its origins in the gaming world, albeit a fictional one. In 1862 Fritz Reuter, a German author, described a scene in one of his novels during which a poker player fears losing his fortune but does not want to lose face by conceding defeat. Instead he explains to his fellow poker players his feet are too cold and he cannot concentrate. This gives him a chance to leave the table and then slip away from the game. It is not known whether Reuter was drawing on a real life experience (as many novelists do) but his scene certainly appears to be the origin of the phrase.
To Curry Favour is a phrase used to describe keeping on the good side of somebody, carrying out acts to keep in favour. The origin of this phrase does not lie in Indian culture, but in the ‘Roman de Fauvel’, a French satirical poem written in 1310 and popular for centuries. Fauvel was the name of the centaur (half-man, half-horse) who was a beast of great cunning and danger, and to keep on the right side of him sycophants would spend time grooming Fauvel to keep him in a good mood. The art of grooming or dressing a horse is known as ‘currying’ the animal and therefore those seeking to keep in the centaur’s good books could be found ‘currying Fauvel’. Over the centuries, and through translation, ‘Fauvel’ became ‘favour’.
A Dark Horse is something of an unknown quantity, perhaps somebody whose abilities are not yet fully known but soon will be. In the 16th century the phrase ‘to keep something dark’ meant keeping something quiet but Benjamin Disraeli created our phrase in his debut novel The Young Duke, published in 1831. (At that time Disraeli was only 27 years old and another 37 years away from being Prime Minister.) In his story he describes a horse race in which the two favourites are beaten to the finishing line by an unfancied third. Disraeli wrote, ‘a dark horse which never had been thought of rushed past the grandstand in sweeping triumph.’ It was common for owners to conceal the potential of their best new horses until the actual day of the race, and almost immediately, throughout the racing world, such animals became known as ‘dark horses’ regardless of their colour.
Dickens To Pay is used as a threat: ‘If you do that again there will be Dickens to pay.’ Charles Dickens wasn’t a frightening character so as a threat it seems mild to say the least. But the 19th-century novelist has nothing to do with it. As long ago as the 16th century the word ‘Devil’ was, in fact, ‘Devilkin’ and having ‘the devilkin to pay’ meant a passage straight to Hell for one’s misdemeanour. Devilkin was usually pronounced ‘Dickens’, or at least it was in 1601 when William Shakespeare included the line ‘I cannot tell what the Dickens his name was’ in his play The Merry Wives Of Windsor – more than 200 years before Charles Dickens was born.
To describe somebody as a Good or Bad Egg would suggest they were either decent, dependable and reliable or not. The expression ‘bad egg’ was first used in 1855 in Samuel A Hammett’s novel Captain Priest which included the phrase, ‘In the language of his class the Perfect Bird generally turns out to be a bad egg.’ The analogy he draws is with an egg that on the outside may appear fresh, but when the shell is broken it may be rotten inside. At the beginning of the 20th century students began reversing the phrase and describing decent people as a ‘good egg’.
The phrase As Sure As Eggs Is Eggs is used to describe absolute certainty about something. In fact, it is a simple misquote which has passed into common usage. In formal logic and mathematics the formula ‘x is x’ is used to describe complete certainty. It is unclear how or when ‘x is x’ became ‘eggs is eggs’ but it is known Charles Dickens used the phrase ‘eggs is eggs’ in The Pickwick Papers, published in 1837. Maybe Dickens was joking, or playing on words, or