Have you ever wondered where some of our sayings come from? We come out with all kinds of strange things but few of us ever think about their actual origin…. For example, what does it mean ‘to give it the whole nine yards’? Well, this one was relatively easy to solve; the belt on a machine gun used to be nine yards in length, so ‘giving it the whole nine yards’ meant firing every available bullet.

But there are plenty of other sayings that are not quite so easy to find out about. I was intrigued to the origins of ‘painting the town red’ so I did a little investigation online. It took me a while to solve it, but I got there in the end. Apparently, Roman soldiers used to party pretty hard when they all went out on a bender (these guys were certainly not into anti aging skin care products or manicures). The ‘painting the town red’ thing refers to them slashing their enemies to pieces and splashing nearby buildings with their blood. Nice. Our binge drinking problems of today suddenly don’t seem half as bad, do they?

See how many you can think of and try looking for their origins online. ‘Three sheets to the wind’, ‘the full Monty’, ‘going the whole hog’, ‘cheap at half the price’ and ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’ are a few interesting ones to start you off!

We are so lucky to have the internet, aren’t we? If we couldn’t find our answers so easily then we really would be ‘in the dark’ and it may even ‘send us round the twist’.