What is the origin of commonly used phrases and sayings?
ok, you know what it means when you say “ok.” but how is “ok” what it is? and how about these?
1. gerry-rig
2. by and large
3. at large
4. posh, snafu (just to name a few)
i did hear, just today, that “ok” derives from a military term that means zero kills or “0K,” in other words a good report from battle of the day.
what phrases or sayings do we say but don’t know why we say them or how? where does it originate?
Observing members:
0
Composing members:
0
17 Answers
Check out this site.
This question makes me wonder where the phrase “what have you” comes from.
Oh! And what about “hooey”
@lilikoi: i think that comes from smelling manure all day and working in the field too long.
or the need to exhale after some really potent whiskey or hooch
Don’t know about those, but the phrase “watch your P’s & Q’s” came from European bartenders that told there customers if they were getting a little out of control to “watch their pints and quarts.”
~Edit~
Also more military ones are FNG = Fucking New Guy and SSDD = Same Shit Different Day
@Axemusica yeah, you got it! that’s the grit of the common phrase i’m trying to get, dude! makes perfect sense! we say this stuff, but where does it come from? excellent answer.
@Axemusica I heard that “Mind your P’s and Q’s” came from printmasters in the old newspaper printing places (where everything the people setting the type saw was backwards) telling their apprentices to be careful not to mix up the lowercase P’s and Q’s since it was backwards.
@ChocolateReigns hmmm, I don’t remember where I heard my description from, but yours doesn’t sound to bad either. I dunno we’ll have to check it out…... just checked wiki & it seems we’re both right, lol. Check it out
@Axemusica, actually, a more valid interpretation of “minding your p’s and q’s” came from the early days of manual typesetting, where individual type is set backwards in blocks for printing text. Since the lower-case letters p and q are near-inverses of each other, and the type is being set backwards, it’s easy to mistake one for the other. Additionally, when removing the block letters after the print job to replace in the bins for those blocks, it’s easy to mix them up again and put them into the wrong bin.
@ChocolateReigns, yes you did. So now you know approximately where I stopped reading the thread, anyway…
So does this mean neither of you clicked the wiki link? Because it says both, but whatever….
Answer this question 
Composing members:
0
