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Today on Something You Should Know reading can be very entertaining, and there are ways to make it even more entertaining.
Then, if you have a goal you're not quite getting to, there's another way to approach it.
I like to look at goals not as a problem to fix, but as a present to open.
So I always try to get people to look at it that way, versus.
There's a part of my life that's broken that I need to fix, because I don't think we don't like to spend time sitting in that spot.
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All this today on Something You Should Know.
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Something you should know.
Fascinating intel.
The world's top experts.
And practical advice you can use in your life.
Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know.
Do you like to read?
I know it's kind of become like passé.
Why read when you can watch the movie?
But reading can be entertaining.
And one way to make it more entertaining is to slow down when you read.
Here are some of the benefits.
Reading slower allows your brain to more slowly absorb the facts of what you're reading.
And when you do that, that makes it easier to connect to that web of knowledge you already possess.
This way you can make valuable associations between what you already know and what you're learning.
It also reduces stress.
Reading slower makes you focus more on what you're reading and, since you can only focus on one thing at a time, it forces you to ignore things like your phone and social media and other distractions which can increase stress.
Reading slower makes you smarter.
Reading fast doesn't allow you to really connect and absorb the information that slow reading does.
And reading slower makes reading more entertaining.
As you know, you don't skip through or speed watch a movie.
You commit to watching it from beginning to end in order to enjoy it.
And the same thing will be true for a good book.
And that is something you should know.
I'm sure you have goals, things you want to accomplish but have yet to do so.
And so what are you doing to accomplish them?
Often people say they want to accomplish something but don't actually take steps to get it done.
It's more of a wish than a goal.
And there are plenty of other reasons that goals are never achieved.
Here to explain why that happens and offer some valuable help on accomplishing those goals that are really important and figuring out which ones are not, is John Acuff.
John is a speaker and author who's written nine books.
His latest is called All It Takes is a Goal.
It's also the title of his podcast, All It Takes is a Goal.
Hey, John, welcome to Something You Should Know.
Thanks for having me today.
I'm looking forward to it.
So first, explain the problem you're addressing here.
What is it about goals and potential that you think we need to get a grip on here?
Nobody feels they're living up to their potential.
So there's a PhD named Mike Peasley.
He's a professor here in Nashville where I live.
We asked 3,000 people, 96% of people said they are not living up to their full potential.
So I would say the problem is a general sense that you're capable of more and not knowing what to do with that.
96%.
96%.
The other stat that got me was that 50 of the participants felt that 50 of themselves was untapped.
So the metaphor for that became.
That's like walking down the stairs on Christmas morning and only opening half of your presents.
And so once we did the study, that's when I said, okay, it's not just me, it's a lot of people.
When people say that they're not living up to their potential or they're not using all of who they are and what they are, what's stopping them?
A million things.
It could be family of origin.
You know their family didn't would say things like must be nice when they saw somebody in their town that did well.
And the implication there was success is for other people.
There was a podcast I was on with a guy named Steven Scoggins and his dad used to say Scoggins, don't get ahead.
Scoggins, get by.
So you hear that a thousand times.
As a kid, you tend to believe what your dad is saying, that no, I can't try to be more than I am today.
So sometimes it's family of origin.
Sometimes they've never even known it was an option.
I've met people that didn't ever meet a comedian or a public speaker or an author, and they didn't even know that was an option to do with your life.
Often it's imposter syndrome, perfectionism.
You know, there's a whole host of things that will trip people up as they try to do more than they're currently doing.
And do you think, if you ask those people and maybe you did ask those people what is it that's stopping you?
They can identify it pretty well or they go, I don't I don't know.
They, they know a little, but they don't know the whole story, because if they knew the whole story they might actually change it.
So sometimes you have to go, wow, like, let's look at what you've been doing.
OK, you see, there's actually a pattern here.
Sometimes.
You know.
I read this great book by this guy, Roy Williams, who said it's hard for us to understand our own lives sometimes because it's like trying to read the label when you're inside the bottle.
So sometimes you need somebody else to go, Hey, I see this pattern.
You did this same thing five different ways at these last five jobs.
Maybe it's a pattern you should break and you don't recognize you're even in the pattern.
So usually they have a sense of something that's holding them back.
But there's a fuller picture, that often a book, a podcast, An event helps them go.
Oh, wait a second, I just got to see a mirror.
That's not the view I want.
I want my life to look this way.
I'm going to change it.
How often do you suppose it is that people say those 96 of people say that they're not living up to their full potential, and I'm fine with it.
It's an itch, but I don't need to scratch it.
It's okay.
Everything's good.
I don't know if they ever actually do that exercise.
I think the challenge is that we're in such a distracted place right now.
Like there's 50,000 developers whose goal is your time.
Like 50000 of the smartest developers are at Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, and their whole goal is your time.
So it's not that you're living in a vacuum and going, no, I'm good with what I'm doing.
Like when Nielsen, when the Nielsen ratings come out and say that the average American watches 34 hours of TV a week a week that's almost a full-time, 40 hour a week job those people i wouldn't say are making the exact decisions they want.
I would say there's a whole distraction industry that is gobbling up their time and attention.
And if you say hey, you know, there's other stuff like you can do, other things like you can you know whether it's you want to declutter your garage or be in shape or start a business, there's other things available.
They then go well, i didn't know that, or it's been really challenging.
And then the other thing is like the only thing easier than accomplishing a goal is not trying the goal.
So it's really easy to not do it.
So it's easy for people to go yeah it's, it's fine whatever, like i'm, i'm all right, like it's, you know, i'm getting by.
But i think that we have to give ourselves credit that we've never faced this level of distraction in history.
It's hard to accomplish your goal because Netflix is really easy and they're really good.
And you have to say, no, if I want something different, I have to be different.
And when people say, I want something different, do they know what it is?
Or it's just, I want something, anything.
I don't know what it is.
Yeah, they usually don't know exactly.
The people that engage with my content, I never meet somebody who says I have zero goals.
People who read a book like mine All It Takes is a Goal or listen to my podcast.
They always have more goals than they know what to do with.
I very rarely will somebody stumble into the self-help or business section of a bookstore and just pick up one of my books just because and say my main problem is I have zero desires.
What I encounter more is like.
I just recently did a study.
The average number for people that read my stuff is they have 225 goals.
So they have more than they could possibly do.
So what you have to do in that situation is go okay.
Knowing like an easy exercise to do with people is they'll say well, how much would those goals cost in time?
Oh, okay.
They'd cost 40 hours.
How much free time do you have currently in your week?
And they'll go, I have two hours of free time.
And I'll say, well, that's why you're frustrated right now.
You're trying to fit a 40 hour load of new goals or desires into a two hour spot in your week.
What if we figured out which was the one that mattered in this season?
Because not every goal is for every season.
Don't you think a lot of the problem with goals is people have goals and maybe they're more wishes than goals but they don't know how to achieve it.
They don't know how to get there.
They can see it there on the other side of the river, but they don't know what the bridge looks like to go across to get it.
Yeah.
Or they try to jump the river in a single leap.
Goals are interesting because there's some goals in life, Mike, that we don't expect to do quickly.
Nobody goes, hey, I'm going to learn Italian this weekend, or I'm going to learn Italian this month.
My goal is to be fluent at the end of the month.
But we say things like, I'm going to write a book.
I want to get in shape.
I want fast progress.
So often it's they don't know which steps to take or they have crazy aggressive goals that are doomed from the beginning.
So they say okay, and we say terrible things online, like if your dream doesn't scare you, it's not big enough.
You need to go big or go home.
Most people go home in that situation because they have a really hard time translating massive desires into daily actions.
And so that's what I talk about a lot in all it takes is a goal is okay.
How do you build some easy goals?
How do you build up some momentum?
How do you build some middle goals that are a little bigger, you know, and, and walk the steps.
The metaphor that's been helpful for me is if I had a ladder and I was 12 feet tall and I said okay Mike um, You need to get to the top of this ladder.
And it only had two rungs, one at the very bottom and one at the very top.
That would be a useless ladder.
You would have to jump 12 feet into the air, two feet higher than a basketball rim.
Try to grab the top rung and pull yourself up.
And that's what people do with goals all the time.
They say, I want to start a business.
It's day one.
I just got to go for it.
And there's no steps where my approach is more hey, what if there was a step, a rung every six inches?
Do you think you could climb to the top of that?
Could it even maybe be somewhat of an enjoyable experience?
Would you have an easy time climbing to the top?
And they go, yeah.
And I say, well, great.
Let's come up with a lot of rungs.
So climbing the ladder is something you're able to achieve.
So how do we come up with those rungs?
Well, a lot of it is you turn that desire into some actions.
So I tell people all the time because, according to the New York Times, 82 of Americans want to write a book.
It's one of our most popular goals.
So I'll say well, don't write a book, write a chapter.
Or don't write a chapter, write a page, write a hundred words.
So I'll try to get them to do some small goals so that they have some encouraging finish lines.
It's kind of like if you ran a half marathon once, There's 13 different signs along the course.
It's not just a starting line and a finish line.
That'd be demoralizing.
That's the one rung and a second rung.
Every mile they have a sign that says one mile, two mile, three mile.
So I'd say okay, let's take this big goal, write a book, start a business, whatever it is, and find some things you can do in a week, in two weeks, in a month, and break it down bit by bit so that you can actually make some progress.
So how is this different than just the advice of break it into small steps, which we've all heard for a million years?
How is your approach different than just that?
Well, the first approach is figuring out what you really care about.
You go back to that, people have 22 and a half goals.
Most people, when they start a goal, run into this vision wall where they say okay, I have to know exactly where I'm going.
They misinterpret things like Stephen Covey's begin with the end in mind and they turn it into until I know the end, I can't begin.
Or they misinterpret, you know, Simon Sinek's wonderful start with why until until I know my why, like my true north, I can't get started.
And so a big part of what I like to do is, at the beginning, help them figure out what do you really care about?
What are the because there's a lot of fake goals.
If you have 22 and a half goals, a lot of them are distracting, fake goals that you really wouldn't want to do it anyway.
And so some of it is at the very beginning saying, OK, What do you really care about?
How do we really figure that out?
How do we build, going forward knowing what matters to you, so that you actually accomplish the goals that matter the most to you?
And I guess I could say too, though, why are there multiple issues of men's health?
If you and I already know how to stay in shape, we already know how to have abs.
Why is there a second issue of men's health?
There's never been an additional ab discovered, and we've known how to stay in shape for a hundred years.
Nobody does.
So I don't, you know, for me, whenever somebody goes, well, isn't this common sense?
I say, if you're doing it like right now, if you are in the best shape of your life, you have more money than you know what to do with.
You get to be so generous with it.
You're spending time the way you want.
You're in a fulfilling, loving relation.
Awesome.
Awesome.
Common sense is common to you.
If you're not doing those things, common sense is extraordinary.
It is the craziest thing you've ever seen.
And once you do it, you're going to say oh wow, I don't know why I waited 10 years to do the things that we've known to do forever.
John Acuff is my guest.
He is author of a book called All It Takes is a Goal.
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So, John, what you said about fake goals is really interesting to me because...
When you say 82 of people say they want to write a book, which is probably more than the number of people who want to read a book.
Yeah, yeah, nobody reads.
I mean, if you look at the number of people reading, yeah, 100%.
My sense is that 82% of people don't really want to write a book.
They want to have written a book.
They're not looking forward to the process.
They're looking forward to being able to say, I wrote a book.
Yeah, I heard somebody say once they they love the noun, not the verb.
And I thought that was really interesting, like that I'm a writer versus that I write.
And so, yeah, I think some of it is is releasing people from that and going, OK, if you want.
Here's an example that like if you won't take this big thing you say you want and turn it into some small actions that you try for a week.
Like if you want to invest five hours into it, it's not the right goal.
Like, if you won't pay that price, then you're definitely not going to pay all the bigger prices, all the bigger efforts.
And you shouldn't feel ashamed about that.
Like maybe it was never something you were supposed to do or maybe sometimes people inherit goals.
So you see this in college students.
When I talk to college students, seniors will come up and say, hey –
I'm about to go to law school and I really don't want to go to law school.
But my mom said I'd be a good lawyer and she always wanted to be a lawyer.
And now I'm about to go to law school and they don't want to go.
I met a dentist that had.
He was five years into his dental career and hated being a dentist, and he said he knew in college that he didn't want to be a dentist but there was so much family momentum that he couldn't stop it.
And now he has too much debt to quit being a dentist.
The only way out of the debt is to keep being a dentist.
So sometimes we inherit goals.
You can pick up fake goals a thousand ways.
So how do you hone it down?
How do you decide?
Because even if you have 22 goals and they're all real there isn't enough time in the day to do them all.
And as you say, a lot of them are probably fake anyway.
So how do you get down to the gold?
The easiest way I think is that you do a kind of desire check, if you will.
So let's say you came to me like, John, these are the five I'm thinking about.
These are the 10 I'm thinking about.
I would say okay Mike, I want you to write, create a list of what you get if you accomplish these goals per goal.
So, okay, if I write a book, here's what I get.
If I declutter my garage, here's what I get.
If I start a business, here's what I get.
I would ask you to kind of brainstorm that.
And you'd see pretty quickly wow, I was able to come up with 25 different things that I will get if I accomplish this goal of writing a book.
That desire is really obvious.
People don't change just because.
Nobody, nobody ever changes just because.
I've never met a single person that said, Yeah, I just woke up one day and decided to have grit.
I decided to have willpower and persistence.
You never just leave your comfort zone just because.
You always leave it with one of two ways.
There's a tragedy, something terrible happens and it shakes you out of it.
Or you have a desire for something that's different and the desire is bigger than staying the same.
So when I, for me...
My life changed.
Like I can plot a couple of different change moments.
When I was 34, I had two kids under the age of four.
I had a beautiful wife named Jenny.
I had a full-time job.
I had an Atlanta commute and I started blogging and I realized, wow, I like this.
I just started blogging on the side of life.
And that made me want to get up early.
I didn't get up early just because I was being disciplined.
I wanted to get up early because I desired to blog more.
And I looked at my time like logs, and I wanted to throw more logs into the fire that was blogging.
That's why I stopped watching as much TV as I was watching, not because I was deliberate or disciplined, but because it wasn't giving me as much as blogging was like enjoyment and connection.
So often if I can get you to kind of tap into which of these things you really desire, because that's what you'll you'll pay the price in that goal.
You won't pay it for goals you don't care about.
You won't trade the time, the effort, the sacrifice for things you don't really care about.
And if we can do a desire check on the front end, we can often clear out the things you really don't care about.
Is there a way to look at your goal, whatever it is?
Because there are plenty of people who say whose goal was I want to be a lawyer?
But then find out later that really didn't pan out too well.
So is there some way to test that ahead of time, so you don't end up after law school realizing this sucks?
Yeah, so I always try to get people to do like a 10-hour experiment where I'm like let's invest 10 hours into it and see what happens.
And you can shape the 10 hours a million different ways.
I mean, I've had – we'll go back to the law school example.
I've had people interview some lawyers they knew like family friends and go.
Oh, I didn't want to do that.
I know a professor in Nashville.
He's a professor in Nashville.
He was a really successful lawyer at a law firm in New York.
And he started interviewing the partners about their lives.
And he realized that this goal he had to become a partner wasn't the goal he really wanted.
And the way he said it was, It was like winning a pie eating contest and your prize was more pie.
He said, I saw the partners and they didn't have lives that looked enjoyable.
There were lives that looked like the kind of life I wanted.
I had this fiction in my head that once I'm a partner, I don't have to work these crazy hours.
Once I'm a part and he realized, oh no, it's actually the reverse.
Have to work five times as much like, and so sometimes, whether it's interviewing somebody who's already in that situation, whether it's really looking at how you like to spend your time, your value system, what amount of money makes you comfortable there's a number of different ways to kind of experiment on the goal before you go all in.
We love the all-in idea because it's romantic and dramatic, But I'd much rather you do a 10-hour test and go yeah, I don't need to do a second 10-hour test.
I knew 10 hours in, not worth it.
Yeah.
Well, it does seem that we have this list of goals that just kind of sit around and gather dust and they're really kind of a burden.
You know you carry them around like the I want to write a book and you don't really want to write a book, but you keep saying it or thinking it and you never get to it, which weighs on you.
Yeah, it has a lot of emotional weight, 100%, because it's an unfinished thing.
And there was a study that we remember the unfinished things in our lives longer than we do the finished. tend to kind of remember those open loops they they nag at us and so for me and i do the same thing this summer one of my goals was i want to work i want to spend some time working on a mystery novel because i you know like i've written non-fiction i was like oh i'm going to do a mystery novel And then I started to do it and I was like, nope, this isn't for me.
Like, it's not for me.
And so I could have carried that for a year or two years.
But the other problem Mike, is that when you tell somebody you have a goal, you get pre-congratulated.
So scientists have studied this from the 1930s.
There was a psychiatrist named Kurt Lewin that studied this.
When I say my goal, say I tell you I'm at a dinner party with you and I say hey, I'm going to run a marathon.
So you naturally congratulate me.
You go, man, good for you.
Like what discipline?
I don't have that kind of like, oh my gosh, I haven't run a single mile.
I'm already getting pre-congratulated and your body releases dopamine in that moment.
And it's not a ton of dopamine, but it's enough to satisfy.
It's this small, dangerous amount where you go, I don't even have to race.
I don't even have to do the work.
Same with writing a book, writing a book.
When you tell people that at a dinner party, they go, You're so brave.
Thank you for using your voice.
And you go, I am brave.
You haven't written a single page.
You're getting congratulated.
It happened to me just the other day.
I was at the I was at the bank and the teller I said, oh, what do you do?
And I actually went in the bank, which feels like very 1920s behavior, but I was in the bank.
And I said, oh, I'm a writer.
And he's like, oh, I'm working on a horror trilogy.
And I was like, oh, okay.
And my first thought was like, dude, you're never going to finish that.
One book is hard.
Starting with three, that's really... And he's like...
I've been working on it for years.
I thought, I bet you have.
Like, that's really hard.
And I tried to resist the like, well, good for you.
Congratulations.
Because I know that doesn't help him long term.
That's so great.
I never thought of that.
But you could say that about like, I'm going to quit smoking.
Oh, that's great.
But I'm not.
Yeah, your family is going to appreciate that.
Way to have willpower.
You could have smoked a pack before you got there.
They don't know.
Yeah.
You could smoke another pack on your way home.
Exactly.
And go, I am a good person.
I am doing well.
What willpower.
God, I'm the best.
I'm strong.
I'm strong.
I'm like the rock.
I'm like Dwayne Johnson.
Don't you think?
A lot of people look at what they say are their goals as more just a thing on the list of things to do.
It's more a task than a goal.
So i like to look at goals not as a problem to fix but as a present to open.
I think there's a lot of people that come to a goal and go i got these five things in my life that are just broken and i gotta get my life together.
And i've never met somebody on the other side who accomplished something and said yeah, i just shamed myself a bunch and i was able to accomplish it.
Um, it just never works.
Long term shame as a fuel isn't helpful.
I'd much rather you go okay, if i allowed myself to dream a little bit, if i allow myself to turn those dreams into some actions, if i allow myself some time to focus on those, what could i really do?
What presence could i really open?
So i always try to get people to look at it that way versus there's a part of my life that's broken that I need to fix, because I don't think we don't like to spend time sitting in that spot.
No, no, no, we don't.
Well, I like the way you look at setting and achieving goals.
It really makes it more accessible and achievable and easier to get your head around the whole idea.
I've been talking to John Acuff.
He is a speaker and writer.
He's written nine books, and his latest is called All It Takes is a Goal.
And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for coming on, John.
Yeah, thank you so much.
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You use words and phrases every day that actually make no sense.
I did it cold turkey.
He was caught red-handed.
You have to know the ropes.
Don't pass the buck.
All these things make no literal sense.
So where do they come from?
Why do we say them?
Here to explain is Caroline Taggart.
She's worked in the publishing business for a long time and has written several books, including Humble Pie and Cold Turkey.
English Expressions and Their Origins.
Hi, Caroline.
Welcome to Something You Should Know.
Hi.
Thank you for having me.
So we use these idioms and expressions in everyday talk.
But why do we use them and why do you find them so interesting to study?
Idioms and funny expressions just make language more interesting.
It makes it easier, more picturesque, more visual, more fun.
I mean, if you look out the window and it's raining really hard, you can say it's raining really hard.
But the first time somebody said it's raining, cats and dogs people must just have gone.
Wow, that's a really visual image.
And people all across the world have thought this, because in different languages you get it's raining spears, or it's raining cauldrons, or even in Danish, it's raining shoemaker's apprentices.
Heavy, heavy things falling out of the sky.
Shoemaker's Apprentices.
I love it.
And what does it mean, cats and dogs?
I mean, why cats and dogs?
That's certainly the one we hear most here.
Everyone's heard it.
Where did it come from?
Opinions vary.
There are those who think that in the old days, when we had open drains and it was raining very heavily, cats and dogs were just swept away with the water.
Some people say they were hiding in thatched cottages and were again swept away by the water.
But I think it's just likely that somebody said, hey, there are heavy things coming out of the sky.
What are some of?
Let's talk about some of your favorites, for whatever reason, but just ones that really tickle you, that you think are fascinating, either because of what they mean or their origin or whatever.
You know the expression to be galvanized into action.
Yeah, I don't hear that very often, but yeah, I guess I've heard that, yeah.
Okay.
Well, it sort of means somebody to put a boot up your backside and make you do something and just get going.
Now in the 18th century, there was a scientist called Galvani, which is where we get the word galvanized from.
And he was experimenting with animals.
They thought.
In those days, some people thought that there was a sort of electrical force that flowed through your body in the same way that blood does.
And Galvani discovered, probably by accident, that if you put an electric charge in a frog's leg it sort of convulsed.
The muscles convulsed, as if it was coming back to life.
And this was very fashionable, thinking very much in the news at the time that Mary Shelley was writing Frankenstein.
So you could say that one of the first people ever to be galvanized into action was Frankenstein's monster.
I just love that.
And another, another you love?
Okay.
I like the idea that in the UK, they tend to call people who organize funerals, funeral directors.
And the old fashioned word was undertakers.
But at some stage Around about the end of the 19th century somebody in the States decided they didn't want to be called funeral directors or undertakers and they advertised in the Embalmers Monthly magazine because there was such a thing for suggestions for a word.
So mortician, which was for a long time the standard American word, came basically from a competition.
Somebody wrote in and said, why don't we call ourselves this?
Halfway between the Latin word for death, which gives us mortal and things like that, and a physician.
So he was a physician of the dead.
It's very common to talk about your life savings or your investments as your nest egg, your nest egg.
But there's nothing to do with nests or eggs typically in your nest egg.
So why do we use that phrase?
The idea was that farmers who were breeding chickens or ducks or anything else that they took the eggs from, wanted to encourage their crops birds to keep on laying.
And I think the psychology is that if you've got one egg in your nest already, you think oh, I can carry on.
I know what to do.
And so you put a nest egg in the nest to help the hen carry on laying and building up a clutch.
So you have an egg in your nest to encourage the hen to lay more eggs.
So you'll have more eggs in your nest.
What about salt of the earth?
You know, someone who's a salt of the earth person is a rock solid, good guy, good woman.
Where did that come from?
That's from the Bible as well.
And there's a speech of Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount, that talks to his followers as being ye are the salt of the earth, ye are the light of the world.
So it was a compliment dating back all that time.
And I think it's because salt was such a very valuable commodity.
I mean, the word salary, meaning your monthly paycheck, comes from salt.
It's something very much worth earning.
You used it to preserve food in the winter when you didn't have refrigeration.
So to be something salty was very complimentary indeed.
Know the ropes.
You've got to know the ropes.
Let me teach you the ropes.
Why?
Why ropes?
All to do with sailing and sailing ships.
There's all sorts of complicated things to do with sailing and sails and which direction the wind is blowing.
The ropes on a sailing ship were very complicated and if you were putting a mast up or putting a sail up using the wrong rope, and presumably also using the wrong knot, you'd be in big trouble.
So in a case like that, know the ropes, which is a very specific reference to sailing, the ropes and the knots of sailing.
Was it ever used that way in sailing specifically and exclusively, and then it morphed into something else where now it's a general term to know what you need to know?
Yeah, absolutely.
They morph.
They very often start specific, so it is specific to the military, for example.
Something else that you get from ships and from the army is the concept of flying your colors, showing your true colors, anything like that, where the color is the flag that you put up, the mast or the standard that you carry into battle, so that people can recognize you, so they know who's on your side, who's on their side, And it starts off with that very specific military naval, whatever it might be application.
And then somebody uses this as a metaphor, and it's a rather innovative and unusual metaphor.
And then other people pick up on it and it becomes a cliche or just something that we say over a period perhaps of 200 years.
It's so interesting, though that I imagine there are plenty of them that people say and start and they never catch on, or they fizzle out.
And that some of them are really dated references that don't really apply anymore, and yet they linger.
Yes.
Yes.
I mean, I think to describe somebody as having bats in the belfry is very old fashioned now and would be politically incorrect.
But a belfry was a watchtower or a bell tower on a church.
And it was a place that you might have bats, which brings you to another thing that makes people produce expressions like that, and the whole concept of alliteration.
You don't have bats in the tower, because that doesn't sound like anything but bats in the belfry, with the two words beginning with B as bold as brass, as right as rain.
They used to talk about people being as fine as fivepence or as nice as ninepence, but you always had to have the same initial letter to make it a catchphrase.
So I just came up with one in our conversation when we were talking about know the ropes.
I said it kind of means like lay of the land.
And that's another one.
And I just pulled that out of the air.
But do you have any idea where that came from?
Well, yeah, because to know the lay of the land is to know the terrain.
You know, how are you going to get from A to B?
Is there a bridge over the river?
Is it very hilly?
Are you going to have to cross a bog?
What factors do you have to take into account before you set out on your journey?
And so you go from there the physical, actually knowing about the landscape to.
I need to know the lay of the land before I go into this meeting.
I need to know who's on what team and whether I have to be particularly nice to this director or that.
It starts off in the specific and then it becomes very general.
I've always liked the one, you know, he was caught red-handed.
What is that?
That goes back to Scotland in maybe the 15th 16th century, when the reason you were caught red-handed was not that you'd murdered somebody and you were covered in their blood, but that you'd been poaching.
So you'd been shooting, probably a deer, but you would have been caught before you had time to wash your hands.
So you still had the blood of this prey that you'd been poaching on your hands.
I wonder if there are some of these expressions where we think we know the story behind it, we think we know the origin and we're wrong.
And I actually know of one of them.
It's come up before, I think, on the podcast, where the phrase riding shotgun everybody knows what that phrase means to sit next to the driver in the car.
You're riding shotgun.
And the assumption that people have is that it comes from the Old West, when stagecoaches would have a guy sitting next to the driver with a shotgun, in case the stagecoach was attacked.
But, as I discovered, it was never called riding shotgun back in the days of the old west.
It was only first called riding shotgun in movies in the 20th century about the days of the old west.
So people are mistaken in thinking that that's an old western term from cowboy days.
It's actually a much more recent term and i wonder if there are any others where we we have the story wrong.
The expression beyond the pale meaning just too dreadful, too awful for words, people suggested that there used to be a thing called the pale in Ireland that divided basically the historic British-based Protestant area from the peasants, who were mostly Catholic.
So it was a very strict divide in Irish society.
The expression beyond the pale is older than that.
So somebody's just made it up as a possible explanation when it simply can't be.
From listening to you and just thinking about this.
I mean, so many of these are really old, you know, like old, centuries old, and they've stuck around.
Are there any new ones?
Are there any ones that the show promised to stick around?
Well, there are things like thinking outside the box.
God, I hate that one.
I just hate it.
Yeah well, once you get into business jargon of that kind, there are all sorts of things that are much more recent.
Yes, so thinking outside the box came into being about the time that business became so much more prevalent in the 1970s and 80s, just as a way of being more imaginative, just trying something out.
We've been talking so far mostly about phrases, but there are some words that you have to wonder about, like freelance.
Everybody knows what that means as soon as you hear it, but what makes up that word, free and lance?
What's that?
I like the idea because I've been freelance for a very long time, self-employed that once upon a time a freelance was like a mercenary soldier, only it was before guns.
So what he had was a lance, those long spear-like weapons that they had in medieval times, and he offered it to anybody who would pay him for it.
So he wasn't in allegiance to anybody, but he had a free lance that could be bought by anybody who had enough money.
Okay, so here are two phrases, two words that people use all the time and I have no idea why or what they mean.
Scapegoat.
I don't know what a scapegoat is.
And white elephant.
Why do we call gifts, useless gifts, white elephants?
A scapegoat is an escape goat, so it's something that, again in biblical times, escaped into the desert, taking symbolically people's sins away with them.
So one goat stayed behind and the other one escaped and people were somehow forgiven, whereas a white elephant goes back to thailand, where back in the day, white elephants were very precious and they weren't allowed to work.
Normal grey elephants could work, but the very rare white one couldn't.
So if somebody gave you a white elephant, it was really quite useless, because what's the use of an elephant, they would think in those days, if you can't put it to work?
And the story goes that a ruler in Thailand gave white elephants to courtiers that he thought were getting a bit above themselves, because they would have to go to the expense of keeping an elephant without getting any use out of it, and that would keep them in their place.
Somebody who has kind of a wild idea or a huge goal that they will never reach, that's a pipe dream.
Why is that a pipe dream?
I think it's probably an opium pipe.
So you're smoking something that gives you hallucinogenic dreams, and really, really unrealistic ideas come to you.
And when you sober up, you'll just realize that that was crazy.
And the phrase let your hair down, which means, you know, to kind of relax unwind, let your hair down.
Why that?
Well, think back again to not that long ago.
Go back to your John Wayne Westerns.
Respectable women would have worn their hair up in a bun or tied back and hidden away under a hat.
And they'd only let their hair down if they were no better than they ought to be, or if they were getting drunk or whatever, at home relaxing, just going to bed.
But if they were respectable ladies going out in public, their hair would be pinned up and covered.
Well, and since it's the title of your book, we i guess we need to talk about humble pie and cold turkey.
Humble pie, you don't hear as much anymore, but cold turkey certainly is a pretty relevant phrase.
So where, where did they come from?
Well, cold turkey is another of these mysteries.
There's a much less used than it used to be phrase expression to talk turkey meaning, to get to the point, to not to beat about the bush, to use another idiom.
Nobody really knows why cold turkey meaning to come off drugs or something like that in a very abrupt and uncomfortable way came into being.
But it may be in the sense of talking turkey, not beating about the bush.
Okay, we're going to give up these drugs, let's just do it.
That's the best guess.
Humble pie is a bit clearer because it comes from the part of a deer called the umbels, which are the bits and pieces that weren't roasts, that went into making venison.
So the lords and ladies in the great hall would be eating the venison And the servants below stairs would be left with the umbels, the bits and pieces.
And so you get the mix up between that sort of thing being eaten by the humble people.
So when somebody says something different than what they said before, you might say well, that's a far cry from what you said before.
Why is it a far cry?
A lot of strange expressions that emerged from Scotland in the 19th century might just have been coined by Sir Walter Scott.
And this is one of them.
He says it's an old, traditional Campbell expression meaning the family, the tribe, the clan of the Campbells, a far cry from somewhere.
Meaning you have to shout very loudly for somebody to be able to hear you.
So it's a fair distance.
But it is extremely likely that Walter Scott just made that up.
He romanticized the Scottish borders a very great deal.
He's famous for that.
And he romanticized the language as well.
You had mentioned that Shakespeare is responsible for a lot of these.
Which ones?
Well, A Wild Goose Trace crops up in Romeo and Juliet.
The origin of the expression to give somebody short shrift is Richard III.
The milk of human kindness is Lady Macbeth.
There's really quite a few of them.
It's interesting that we do have some of these metaphors that don't need an explanation.
You can figure it out just from saying it.
And the one I'm thinking of is like, don't burn your bridge.
You know, because if you burn your bridge, you can't go back.
It's pretty clear what that is.
Maybe there will come a time when people won't know what it meant.
But that one, I don't need you to explain.
Well, I can give you another one where you probably would never have guessed, which is the idea of being ham-fisted meaning clumsy.
Because in the old days, they say, rather mediocre jazz musicians, particularly rather mediocre trombonists, used to keep a piece of ham fat in their pocket to help them grease the slide of the instrument and make them play better.
And so their hand obviously became covered in ham, covered in fat.
And from there, by a strange set of circumstances, we get the idea of a ham actor, somebody who overacts or doesn't act terribly well.
But it all comes down to somebody having a piece of grease in their pocket to help them play the trombone.
Well, it is kind of weird, when you think about it, that we have so many of these phrases, these words and phrases we use to say what we mean, but they don't really mean what they say.
But somehow it all works.
I've been speaking with Caroline Taggart.
She is author of the book Humble Pie and Cold Turkey, English Expressions and Their Origins.
And there's a link to that book in the show notes if you'd like to get yourself a copy.
Thanks, Caroline.
Well, thank you for having me.
Enjoyed it.
If you want to win an argument, it's important to understand something about human nature.
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