Old idiom a flash in the pan

Readers sick of my love affair with idioms and slang, take heart (encouragement). This is it for a while; I won't be listing them until the cows come home (from free range grazing).

As promised, some 16th century idiom stories (and Internet fallacies) are today's topic. Dieters will love them; they're appetite killers.

My daughter came home with a few of these, sticking a bee in my bonnet (originally, Scottish men's bonnets). As with many "facts" these days, some have truth, and others lack evidence. Relying on a few historical periodicals and websites, I gleaned enough likelihood of truth not to toss the baby out with the bathwater (hard to say if family bathing hierarchy made that a possibility in dirty water, but bathing was so rare it makes you wonder).

Moving to the kitchen, consider the porridge pot. Without plumbing, dishwashers, or endless soap, things were cooked in a kettle always over the fire. Dump it in, scoop it out, add more (without washing) for the next meal. Mostly that was vegetables, as meat wasn't plentiful. After a while, what was in the pot was hardly appetizing, given the thick layers of remnants from meals gone by. Peas porridge in the pot, nine days old. Yum. So what if the song came a couple of centuries later?

Now as meat was not a daily treat, pork was a delicacy. So a man who could "bring home the bacon" was a catch. The stories say if you had special guests around that time, they were treated to pork fat. If there was enough, the hosts joined in, "chewing the fat" at a social occasion. This last bit hasn't sufficient evidence, although it's often repeated.

Speaking of dignitaries, they really did get the upper crust. Confirmed by historians, bread was divided around this time (if not before) by section. The workers got the bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and the guest or highest on the "food" chain got the upper crust.

Many others allegedly from this time period have little basis in fact. "Dead ringer" is an old horse racing term referring to identical looks, not from caskets of olden days for those buried alive (although "saved by the bell" might apply). Trenchers really were mealy-wormed, poor man's bowls made of hard bread or wood, but "trench mouth" was coined much later in World War I. And cats and dogs didn't fall willy nilly (opposites, noun "will" and "nill" - the negative) from roofs. Old myths and fables associated rain with cats, and the wind, with dogs.

And that flash in the pan? Not the gold prospector's. The flintlock musket explanation is difficult to confirm, but the explanation does make sense considering the French origin of both the gun with the "pan" against which the flint ignited (invented about 1610; adopted by British in 1862), and the phrase - "Ca n'a ete qu'un feu de paille."

English is so rich with idioms and slang that we hardly notice, making it one of the most challenging to learn as a second language. So forgive me for going to town on the subject.

Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network who found English the most difficult of those learned in her childhood. Email sholehjo@hotmail.com