Red Herrings and White Elephants: Albert Jack

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Therefore, the best ships to command or crew were known as the ‘first rate’ vessels, a term that became synonymous with the best of anything. A bit surprisingly, my favorite mystery phrase - "the whole nine yards" - doesn't appear here, probably because it _is_ a mystery.

red herring in Traditional Chinese - Cambridge Dictionary red herring in Traditional Chinese - Cambridge Dictionary

At the first sign of boredom your class shows in an English course (you should be able to notice the blank looks and nodding heads), swipe Red Herring and White Elephants out and start to ask them why certain phrases are so. I learned a great deal about how language evolves through these phrases, and even learned a few new British sayings. A totally different issue: For "blonde bombshell," Jack states that actress Jean Harlow was "mistress of the one-line witticism.Therefore this period of months in the painfully slow mid-ocean became known as ‘flogging the dead horse’.

Red Herrings and White Elephants by Albert Jack

As the victim was usually unconscious it was obvious they were totally reliant upon third parties and whatever action they took would determine their fate. The traditional high standards of ships leaving Bristol lead to the phrase passing into the English language.

From the time Henry VIII began organising the English Navy in the 16th century, war ships were rated on a scale of one to six (a grading that lasted more than 300 years). I can't think of any such witticisms associated with Harlow; I suspect that Jack was thinking of a different blonde actress, Mae West. In the days before Liverpool became a major English port, Bristol was the premier western port from which most ships would embark on transatlantic voyages. The phrase is another dating back to the days of the tall ships that relied upon the wind in their sails. As it went on the blows became harder, leading to its effectiveness more as a punishment rather than a game.

Red Herrings and White Elephants - Albert Jack 1843581299 - Red Herrings and White Elephants - Albert Jack

Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). I thought they could've whittled it down to the quality ones a bit more rather than trying to up the number of items but leaving the content a bit thin on the ground. Teachers of the language, especially one teaching ESL (English as a Second Language), would benefit from the book as well.From bringing home the bacon to leaving no stone unturned, the English language is peppered with hundreds of common idioms borrowed from ancient traditions and civilizations throughout the world. Reviewed'Albert Jack has all the answers' - Daily ExpressI never questioned the origin of While Elephants, Red Herrings, or any of the other many ideomatic phrases that we use everyday, but a friend of mine bought me this book and I was blown away! I believe that in Hungarian, “fehér elefánt” (white elephant) simply means something very rare, same as the more common “fehér holló” (white raven).

Red Herrings and White Elephants by Albert Jack - AbeBooks Red Herrings and White Elephants by Albert Jack - AbeBooks

Making money Hand Over Fist alludes to the practice of making steady financial gain, and usually pretty quickly. Crew would become suspicious of a fellow sailor with so much food it piled against the rims and they became known as ‘on the fiddle’ (taking or being given more than they should). It’s quite simply a nautical phrase, in use from the early 1800s (around the time of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805), and used to describe a ship left grounded and vulnerable as the tides goes out.This meant that on severely cold days the indentations holding the lower level of cannonballs would contract, spilling the pyramid over the deck, hence ‘cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey’.