OBSCURE ORIGINS of COMMON PHRASES
I was in a meeting this week and my manager said, “I’ll bet that scared the Dickens out of you”. This got me thinking about what possible Charles Dickens story could be so scary that this phrase was born??? NONE- because that’s not the origin of the phrase and over the years we Americans have further obscured the origin due to the capitalization of the word, Dickens.
What the dickens does this mean?
Dickens or rather, dickens was used by Shakespeare as a euphemism for the devil. In his play, The Merry Wives of Windsor the question is asked, “What the dickens”? to mean “What the devil”? So when someone says scare the dickens out of you – they mean to scare the devil out of you and I guess there’s a little devil in all of us!
Bill Ding and his band of clowns are the security patrol for this blog site. He is a favorite toy from the 50*s. By the way sometimes a blog is just an ego-maniacal stream of conscience.
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