Once in a Blue Moon . . . Idioms with Nature

Idioms truly enrich and enhance a language. This is my fourth idiom hub, and it focuses on nature. If you are a native speaker, you “get” the message, but imagine how difficult it must be for non-native speakers to understand this form of figurative language. Have you ever wondered about the origin of idioms? Listed below are some popular idioms including their meanings and origins. Have fun!

Once in a blue moon

• Meaning: Rare

• Origin: Actually when there are large dust particles in the air, diffract red light, making the moon appear bluish (as red light is diffracted)

• In 1528, the Bishop of Chichester, the Treatyse of the Buryall of the Masse, by William Barlow
• Yf they saye the mone is belewe,
  We must beleve that it is true.

Every cloud has a silver lining

• Meaning: Something positive will come from something negative

• Origin: In Comus: A Mask Presented at LudlowCastle, by John Milton in 1634

• I see ye visibly, and now believe
  That he, the Supreme Good, to whom all things ill
  Are but as slavish officers of vengeance,
  Would send a glistering guardian, if need were
  To keep my life and honour unassailed.
  Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud
  Turn forth her silver lining on the night?
  I did not err; there does a sable cloud
  Turn forth her silver lining on the night,
  And casts a gleam over this tufted grove.

The apple never falls far from the tree

• Meaning: Traits (often negative) are passed from parent to child
• In school, we say, the acorn doesn’t fall too far from the tree (maybe we are making a commentary that the child/parent in a nut - Hmmmmm)
• Origin: The notion is similar to the older Like father, like son, and seems to have appeared first in German. The American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson apparently was the first to use it in English when in an 1839 letter, he wrote that 'the apple never falls far from the stem.' But here Emerson used it in another sense, to describe that tug that often brings us back to our childhood home.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet

• Meaning: What is important is what something is, not what it is called.

• Origin: From Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, 1600:

• JULIET:
  'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
  Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
  What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
  Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
  Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
  What's in a name? that which we call a rose
  By any other name would smell as sweet;
  So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
  Retain that dear perfection which he owes
  Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
  And for that name which is no part of thee
  Take all myself.

Can't see the forest for the trees

• Meaning: Too close to the problem to see the solution
• Origin: In Conteynyng the Nomber in Effect of all the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue by John Heywood in 1546: Plentie is no deinte, ye see not your owne ease. I see, ye can not see the wood for trees.
• Later used in "Heavens to Betsy" by Charles Earle Funk (Harper & Row, New York, 1955): Too beset by petty things to appreciate the greatness or grandeur; too wrapped up in details to gain a view of the whole. In America we are likely to use the plural, 'woods,' or possibly to substitute 'forest,' but 'wood' is the old form and is preferable.

Feeling under the weather

• Meaning: Feeling ill or sickly; Originally it meant to feel seasick or affected by bad weather. The term is also known as 'under the weather bow' which is a gloomy prospect; the weather bow is the side upon which all the rotten weather is blowing.
• Origin: From a maritime source. In the old days, when a sailor was unwell, he was sent down below to help his recovery, under the deck and away from the weather. Ik Marvel, (J.K. Marvel) wrote in Reveries of a Bachelor about everything from ill and indisposed to financially embarrassed and drunk.

Indian Summer

• Meaning: Unseasonably warm, dry and calm weather, usually following a period of colder weather or frost in the late Autumn
• Origin: Used in Letters From an American Farmer in 1778
• Then a severe frost succeeds which prepares it to receive the voluminous coat of snow which is soon to follow; though it is often preceded by a short interval of smoke and mildness, called the Indian Summer.
• The incidence of Indian summers has increased significantly over the past decade or so as one symptom of the unstable weather caused by global warming.

Greased Lightning

• Meaning: Very quick
• Origin: Thomas Comber used it in the devotional text, A Companion to the Temple, (1676)
• "Now if the Attendants be bright as the Sun, quick as Lightning, and powerful as Thunder; what is He that is their Lord?"
• The first use of greased lightning is from the early 19th century. In The Boston, Lincoln, Louth & Spalding Herald (1833He spoke as quick as 'greased lightning.

Over the moon

• Meaning: Very happy
• Origin: From High Diddle Diddle, a Mother Goose melody (1760)
• High diddle diddle,
  The Cat and the Fiddle,
  The Cow jump'd over the Moon,
  The little dog laugh'd to see such Craft,
  And the Dish ran away with the Spoon.
• And more recently with football (soccer). Influenced the famous Monty Python 'Dead Parrot' sketch, which was broadcast in 1969 and could be quoted verbatim by many in the UK at the time and which remains one of the most popular sketches ever shown on British TV.

A bed of roses

• Meaning: A pleasant or easy
• Origin: From Christopher Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd To His Love. (1599)
• Come live with me and be my love,
  And we will all the pleasures prove
  That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
  Woods or steepy mountain yields
• And we will sit upon the rocks,
  Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,
  By shallow rivers to whose falls
  Melodious birds sing madrigals.
• And I will make thee beds of roses
  And a thousand fragrant posies,
  A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
  Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;
• A gown made of the finest wool
  Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
  Fair lined slippers for the cold,
  With buckles of the purest gold;
• A belt of straw and ivy buds,
  With coral clasps and amber studs:
  And if these pleasures may thee move,
  Come live with me and be my love.
• The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing
  For thy delight each May morning:
  If these delights thy mind may move,
  Then live with me and be my love.

The darkest hour is just before the dawn

• Meaning: There is hope even in the worst times
• Origin: Used to mean the lowest ebb from the late 1700s
• Thomas Fuller’s A Pisgah-Sight Of Palestine And The Confines Thereof, 1650, contains this view:
• It is always darkest just before the Day dawneth.
• The source of the proverb isn't known. It may be Fuller himself, or he may have been recording a piece of folk wisdom. In 1858, much later than Fuller of course, Samuel Lover attributed the notion to the Irish, in Songs and Ballads:
• There is a beautiful saying amongst the Irish peasantry to inspire hope under adverse circumstances:- "Remember," they say, "that the darkest hour of all. is the hour before day."

The ends of the earth

• Meaning: As far as possible
• Origin: The Bible, Zechariah 9:10 (King James Version):
• And I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off: and he shall speak peace unto the heathen: and his dominion shall be from sea even to sea, and from the river even to the ends of the earth.

Field day

• Meaning: Exciting day
• Origin: From the military in 1747, in Scheme Equip. Men of War
• "These periodical Intervals of eating and drinking ... are to the Citizens as it were Field Days, for improving their Valour."
• Field day was a commonly used term in the military throughout the rest of the 18th century. We spend less time in fields now than before and during the 20th century, so the term was further extended to include opportunity as well as enjoyment. For example, 'Clergyman found drunk in nightclub - the tabloids will have a field day with that'.

As good as gold

• Meaning: Well-behaved and disciplined
• Origin: Here good means genuine - not counterfeit. So, 'as good as gold' ought really to be 'as genuine as gold', but the more usual meaning of 'good' has taken precedence over the years and left us with the usual meaning of the phrase.

• As these similes go, it isn't especially old and is first recorded in Thomas Hood's Lost Heir, 1845.
  
  Hell or high water

• Meaning: Any difficulty or problem

• Origin: May be just an impressive-sounding alliterative phrase that refers to things that are obviously difficult to overcome. From the Little Rock Gazette'.
• "Since dat time de best ob my friends hab become enemies, an' strangers hab become friends. De debil had brook loose in many parts ob de country, an' keepin' up wid de ole sayin', we've had unrevised hell and high water - an'a mighty heap ob high-water I tell yer."

An ill wind

• Meaning: A negative effect
• Origin: First recorded in John Heywood's A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the Englishe tongue, 1546:
• "An yll wynde that blowth no man to good, men say."

Knock on wood

• Meaning: To continue good luck or to stave off bad luck. In the UK the phrase 'touch wood' is used - often jokingly by tapping one's head.
• Origin: The meaning may be associated that wood and trees have with good spirits in mythology, or with the Christian cross. It used to be considered good luck to tap trees to let the wood spirits within know you were there.
• The British version - touch wood, had an earlier Latin version used when touching wood - absit omen!, meaning 'far be that omen from us'. This dates from at least the early 17th century, when it is quoted by Heywood. It isn't clear when touch wood began to be used. It must have been well-known by 1849, when The Boy's Own Book published the rules of a children's game that derived from the phrase:
• "This game is sometimes called 'Touch-iron' or 'Touch-wood'; in these cases the players are safe only while they touch iron or wood, as may be previously agreed. They are liable to be touched only when running from one piece of wood or iron to another."

As pure as the driven snow

• Meaning: Very pure.
• Origin: Driven snow is snow that has blown into drifts and is clean. Shakespeare used snow as a symbol for purity and whiteness in several plays. The tradition of brides wearing white in many cultures stems from the association between the color and purity. This was referred to as early as the 1400s, as in John Lydgate's poetry for example, circa 1435:
• Alle cladde in white, in tokne off clennesse, Lyche pure virgynes.

Vanish into thin air

• Meaning: Disappear

• Origin: Shakespeare came close to this phrase in Othello, 1604:

• Clown:
  Then put up your pipes in your bag, for I'll away. Go; vanish into air; away!

• In The Tempest, 1610:

• Prospero:
  These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air

Your name is mud

• Meaning: Unpopular
• Origin: Mud is defined as mixing of water with soil, sand, dust, or earth. The word began to be used in a figurative sense as early as the 16th century to refer to things that were worthless or polluting. That usage was later extended to apply to people, as listed in the 1703 account of London's low life, Hell upon Earth:
• Mud, a Fool, or thick skull Fellow.
• Also used as something that is at one extreme end of the scale, like 'good' or 'stupid', mud features in many English phrases - 'dragged through the mud', 'mud in your eye', 'as clear as mud' etc.

Several other popular idioms can be found on the The Early Bird Catches the Worm (animal idioms), Life is a Bowl of Cherries (food idioms), and Grass is Greener idiom hub.

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