Heavens to Betsy! More Cliches! Quiz

Answer: He or she has been given a forewarning of something unfortunate soon to occur.

To see the "hand writing on the wall" is to receive a portent or forewarning, usually of something ominous. The source of this expression is the Old Testament book of Daniel. Belshazzar decides to hold a feast when he becomes king of Babylon. "In the same hour [of the feast] came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king's palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote" (Daniel 5:5 KJV). The prophet Daniel is called in to interpret the message, and tells Belshazzar that it means God has numbered the days of his kingdom and it will be divided between the Medes and the Persians.

By the way, this expression has sometimes been corrupted to "the handwriting on the wall", but one can easily see from the original story in Daniel that a literal hand is seen.

Answer: some more of the alcohol I had been drinking

"The hair of the dog that bit you" is a deliberate choice to experience for a second time something that was a bad experience the first time to cure the negative effects of the first experience. Ancient folk wisdom often advocated that like cures like or that the same thing that hurt you is what will cure you.

The humor of the song "Coconut" revolves around this belief; a guy gets sick from drinking a mixture of lime and coconut and then calls up his doctor, only to hear the doctor tell him that he needs to drink lime and coconut for the cure. Anyway, the expression itself comes from the ancient practice of burning the hair of the dog that bit someone and applying the remains to that someone's wound to heal it.

This was done particularly for bites received from rabid dogs. Over time, the expression has grown to refer most often to a treatment for hangovers.

There may actually be some legitimacy to drinking alcohol to relieve a hangover. Apparently, hangovers are caused primarily from the body's attempts to metabolize methanol, which is usually a byproduct of alcoholic beverages. Of course, alcoholic beverages also contain ethanol.

The body relies on the same enzyme to metabolize both of these chemicals, but the enzyme prefers ethanol. Thus, if one drinks a little more alcohol, the body will postpone its attempts to metabolize methanol while it metabolizes ethanol. This is, of course, only a temporary fix to the eventual hangover one is going to experience.

Answer: to disregard every caution and move as fast as you can

The expression "hell-for-leather" means to travel at top speed, usually recklessly. The "leather" refers to the saddle on a horse, and to ride a horse at a frantic speed would be to put the saddle (as well as the horse) through hell or through a tremendously rough and exhausting experience. Of course, the rider him or herself may feel as if he or she is riding on something from hell as well, particularly by the end of such an arduous journey.

The Nobel-winning British author Rudyard Kipling is believed to have coined the expression, or at least to have been the first to publish it.

In his 1899 "Story of Gadsbys", he writes, "Here, Gaddy, take the note to Bingle and ride hell-for-leather".

Answer: happy as a clam

While a clam may look as if it is smiling when its shells are open, truly one cannot know the emotional state of a clam, pariticularly since it is not developed enough to experience feelings. So, why "happy as a clam"? The rationale becomes clearer when one considers the original and more complete form of this saying, which is "happy as a clam at high tide". High tide is the time when clams are least likely to be found by predators, including clam-digging human beings. Thus, if a clam could possibly ever feel happiness, it would supposedly be during high tide when it was most likely to be safe and secure.

The expression is at least as old as 1848, the publication date of Bartlett's "Dictionary of Americanisms". There one finds these words: "'Happy as a clam at high tide' is a very common expression in those parts of the coast of New England where clams are found".

Answer: a Scottish drinking game

From the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, a drinking game called "high jinks" was popular in Scotland. Usually a roll of dice determined who would have to perform a particularly ridiculous stunt. If this person refused the stunt or failed it, he or she would then have to drink a significant amount of alcohol, which put the drinker increasingly in a frame of mind to have no hesitation about performing later challenges and increasingly less likely to be able to perform them. Good times and uproarious laughter followed.

The word "jinks" in the expression comes from a Scottish term for "game" or "prank". However, before this usage, the term "jink" was a verb meaning "to move quickly and nimbly, particularly during some evasive maneuver".

Answer: Hobson's choice

While some may have assumed the answer was "horns of a dilemma", this would not truly be accurate. A dilemma is a choice between two options, and usually both options are unpleasant. In the above situation, George has only one option, and that option is not necessarily a bad one; it's just not the one George wanted. "Hobson's choice" refers to a situation in which someone has no two options from which to choose; he or she must either take the next item that is available or take nothing at all.

The expression refers to the owner and manager of a famous livery stable in 17th-century Cambridge, England, by the name of Thomas or Tobias Hobson. Mr. Hobson owned a large number of horses, which he leased to others to ride. He believed in allowing each horse to rest a long time before being ridden again, and he would stack them in his stable so that the freshest horse was always up front at the gate, and was the only horse available for leasing.

Therefore, if a customer preferred another horse for whatever reason, that customer was told he or she could lease the horse at the gate or lease no horse at all.

This practice of taking what is offered or taking nothing at all came to be called Hobson's choice. By the way, Hobson also apparently had the reputation of a miser. Thus, sometimes people use the expression to imply that the one choice being offered is less than what truly could be offered, if the one doing the offering were a more generous sort of person.

Answer: classical Greek mythology

The expression is derived from the story of Damocles in classical mythology, and sometimes people will even refer to "Damocles' sword". Damocles was a privileged courtier in the reign of Dionysius I of Syracuse in the fifth century B.C., and he was a sycophant whose flattery of Dionysius had begun to irritate the ruler. Dionysius decided to teach Damocles a lesson by showing him that power and happiness are precarious, so he prepared a grand banquet in honor of Damocles. Damocles presumably enjoyed the gala until he happened to look up; over his head, and aimed at it, was an unsheathed sword suspended by a single hair. By 1545, the expression had become a part of English culture as is made apparent by these words found in the text "Precepts of Cato": "There are that fayneth it [life] to hange by an heere or a twynned threde".

Answer: Hold a candle to him

If someone can't "hold a candle to him", that means that that someone can't compare to the other or is inferior to the other. In the days before street lighting, young men would be hired as linkboys ("link" meaning "torch") to carry a torch or a candle before individuals who were wealthy or important enough to employ someone to provide light for their paths as they walked through town.

In other words, a boy would be hired to "hold a candle to him [the employer]". However, the occupation obviously required little skill, so if someone had such little ability or intelligence as not to be able to carry a candle to light someone's way, then that individual was truly inferior in various respects. That individual could not even "hold a candle to him".

In 1725, John Byrom published his "Epigram on the Feuds between Handel and Bononcini", with this verse: "Some say, that Seignior Bononcini / Compar'd to Handel's a mere Ninny; / Others aver, to him, that Handel / Is scarcely fit to hold a candle".

Answer: hewers of wood and drawers of water

The expression comes practically word-for-word from the Bible. In the Old Testament book of Joshua, chapter 9, verse 11, one finds the following words: "And the princes said, Let them live; but let them be hewers of wood and drawers of water unto all the congregation" (King James Version).

Answer: hunky dory

No one knows for certain the origin of the phrase "hunky dory", but all are agreed that it means something is all right, safe, secure, and cozy. Some argue that the expression comes from a mispronunciation, perhaps an intentional one, of Huncho-dori, a steet in Yokohama, Japan, frequented by pleasure-seeking American sailors in the 1800s. Because of the pleasant connotations these sea-going men associated with the term "hunky dory", they began to apply the term as a description of any item or situation that was agreeable.

However, many other scholars disagree with this explanation of the phrase's origin. They argue that no such street ever existed and that the term "hunky" or "hunk" was already in use by Americans before the United States officially visited Japan. Apparently, "hunk" is derived from an old Dutch word "honk", which meant "goal" or "safe" or "home".

This term, they suggest, would have been introduced to America through the Dutch settlement of present-day New York. This argument is lent credence by the existence of the phrase "all hunk", which was defined in Bartlett's "Dictionary of Americanisms" published in 1860: "To be all hunk is to have reached the goal . . . to be all safe".

However, tying the word "hunky" to the Dutch "honk" offers no explanation of the word "dory".