Prick up Your Ears! It's More Cliches! Quiz

Answer: pay through the nose

"Pay through the nose", meaning to pay an unreasonably high price for something, is quite an old expression. Andrew Marvell, a seventeenth-century English poet, wrote the following in 1672 in "The Rehearsal Transpos'd": "Made them pay if most unconscionably and through the Nose".

The origin of this expression is lost, but many argue that having something removed from oneself through the nose would of course be quite painful, as would paying much more money than was truly fair--though the two sources of pain are obviously quite different.

Some have argued that the analogy is perhaps related to a nosebleed, a rather unpleasant if not irksome experience. Finally, others argue that the expression may have come from the manner in which the Danes punished the Irish when they failed to pay their taxes.

The Danes, who had invaded the Irish during the ninth century, levied a tax on those they had conquered, and anyone who failed to pay it was punished by having his nose slit. Ouch!

Answer: He had grown tired.

"To peter out" means "gradually, to give out, grow exhausted, fade away, or fail". The use of the word "peter" as a verb and the use of this expression "peter out" seem to have begun in the early to middle nineteenth century in the United States, and most believe that its origin lies in the mining occupation.

In an 1845 Wisconsin newspaper, the "Milwaukee Daily Gazette", someone wrote: "When my mineral petered why they all Petered me. Now it is dig, dig, dig, drill, drill for nothing. My luck is clean gone - tapered down to nothing".

Then in 1854, H. H. Riley wrote in "Puddleford and Its People": He hoped this 'spectacle meeting warn't going to Peter-out'". The origin is not really known, but many speculate that, as the word "Peter" was typically capitalized early on, the origin most likely has something to do with an individual named Peter.

Some argue that the Peter being referenced is the disciple Peter from the New Testament of the Bible. Charles E. Funk holds with this theory and explains that during the scene at the Garden of Gethsemane when Jesus is arrested after Judas's betrayal, Peter at first is determined to defend Jesus at any cost as he grabs a sword and attacks a soldier.

However, within a few hours all of his fervor and determination had dwindled to the extent that he denies even knowing Jesus on three different occasions. Finally, some argue that the origin of "peter out" has to do with the use of saltpetre as gun powder, which miners used as an explosive in their work. The argument is that fuses would sometimes fail because of diminishing saltpetre or some other fault with the substance. People capitalized "peter" in the expression "Petered out" because they erroneously assumed the word was referring to someone's name.

Answer: Mao Zedong (Tse-Tung)

In "Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong", or "The Little Red Book" as it is popularly called, Mao says, "Imperialism and all reactionaries are paper tigers". However, long before Mao popularized the expression, it was being used by the Chinese in general.

In Sir John F. Davis's book "The Chinese", which was published in 1836, he explains, "A blustering, harmless fellow they [the Chinese] call 'a paper tiger'". Since Mao's use of the expression, Western culture has extensively borrowed it for a number of purposes, including the application of it to sports teams or individual athletes.

Answer: Put on the dog

"Put on the dog" or "put on dog" means to put on airs or to dress or behave in an elegant, extravagant manner. Some have erroneously argued that the expression stems from the medieval practice of wearing clothing made of dog leather. However, the expression appears to have entered the English language during the 1860s as part of college slang.

In 1871's "Four Years at Yale", Lyman H. Bagg writes, "To put on dog is to make a flashy display, to cut a swell". The origin is unclear, but many speculate that the phrase arose from the sight of fashionable people walking a popular breed of dog or riding with a popular breed of dog in their laps.

Answer: I had unwisely bought something without first seeing if it really did all the manufacturer claimed.

To "buy a pig in a poke" is to buy something (or to accept an idea) without having seen it or without being certain that it truly will work. During the thirteen hundreds, a "poke" (a word derived from the same root of words like "pouch" or "pocket") was a bag, and a pig was, of course, just that--a pig. In the past, a popular con was to try to get someone to buy a bag without being certain of what was inside of it. An individual would seal a cat in the poke and tell a foolish buyer that he or she was purchasing a pig, a much more valuable commodity. If the buyer wanted to see inside the poke, he or she would be told that opening the poke was unwise as the pig was severely frightened and would escape and run away. Once at home, the buyer would discover he or she had been sorely deceived.

Interestingly, this infamous swindle gave rise to another expression. Those buyers who managed somehow to open the bag first before buying "a pig in a poke" or those swindlers who accidentally let the bagged animal escape led to the creation of another cliched expression--"let the cat out of the bag"--which, of course, means to reveal something that was supposed to have been kept a secret.

Answer: a famous puppet show

The Punch and Judy show, a popular puppet show dating as far back as England's Restoration (the middle to late seventeenth century), is responsible for the birth of this expression, and perhaps the pleasing alliterative quality of the words is what has contributed to its continued existence as interest in the puppet show waned over the course of the twentieth century. The traditional Punch character was supposed to be portrayed as an individual given to strong emotions so that he would be completely possessed by whatever he was feeling and the audience would have little trouble understanding what he was feeling. Punch was quite smitten with himself and was overwhelmed with delight when his plans, which were usually evil or cruel, were brought to fruition. When he would kill another character, he would often exclaim in ecstasy: "That's the way to do it!"

The Punch and Judy show is recorded by Samuel Pepys in his famous diary; however, there one will see it referred to as "Polichinello", as the puppet show is a variation of one that began in Italy. Sometimes, "Polichinello" was referred to as "Punchinello", and eventually the main character's name was shortened to "Punch".

Answer: a pitched battle

At one time, the term "pitch" was used to refer to the act of setting things up in an orderly fashion, such as the posts of a fence. A pitched battle, militarily speaking, is a battle in which both sides' officers plan the set up for the engagement of the two sides' armies. The time and place were agreed upon by the two sides, and both sides were allowed to plan exactly how many soldiers and what kinds of weapons and equipment would be present. Such a battle is, quite obviously, the opposite of a skirmish, an unexpected battle, or a siege. Eventually, people outside of the military began to use the phrase for other sorts of battles experienced in life.

One may see in older texts from a few centuries in the past such an expression as a "pight battle"; the word "pight" used to be used as the past participle of "pitch".

Answer: possum

When a person feigns ignorance or innocence or pretends to be weaker or less capable than he or she truly is, then that person is "playing possum". The expression comes from the strange yet interesting behavior of the American marsupial, the opposum, which is commonly referred to by Americans as a "possum".

When threatened, an opposum will lie still for a great length of time so that the creature or person threatening it will think that the opposum is dead or asleep. In 1822, W. H. Simmons explained this tendency of opposums in his book "Notices of East Florida" and furthermore explained how this creature's behavior led to the expression "playing possum".

Not only is the expression used to describe the actions of those who are cunning and duplicitous but also those who, like the "possum", are pretending to be asleep or dead.

Answer: pudding

The meaning behind the expression "the proof is in the pudding" is better understood when one considers that the original expression was "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" and that a rarely referred to meaning of "proof" is "test". Then, one can see that what a person speaking the expression means: the way to test whether something came out as it was intended is to try it. An English pudding may look and smell delicious when it is placed onto a table, or perhaps someone else says that it truly is delicious, but the only way to know for certain is to taste it. Thus, the meaning behind the expression is quite similar to that behind "you can't judge a book by its cover".

The pudding expression is a very old proverb, as a version of it exists from as far back as the 1300s, the Middle Ages.

Answer: The knobs on an organ that open and close particular pipes

Organ stops are indeed the source of the figurative language used in the expression "pull out all the stops". Organ stops, as explained earlier, are knobs on pipe organs that organists push and pull to open and close individual pipes or particular sets of pipes.

In 1865, the British poet and critic Matthew Arnold wrote the following in "Essays on Criticism": "[H]ow unpopular a task one is undertaking when one tries to pull out a few more stops in that . . . somewhat narrow-toned organ, the modern Englishman".