Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: More Phrase Origins

Episode Date: September 2, 2020

We're back with another handful of phrase origins. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, Jerry's out there fiddling around somewhere in the ethernet

of the internet and the whatever. And this is short stuff. Let me just stop talking, let's go. Yeah, this is something we've done before and we will do again because as everyone knows, we like phrase origins. I especially love phrase origins. And I think we're doing three today.

The second one, which can be summed up in like a single sentence probably. But we're gonna start with a grain of salt. Take it with a grain of salt, buddy. I will take it with the grain of salt because I've just ingested some poison. Oh no, salt won't help that. Oh, well, according to Pliny the Elder, it wouldn't.

They think that that's where the phrase take this with a grain of salt really finds its origin. And by the way, take something with a grain of salt means that you should be skeptical of what you're about to hear or see or whatever. That there's this information that you're about to receive is of dubious origin, right? That's the current understanding of take it

with a grain of salt or a pinch of salt or a dose of salt. However you put it, that's the current meaning of it. But they think as far back as Pliny the Elder's naturalist, Historia, that that's where it finds its origin. It's actually kind of a referential thing to that, to a recipe he gave under the walnut section. Yeah, take two dried walnuts, two figs, and 20 leaves of roux, pound them all together

with the addition of a grain of salt. If a person takes this mixture fasting, he will be proof against all poisons for that day. So if you thought you were gonna be poisoned that day, before you eat breakfast, eat this concoction that includes a grain of salt and no poison will befall you. Yeah, but here's the deal.

That explains nothing about this phrase other than he said the words grain of salt in his language, which was, come grano salis. Okay. Cause it's not metaphorical, it's literal. If you wanna talk about metaphor, you need to flash forward quite a bit till 1647. Yeah.

John Trapp used it in a book called The Commentary on Old and New Testaments, colon boring, no wait, I just made that part up. And he said, this is to be taken with a grain of salt, but we still aren't sure what he meant by that. I want to hazard a guess here. I think with John Trapp, who has a great name by the way, what he was saying is that this,

the following is very difficult to hear or it's hard information to swallow, AKA poisonous. Oh, okay. So you would have to take this with a grain of salt. That's my guess. Now I'm putting this out there everybody because this is a short stuff.

I did not go to the trouble of reading John Trapp's commentary on the Old and New Testaments. I don't know. So it's a guess, but man, oh man, it is a good guess. Yeah, that makes sense. And it did pop up since then, but usually again, referring to actual grains of salt. Then in 1908, in the Athenaeum, it's a literary journal,

had this line, our reasons for not accepting the author's pictures of early Ireland without many grains of salt, which I can even make heads or tails of that sentence, period. No, but I think they were wailing on the photographer, which it's like, just don't accept the pictures. Don't make fun of them in the magazine.

That's like us criticizing House of Works articles that we based episodes on. We'd never do that. No, it'd just be mean. But this doesn't, and I think this one frustrated me because even that, it still doesn't say where it came from or why they started saying grain of salt to mean what they meant metaphorically.

Yes, because it was terribly written in this House of Works article. Well, did you find a real reason? Because I couldn't. I didn't. It just kind of suddenly is like, it just appeared. And I get the impression that the grain of salt just kind of appeared out of nowhere,

that it was not appeared out of nowhere, that they have kind of traced it back, but there's not any real clarification. I'll tell you what has a clarification check, a clear lineage. And that is the phrase close, but no cigar. Yeah, this one's easy, and we can definitely get this in in the next minute and 20 seconds before our break,

because it's super easy. In the early 20th century, when you went to these traveling carnivals, and they had these rip-off games where you would throw a ring on a Coke bottle or shoot a basketball into a hoop that's barely the size of a basketball, which I didn't figure out until I was way too old.

Right. That that was not a standard hoop. You had gray hair by then? I did. You're meant to not win those games, generally, or to come close and want to spend more money. And that's the whole idea. But back then, what was the prize,

or one of the prizes, that you would get? A cigar. That's right. So if you were sitting there doing a ring toss around some glass bottles, and you missed, and you missed, and you missed, you ran out of rings, the carnival barker would say, close, but no cigar. No cigar.

So that's where that origin comes from, where that phrase comes from, which is great, because it's a nice, tidy package. There's no controversy, no disputing it, and it's just done. It's not like that ugly, horrible grain of salt origin. Yeah, and kids, six-year-olds everywhere would go, well, I never get the cigar,

and their dad would say, here you go, son, have mine. That was great. Should we take a break? Yeah, I thought that was implied by the pregnant pause. All right, we'll talk about South Paws right after this. That's why sk. You should know. Ya have it.

No, but what? Also on Pizza Thomet you shouldn't know. Anyway, look at Brandon Brown, on Josh Clark. On the podcast, Hey Dude the Nineties called, David Washer and Chrystine Taylor, stars of The Colt Classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

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And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. S-Y-Y-Y-Y-S-K-S-K, K-K-K-K, M-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N- N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N

All right, Chuck. We're talking South Paws, and this one's like a neat combination between horrible, ugly grain of salt and beautiful, perfect, close but no cigar, because there's a lot of different ideas that, that, um, are competing for the origin. That aren't necessarily right, but aren't necessarily wrong either. So, there's a lot of great info involved. That's right.

And it kind of comes down to a couple of sports. Southpaw has long been linked to boxing and baseball. Rocky Balboa was a Southpaw. No, was he? Yeah, I think so, right? I don't know. I don't pay that close of attention. I'm just enthralled by the action.

You were just all about those muscles. Yeah. Yeah, I think it was kind of a deal that he was a Southpaw. Okay. So you've long heard it to be about boxers in baseball, but generally even more specifically, it's been associated with pitchers.

A left-handed pitcher is known as a Southpaw. Okay, yes. Now that's the one I've always heard it from. I've never, or no, I'm sorry. I was about to say the reverse of the truth. I've always heard it from boxing. That's called a lie. Right, yeah.

I've always heard of it being associated with boxing. I've never heard it associated with baseball. Okay, yeah. Baseball pitchers generally, it's an old school term, but I've definitely heard it before. So even before necessarily it was involved in boxing, or it was involved with boxing in this,

there was a political cartoon that was referencing boxing, and we just didn't realize it. The earliest, one of the earliest mentions of the left hand, especially involved in delivering a punch being called the Southpaw, comes from an 1848 editorial cartoon that showed a candidate named Louis Cass, who was running for the Democrats.

He had just laid out Zachary Taylor, and Taylor's running mate, Millard Fillmore, and Millard Fillmore has a black eye, and there's a quote coming from him, which Chuck, I think that you would be really good to read this quote. Curse the old horse, what a Southpaw he has given me. That was one of the best Millard Fillmore impressions

I've ever heard in my life. WOT, I'm gonna bring that one back. Yep, so Millard Fillmore is calling at the very least the punch that Louis Cass landed on him, a Southpaw. If not, Louis Cass, a Southpaw, for using his left hand, who knows? But the idea is Southpaw, in knocking a person to the ground with your fists,

was associated at least as early as 1848, at least as politics is concerned. Yeah, there were more specific boxing references. There was one in 1860 in a bare knuckle fight, I guess, or boxing match, pugilists squaring off against one another in the New York Herald. The reporter, David Woods reported in the ninth round, oh, I'm sorry, David Woods was the boxer.

David Woods planted his Southpaw under the chin, under his opponent's chin, laying him flat as a pancake. And that wasn't calling him a Southpaw, but called his fist his Southpaw, two words. Right, okay, so that's good enough for me, I say boxing, but unfortunately, there's some contemporaneous use of Southpaw as far as pitching goes.

As far back as 1858 in the New York Atlas, there's mention of a left-handed first baseman who's called the Southpaw, that predates that boxing reference, although it comes after the Millard Fillmore quote. There's some others, like an 1875 edition of St. Louis newspaper. So it seems to have been associated not just with pitchers,

but the pitchers are the ones who have the great origin story of associating left-handedness with being a Southpaw. Yeah, and there was, some people said that ballparks were oriented in the 1800s with home plate facing west, which meant that a lefty player facing west would be pitching with his Southpaw, but not all baseball stadiums were oriented that way, so that seems a little flimsy to me.

I was thinking of the boxing thing, if you were a boxer, you've got your right hand sort of up as your lead hand, and your left hand would be south, so that might be your Southpaw, but if you are a Southpaw, then your left hand is up, so that doesn't really make sense. That's right, that's right, it's not sensible at all,

which means it's not solved. We have no idea what the true origin of Southpaw is, but at least there's a lot more information about it that we can choose from and make our own decision. So are we one for three on this one? No, we're two for three. I'm including Southpaw because it's so great. Close but no cigar is literally perfect,

and then I don't even wanna bring up the other one again. Yeah, I'm gonna go on a salt-free diet for the next week because of this episode. Yeah, that'll show salt. Well, if you wanna show salt, well, you do that same thing yourself, and because we have run out of things to say everybody, short stuff is out.

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