Hey, Use Your Loaf
Red Herrings & White Elephants: The Origins of the Phrases We Use Everyday, 2004
by Albert Jack
This two-decade-old book serves two purposes: it introduces readers to around 420 interesting English phrases and also provides a brief origin story for each one.
I picked up this book to learn new phrases that I could weave into my writing. A phrase's origins was not of much interest to me.
After all, the right phrase adds color to writing and lifts it above the pedestrian. But a phrase's origins is not something writers usually put into their pieces.
As with books of this genre, you'll probably know some of the phrases mentioned here: phrases like to kill the goose that lays the golden egg, sour grapes, to make a mountain out of a molehill and at the eleventh hour are familiar to most of our readers.
But there are plenty of phrases here that you're unlikely to have encountered. How many of you are familiar with Gone Doolally (hint: there's a connection to Maharashtra).
Another phrase in the book with a connection to India is having a dekko.
The 256-page book is divided (by topics such as politics, language, literature, military, food and drink, etc.) into 17 chapters and, mercifully, includes an index as well. Failure to include an index in a book, an increasingly common practice these days, drives me nuts.
It's time to take a look at some of the phrases in the book:
- Gone Doolally: gone crazy (originates from Deolali in Maharashtra where the British colonial army had a military base that included an asylum)
- Have a dekko: take a look
- Red herring: misleading or false clue
- Set off on the wrong foot: to start something badly
- Smell a rat: be suspicious of something without a demonstrative cause
- Use your loaf: use your head, show commonsense
- Two faced: hypocritical
- As drunk as a lord: very intoxicated
- Play fast and loose: describes a person who cannot be trusted with another's affections
- Get someone's goat: to really irritate someone
- White elephant: something useless that will become a burden to its owner
- Hair of the dog: hangover remedy
- Being on cloud nine: feeling of euphoria, great happiness
- Just deserts: when people get what they deserve (often used in a negative sense)
I suspect in this era of LLMs, Vibe Coding and Personal AI Agents few people care about phrases let alone their origins. But I leaf through Red Herrings & White Elephants at least once a week.