Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 129, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 June 1919 — Familiar Phrases Which Recall Adventurous Days [ARTICLE]

Familiar Phrases Which Recall Adventurous Days

How many familiar phrases we use without realizing the apt and sometimes striking figures they represent! Consider the word “skinflint,” for example, or the expression “a flash in the pan.” We ask for “leeway” or we “shorten sailwe “launch plans” or we “run close to the wind.’’ w We have a “close shave;” we speak of a man as “half seas over.” We “take time by the forelock” and “the bull by the horns.” We “get down to_hard pan” or “to bed rock.” Yet we seldom think of the phrases as graphic metaphors, and more seldom still do we think, as we use them, of the adventurous days to which we owe so much of the suggestiveness of our colloquial speech.— Youth’s Companion.