Although the idiom has been explained a million times, I don’t think there are many infographics on this so here is one that I have just prepared. ‘Idiom’ – a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words (e.g. over the moon, see the light ). There …
In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland readers encounter a large, grinning cat lying on the hearth. Alice is told that the cat is grinning from ear to ear because they are from Cheshire but there’s no explanation as to why cats from that county in England (see map below) should be predisposed to smiling …
In the news at the moment there is a plethora of cat analogies to describe the trials and tribulations of Boris Johnson, the UK’s former prime minister who recently resigned due to a cascade of criticism over his inability to stick to the rules. In the Sunday Times today there is a big article …
What the hell does a “dead cat strategy” mean? I don’t like the phrase already even though immediately before writing this I had no idea what it meant. I think it is disrespectful and I think it is incorrect to create an image of a dead cat in order to get a message across. …
This post is all about the origin of the old and rarely used saying, “raining cats and dogs” plus its meaning. So, for people whose first language is not English, this phrase means “it is raining hard” or ” it is raining very heavily”. The literary extracts referred to below describe a situation when, …
Here are 4 facts about calling female cats ‘queens’. I think that there is a misconception by quite a large number of people about how this description came about and is used. Why is a female cat called a queen? The answer is because “when she is on heat, she lords it over the …
This is a page on the origin and history of the saying “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”. I am very thankful to a French citizen, who speaks and writes English better than many Brits, Pascal Tréguer, who completed a thorough breakdown of the saying, which makes it much easy for me to write …
The origins of are quite difficult to trace actually and I am not sure I have the answer but here goes. I have included the answers of other people as well for comparison. It is not unusual for the origin of words to be clouded in the mists of time and sometimes it can …
