I think letting the cat out of the bag refurs to the cat o nine tails for punishing sailors
It refers an ancient scam: You sell a suckling pig at market, and then distract the buyer and surreptitiously substitute it for a cat, thus letting the cat out of the bag means revealing the secret, giving the game away.
Money For Old Rope
Merchant seamen , when in port for a while would be keen to spend some time in the pub and with a lady of the docks but were rarely paid until the end of their voyage . So they would steal ropes from ships in the harbour and sell it to the naval suppliers in the town . Much less hard work than being a deck swab , so hence the saying.
Hubby says theres a book you can buy and its got all those saying in it like "pass the buck", "the whole nine yards" etc.
But he cant remember the name of it but it was written by an American lol.
Pass the buck - a phrase coming from the game of Poker.
A buckhorn knife was placed in front of a player to indicate that he was the next dealer. When he had *dealt* he *passed the buck* to the next player . .
T-J
"saved by the bell" and "the graveyard shift" both come from a time when people tended to be pronounced dead when they actually weren't so bells were put in graveyards with a long rope going into the coffin which people would ring if they suddenly gained consciousness (saved by the bell).... and obviously they had people listening out for these bells ringing (the graveyard shift)
I can't say that I know for certain, but it seems likely that it is derived from the experiment 'Schodringers cat'
The basis behind the experiment is similar to that of the old 'If a tree falls in a forrest and nobody is there to hear it fall, does it make a sound'
Basically, this guy said that you could never collect accurate results on any experiment, because as soon as you have tried to collect these results, you have interferred with this experiment and thus the data would be impure.
The question goes thus: If you lock a cat in an air tight conatiner for 5 days with food and water, will it survive?
Until you open the box, you don't know, but when you do, you are invalidating your results.
So, letting the cat out of the bag (or box) would be letting something previously unknown become known to all
This is merely an educated guess though
To be hoist by your own petard means literally to be lifted off your feet by your own hand grenade. That's what a petard is, a little bomb, so the expression means to make trouble for yourself by your own carelessness.
Who said that u never learn anything from this site?
