Dutch’s English Language Oddity Clearing House

Meaning

A response to a sudden unexplained shudder or shivering.

Origin

‘Someone is walking over my grave’ seems a rather odd thing for a living person to say when experiencing a sudden shudder, so why is it said?

The 18th saying derives from an earlier folk legend that a sudden cold sensation was caused by someone walking over the place that one’s grave was eventually going to be. This belief is in line with the workings of people’s minds in England in the Middle Ages, in which the distinction between life and death was much less clear than we see it now. There was then an unambiguous belief in the everyday communication between the afterlife in heaven or hell and the physical world of the living. When someone dies in our day and age we a likely to hold a commemorative gathering where we talk about the deceased person. Mediaeval mourners would hold wakes, in which they spoke to the deceased, in the belief that their words were being heard and understood. A person’s final resting place would also have been understood to be predetermined and ’someone has walked over my grave’ would have been said in the belief that a real person had actually walked over the ground where the speaker would be interred.

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Meaning

A general term of disapproval, of something that is troublesome or a nuisance.

Origin

It can come as as little surprise that the term ‘cotton-picking’ originated in the southern states of the USA, where it is usually pronounced cotton-pickin’. It began life in the late 1700s and differs from the 19th century Dixie term, ‘cottonpicker’, in that the latter was derogatory and racist, whereas ‘cotton-picking’ referred directly to the difficulty and harshness of gathering the crop. Of course, ‘cotton-picking’ must have been in use as an English adjectival phrase for as long as English-speaking people have picked cotton. There are numerous citations of ‘cotton-picking’ seasons/jobs/machines etc. since the late 1700s. J & E Pettigrew’s Letters has an early example, from 1795:

‘One of the students was banished… for going to a cotton picking after eight at Knight.’

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Meaning

An indication that a piece of information was obtained via an informal contact.

Origin

The first practical public demonstration of the telegraph was given in 1844, when Samuel Morse sent a message from Washington to Baltimore. The invention was widely welcomed as a means of rapidly communicating news. It soon became clear though that close communities already had effective word-of-mouth communications. Soon after the telegraph was invented the term ‘grapevine telegraph’ was coined – first recorded in a US dictionary in 1852. This distinguished the new direct ‘down-the-wire’ telegraph from the earlier method, which was likened to the coiling tendrils of a vine. It’s clear that the allusion was to interactions amongst people who could be expected to be found amongst grapevines, i.e. the rural poor.

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Meaning

A timely effort will prevent more work later.

Origin

This is nothing to do with rips in the fabric of the space-time continuum, as some have ingeniously suggested. The question usually asked is “saves nine what”? The stitch in time is simply the sewing up of a small hole in a piece of material and so saving the need for more stitching at a later date, when the hole has become larger, Clearly, the first users of this expression were referring to saving nine stitches.

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