Pin Money

To have your ‘pin money’ means to have a bit of extra money…just in case. This expression dates to the 1500s in England. During the Tudor period, small brass and copper pins were essential for dressing. Without the modern safety-pin or an abundance of buttons and buttonholes, clothing was held together with simple, mass-produced pins. Your ‘pin money’ was the essential money that you needed at all times to buy dressing-pins for your clothing.

Uppercase and Lowercase

Capital letters and small letters in text are often called “uppercase” and “lowercase” letters. Why? Why are they up and why are they down? And what cases are there that we can see, anyway?

Uppercase and lowercase letters come from around the 18th century and it relates the occupation of professional printer.

Printing-presses were fairly common in the centuries after the 1500s, but printing was still a skilled art that required strict organisation of everything that the printer did, if a printed page was to turn out correctly. Printing with little metal blocks of movable type meant that there were literally hundreds of tiny little metal cubes and blocks all over the print-shop. To organise these blocks effectively, they were placed into wooden cases with little pidgeon-holes in them for each letter and punctuation-mark. These cases were stacked on top of each other for better organisation. Capital letters were placed in the upper case, where they would be out of the way of the more frequently-used smaller letters, which were placed in the second, lower case. The adoption of this system gradually led to the two terms “uppercase and lowercase”, referring to big and small letters.

The Wrong End of the Stick

To have the “wrong end of the stick” means to believe that you’re doing something correctly, only to find out later that you’re not doing it correctly at all. But why a stick? What does a stick have to do with anything? Why not a sword? Or a knife? Or a bow and arrow?

Again, this is a phrase that comes from the world of printing. The ‘stick’ in this case, refers to the composing stick or the compositor’s stick, which was a long, thin frame used by the printer when he was creating lines of text. Individual lines of text were composed in the composing stick before they were transferred, row by row, to the press-bed, until an entire page was completed, inked and made ready for printing.

To have the “wrong end of the stick” meant to have the stick by the…wrong end. This meant that when you transferred the letters from the stick to the press-bed, you rather spectacularly messed up the ordering of the letters, resulting in everything being printed out backwards! Thus, having the wrong end of the stick really is a big mistake!

Stool

A stool is a solid lump of faecal matter. Delightful. But why is it called a ‘stool’?

Like many things, this slang-term for faeces is shrouded in a big, stinking cloud of mystery. The word ‘stool’, meaning faeces, comes from the 1500s. Before the days of running water, one would use a piece of furniture called a ‘close stool’ to go to the toilet in. A close stool was basically a box with a padded lid with a hole in it. Inside the box, under the hole was a bucket. Over time, the evidence of the close stool’s use, which was collected in the bucket after each event, became known as…stools.

Bob’s Your Uncle

If someone says that “Bob’s your Uncle”, he means ‘there you are!’, ‘done!’, ‘You’re in the club! Huzzah!’. But who was Bob and what did it matter that he was your uncle? And what if your uncle was named Richard…what the hell did you do then?

But who is Uncle Bob, and what does he have to do with all this?

Uncle Bob was actually a real person. His name was Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil and he was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1895-1902. And it was his famous act of nepotism (nepotism is favouritism for family-members in matters of professionalism) regarding his nephew, Arthur Balfour in 1886, that gave rise to this popular phrase today. In 1886, Arthur’s Uncle Robert gave him the position of Secretary of Ireland. Many people think that the only reason Balfour got the job was because of his uncle’s favouritism and that he didn’t really deserve the post.

Yanking your Chain

If someone’s ‘yanking your chain’, it means they’re having a larf at your expense. Having a giggle. A bit of a practical joke. What is your chain and why are they yanking it?

The origins of this phrase go back to the mid 1800s to the United States. In parts of America where there was a lot of mining, for gold, coal or other raw materials found deep underground, miners often didn’t have a toilet nearby to relieve themselves in on their long, underground shifts. This situation was slightly remedied by the adaptation of mining-carts which became the port-a-potties of the 19th Century. The top of the mining-cart would be boarded over and these boards would be made into a hinged lid with a hole in it, leading to the bucket inside the cart which caught any bodily waste.

This commode on wheels was always kept near to where the miners were working so that they could relieve themselves if necesary, without having to go all the way outside. Of course, for obvious reasons, the cart was never kept too close to the mine-face. To stop it rolling down the mine’s railroad tracks and causing a disgusting and disasterous accident, a length of chain was looped over and under the cart’s wheels, to jam them in place and to keep the cart at a safe distance. A common practical joke was for, when one miner was using the cart to relieve himself, another miner would sneak up to the cart and start yanking away the chain that acted as the cart’s brake, causing the cart to rattle off down the mine. This gave birth to the expression, to yank someone’s chain.