When I teach History of English to English majors, I have an etymology assignment where they have to find the origins of a figure of speech. The hardest part of that assignment is almost always finding a reputable scholarly source to support whatever phrase you’ve chosen. Naturally when I saw Why Do We Say That? On the library shelf, I was hopeful. I was shortly thereafter disappointed. This book is indeed a collection of 101 idiomatic phrases (and most of them count as figurative) that […]