The Full English

The mother tongue you thought you knew like the back of your hand turns out to be a horse of a different colour. 

Sir James Murray, first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, faced a monumental task

English is a right old mishmash of languages, a hotchpotch that has absorbed influences piecemeal from the four corners of the earth and across all the seven seas. The upshot is that our lingo, this stuff from which we spin our yarns and crack our gags, what we use to chew the fat and have a chinwag, has become a hotbed of verbal oddities.

These quirky turns of phrase – more than you can shake a stick at – are second nature to us and we use them willy-nilly, at the drop of a hat. But the lion’s share of these common or garden sayings, which we think are plain as a pikestaff, are actually, if you use your noggin, quite quizzical conundrums, and some of them, when they show their true colours, appear perfectly potty. Get down to the nitty-gritty, and the mother tongue that you thought you knew like the back of your hand turns out to be a horse of quite a different colour – more like double Dutch.

Kudos should go to Mark Forsyth, then, author of The Etymologicon, who has tried to sort out this linguistic mare’s nest and help us see the wood for the trees. Clearly a man who knows his onions, Mr Forsyth must have worked 19 to the dozen, spotting red herrings and unravelling inkhorn terms, to bestow this boon – a work of the first water, to coin a phrase.  

From The Telegraph