The Black Sheep of Cliches Trivia Quiz

Answer: an old method of dividing land among the heirs of an estate

According to "Coke in Littleton", a 1620 text on English law, land was divided among the heirs of an estate from a procedure that involved balls of wax. The executor of a will would write out descriptions of parcels of land on pieces of paper, roll the pieces of paper into balls, cover the balls of paper with wax so that no one could tamper with them, and then put these balls into a hat.

The eldest heir would then draw a ball from the hat and receive the parcel of land described on his or her piece of paper.

The next eldest would then draw and so on down the line of inheritors. Most believe this practice to be the source of the expression "a whole new ball of wax".

Answer: baptism of fire

"Baptism of fire" or sometimes "baptism by fire" is an expression mostly used to refer to a soldier's introduction to battle and is a translation of the French phrase "bapteme du feu". The "fire" may refer to the discharging of missile weapons or it may be the metaphorical reference to a literal burning fire or conflagration.

However, the phrase has been used to mean any severe or traumatic experience that would alter one's perspective and test one's endurance or loyalty. The "baptism by fire" expression is more often used to refer to the Christian understanding of spiritual sanctification that may occur due to facing a severe or testing ordeal.

Answer: a babe in the woods

"Babe in the woods" refers to "an innocent person who finds him or herself in a situation he or she is too inexperienced to handle or understand". The origin of this expression appears to come from a sixteenth-century English tale. According to the story, a wealthy man dies and leaves his fortune to his children, a son and a daughter.

They are to be taken care of by an uncle until they are old enough to handle their inheritance maturely; however, if they died prior to reaching adulthood, the uncle would then inherit his brother's wealth.

The uncle is unable to control his greed, and he hires two men to take the two children into the woods and kill them. One of the hired murderers cannot bring himself to kill the children, so he kills the other would-be murderer instead and then abandons the children.

As they are but babes in the woods, they soon die. As karma would have it, the uncle begins suffering one calamity after another, and the hired murderer who abandoned the children is caught after a robbery and confesses all--including the uncle's plot to hire him to kill the children.

Answer: beard the lion in his den

While the expression does not literally occur word-for-word in First Samuel 17, the inspiration for the expression does. Saul says to David, "You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him; for you are but a youth, and he has been a man of war from his youth". Referring to himself, David replies, "Your servant used to keep sheep for his father; and when there came a lion, or a bear, and took a lamb from the flock, I went after him and smote him and delivered it out of his mouth; and if he arose against me, I caught him by his beard, and smote him and killed him" (First Samuel 17:34-35, English Standard Version, 2001).

Much later in Sir Walter Scott's epic poem "Marmion", published in 1808, one can find these lines: "And dar'st thou then / To beard the lion in his den . . . ".

Answer: "To a Mouse" by Robert Burns

Robert Burns, perhaps the most recognized Scottish poet, published "To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough" in 1785. One stanza near the end of the poem is as follows: "But Mousie, thou art no thy lane, / In proving foresight may be vain: / The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley, / An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, / For promis'd joy!" The speaker of the poem, after destroying a mouse's nest while plowing his field, considers how the mouse planned for quite some time to take necessary precautions for the winter but could not foresee that all its plans would be for nothing.

Then he compares himself and all people to the mouse; all creatures are the same in that we all try to survive by making plans for the future, yet so often, because we cannot see the future, those plans fail.

In the end, the speaker remarks that the mouse is luckier than the man because the mouse does not have to live with worry and regret; the mouse lives only in the present while the man must live in the present as well as the past and the future simultaneously.

Answer: The Hawk and the Nightingale

In Aesop's "The Hawk and the Nightingale", the hawk has managed to catch the nightingale. The nightingale begs the hawk to release him by claiming that he is too small to make a decent meal for the hawk and that he has a beautiful song he will sing for the hawk, if set free.

The hawk replies first in reference to the free song and then to the bird's size: "Much good it will do to an empty belly . . . and besides, a little bird that I have is more to me than a great one that has yet to be caught".

Some older versions of the expression refer to "two in the woods" instead of "two in the bush". Some individuals have argued that the origin of this expression is connected to the practice of falconry or hunting with a falcon; the idea supposedly is that people considered their falcons, perched on their hands or arms, to be of far greater value than the birds flitting freely about the woods.

Answer: blue blood

During the centuries when the dark-skinned Moors ruled Spain, many of the old Castilian families took pride in being able to claim that they and their children were purely Castilian and that their blood had not been "corrupted" or "mixed" with the blood of Moorish or other foreign people.

They used the phrase "sangre azul", an expression that arose most likely from the fact that the blue veins of the fair skinned were easily visible, unlike the veins of those with darker skin.

Answer: beyond the pale

"Beyond the pale" means to "go outside the boundary of something, often such as decency or social recognition, usually as a result of one's own choices or actions". The word "pale" in this expression comes from the Latin "palus", meaning "stake" or a long wooden piece planted into the ground to make a fence. Thus, one can easily understand how the literal understanding of a fence or boundary came to have a figurative meaning as well. Most scholars agree that the expression began in the Middle Ages when England occupied part of Ireland that became directly controlled by the English government.

The occupied area consisted of a small piece of eastern Ireland, and anyone who crossed the boundary, which was basically a fortified ditch, from the occupied English territory into Ireland was said to be "beyond the pale".

Not only was this individual no longer guaranteed safety but he or she would also, from the English perspective, be exposing him or herself to an inferior culture.

Answer: The Bible

One of the punishments God administers to Adam for eating the Forbidden Fruit in the Garden of Eden is that henceforward he will have to work to live. In Genesis 3:19 God says to Adam: "You will eat food by the sweat of your brow until you're buried in the ground ... " (International Standard Version, 2012).

Answer: bone of contention

Obviously, since the time humans have domesticated dogs, they have had to contend also with dog fights. Commonly, dogs will fight over food, or in the case of this expression, a bone. The expression has been around since at least the sixteenth century, for in 1576, William Lambarde wrote in "A Perambulation of Kent" the following: "This was such a bone of dissention between these deere friends".

A closely related expression is "to cast a bone between", meaning "to initiate an argument or create dissension".