Famous Idioms

Never really understood what "take with a grain of salt" meant.
It means

take with a grain of salt

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take something with a grain of salt
to consider something to be not completely true or right I've read the article, which I take with a grain of salt.
Related vocabulary: hard to swallow
Etymology: based on the idea that food tastes better and is easier to swallow if you add a little salt

Maybe related to - "Drink the cool-aide"?

 

buy the farm---from military pilot crashed into a farm, they paid for damages....or if a serviceman died, the life insurance paid for the 'farm.....great thread....I just can't think of more now.....
my mom would always say ''suffer, it'll make you tougher

 

Red sky at night- sailors delight.
Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.

 

"as thick as thieves"

"the cat's meow"

 

#4 might not be an idiom.

 

good one...
.I thought if you named an idiom, you were supposed to explain it ...?

 

Drink the Kool-Aid refers to the Jones Town Massacre in Guiana.Means, "to follow blindly."Used mostly today to indicate a political party preference or point of view.
The whole nine yards,Legth of .50 caliber ammo in a WW2 fighter plane,P51,P47,etc.Means you used all your ammo on a target."He gave him the whole nine yards".

 

You are correct as to the origins of "Drink the Kool-Aid", but the WWII fighter plane machine gun origins of "whole nine yards" is incorrect. Apparently, common use of the term pre-dates WWII by many years. The first known published use was in 1907. Based on what I've read, I don't think anyone really knows the term's actual origin, many theories, but none that are definitive. Apparently, it is a great linguistic mystery.

 

From the UK Met Office - It makes most sense where the weather systems are predominantly from the West and the weather is changeable. Welcome to the UK

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/learning/learn-about-the-weather/how-weather-works/red-sky-at-night

 

Kool -Aid is a classic......as in other idioms, a lot of people weren't even born, or old enough to know, when this happened......and it being a 'short term', local, odd event makes it even more strange, interesting, etc....

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark

 

Actually, no. The "farm" is that 3x6 foot plot you get when you die. That's your farm.

 

The term "coyote date" was popular in my vagrant yoot - you wake up in a strange room with a hangover to find a very undesirable date sleeping across your arm, so, like a coyote in a trap you chew your own arm off to escape.

The later version is "double coyote date" where after you escape, you chew your other arm off just in case she begins looking for a one-armed man.

 

well the top 5 googles say otherwise.....obviously, there is no definite way to check the start of that one...I guess the farm could mean the 'plowed', dug grave.....but farm-grave?? does that connect?...farms=big, planting, irrigation, growth etc....what's the connection?...but I didn't see that searching...Kool Aid does have a definite start story.....

 

"Bought the farm" wasn't just used by airmen it was also used by ground troops and it means dead. It might mean the death benefit that pays off the family mortgage or it might refer to the 3x6 plot, but it isn't about paying damages to something destroyed by a bad landing. I suppose like most idioms, it means something different to whoever uses the term. But, in this case it always means dead.

 

From Snopes:

The Oxford English Dictionary offers this definition of "buy":

The earliest use of "buy" in this sense dates to 1825, more than a century before the earliest appearance of "buy the farm."

Lexicographer Dave Wilton concludes "the farm" is a slang reference to a burial plot (i.e., a piece of ground). "Buy a plot" appeared around the time of "buy the farm" (both mean the same thing), but it's a particular snippet of World
War I slang that ties it all together: "Become a landowner" thus means "to inhabit a cemetery plot."