Stories behind the sayings
21 October 2026
Four Christmas Phrases Everyone Repeats Have A Documented Paper Trail
Shops start playing carols and stacking tins of biscuits weeks before December even arrives, which makes Christmas the longest-running seasonal hook of the year. The phrases that travel with it, from a bishop's 1534 letter to a 1977 political jibe, have a better paper trail than most people assume.
14 October 2026
Old Soldiers Never Die: The Song Behind The Saying
Remembrance Sunday brings out a handful of phrases we repeat without thinking about where they came from. Two are older than any war fought in living memory, and one has a history most people get wrong.
7 October 2026
Halloween's Ghosts And Devils Come From Real Belief, Its Witches Do Not
Halloween fills the streets with ghosts, devils and witches, and English has absorbed each of them into everyday phrases. Some of those phrases preserve genuine old beliefs about death and the supernatural; one of them is a much newer invention wearing an old costume.
30 September 2026
National Poetry Day Reveals How Poetic Craft Built Plain English
National Poetry Day puts verse in front of readers who rarely open a collection. Three phrases now used far from any poem, from rhyme nor reason to wax poetic, show how much of that craft has already slipped into ordinary speech.
23 September 2026
The Political Phrases That Say Nothing About Politics
Party conference season fills the air with slogans like 'politically correct' and 'open season'. None of these phrases started out meaning what conference-goers now use them to mean.
16 September 2026
Harvest Time Brings Out Three Old Farming Phrases
As the equinox brings harvest festivals and the season's brightest full moon, three phrases rooted in fields and grain still turn up in offices and arguments. Their origins are stranger, and older, than most people assume.
9 September 2026
The Phrases That Describe The Battle Of Britain Without Meaning To
On 15 September 1940, RAF pilots fought off the Luftwaffe's largest daylight raid over Kent and London. Three long-standing English phrases, none of them coined for the occasion, happen to describe exactly what took place that day.
2 September 2026
Back-To-School Sayings Are Older And Sharper Than They Sound
Every late August, Britain reaches for the same handful of sayings about school, teaching and stubborn learners. Their origins turn out to be older, sourer and stranger than the classroom clichés suggest.
26 August 2026
The Bank Holiday Moved Dates, But These Rest Phrases Never Changed Meaning
The August bank holiday shifted from the first Monday of the month to the last for most of the UK in the late 1960s. The phrases we use about rest and idleness have their own, stranger histories.
19 August 2026
The Ashes Urn Takes Its Name From A Funeral Service, Not A Cricket Pitch
Cricket's oldest rivalry has given English two phrases that behave very differently under scrutiny. One is a genuine pitch condition with a real Victorian source; the other borrows its name from a burial service, not the game itself.
12 August 2026
The Loud Word Behind Boomtown, Baby Boomers And The Final Frontier
Boomtown is trending again, and the word's history is a small lesson in how a sound became a synonym for sudden wealth. The same 'boom' turns up in baby boomers, in Star Trek's frontier, and in the old saying about muck and brass.
7 August 2026
The Silly Season Has Its Own Phrasebook Of Nonsense
Late summer is when British newspapers traditionally run thin on real news and thick on odd ones, a stretch known as the silly season. The phrases we reach for to describe that filler, and the stories it produces, have their own overlooked histories.
22 July 2026
We Are In The Dog Days. They Have Nothing To Do With Dogs
Late July is when Britain reaches for the phrase 'dog days'. The Romans who coined it were not thinking about exhausted labradors on hot pavements.