![]() ![]() In astronomy, this is 1 AU – or an astronomical unit. Earth revolves around the Sun, but its average distance from it is 149 million kilometers / 93 million miles.Earth is the third planet from the Sun and our home planet.Many languages throughout the world have their own names for our planet. The name of our planet comes from the Old English and Germanic languages. When there was an issue up for discussion by some kind of official council it was on the carpet.Ī version of this story ran in 2018 it has been updated for 2021.Earth is the only planet whose English name does not derive from Greek or Roman mythology. But it actually goes back to the tablecloth meaning. The floor carpet is the one we use most now, so the image most people associate with this phrase is one where a servant or employee is called from plainer, carpetless room to the fancier, carpeted part of the house. Called on the CarpetĬarpet used to mean a thick cloth that could be placed in a range of places: on the floor, on the bed, on a table. The fact that the wire itself got easily tangled when unspooled contributed to the “messed up” sense of the word. In addition to tying up bundles, haywire was used to fix and hold things together in a makeshift way, so a dumpy, patched-up place came to be referred to as “a hay-wire outfit.” It then became a term for any kind of malfunctioning thing. What kind of wire is haywire? Just what it says-a wire for baling hay. If you pass the acid test, you didn’t dissolve-you’re the real thing. Most acids dissolve other metals much more quickly than gold, so using acid on a metallic substance became a way for gold prospectors to see if it contained gold. Holding the candle to light a workspace would have been the job of an assistant, so it’s a way of saying "not even fit to be the assistant, much less the artist." 14. In other words, that person isn’t even good enough to hold up a candle so that a talented person can see what they’re doing in order to work. We say someone can’t hold a candle to someone else when their skills don’t even come close to being as good. Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff brought the expression into wider use. You push it as far as you can in order to discover what the limits are. The envelope can be described in terms of mathematical curves based on things like speed, thrust, and atmosphere. The flight envelope is a term from aeronautics meaning the boundary or limit of performance of a flight object. Pushing the envelope belongs to the modern era of the airplane. The origin of the word is obscure, but because it also applied to a tavern or drinking place, it may go back to the Irish word shebeen for a ramshackle drinking establishment. Some officers wrote home about “running the shebang,” meaning the encampment. The earliest uses of shebang were during the Civil War era, referring to a hut, shed, or cluster of bushes where you’re staying. Where the telegraph was a straight line of communication from one person to another, the “grapevine telegraph” was a message passed from person to person, with some likely twists along the way. The communication grapevine was first mentioned in 1850s, the telegraph era. Through the GrapevineĪ grapevine is a system of twisty tendrils going from cluster to cluster. That big pile of cut-outs isn’t going to sew itself together! 10. The image is more that your task is well defined and ready to be tackled, but all the difficult parts are yours to get to. It seems like if your work has been cut for you, it should make job easier, but we don’t use the expression that way. To do a big sewing job, all the pieces of fabric are cut out before they get sewn together. ![]() The expression you’ve got your work cut out for you comes from tailoring. The idea became part of literature and part of the culture, giving us the proverb every cloud has a silver lining in the mid-1800s. The expression can be traced back directly to a line from Milton about a dark cloud revealing a silver lining, or halo of bright sun behind the gloom. The silver lining is the optimistic part of what might otherwise be gloomy. Hands down comes from horse racing, where, if you’re way ahead of everyone else, you can relax your grip on the reins and let your hands down. If too many people were gathering and looking ready for trouble, an officer would let them know that if they didn’t disperse, they would face punishment. It went into effect only when read aloud by an official. When you read someone the riot act you give a stern warning, but what is it that you would have been reading? The Riot Act was a British law passed in 1714 to prevent riots. ![]()
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