The French phrase “va dans ta niche” translates to “go in your kennel” or “go to your place”. It is an idiomatic expression used to tell someone to go away or leave, often in a dismissive or authoritative way. The phrase implies that the person …
I’m going to take a very puritanical viewpoint on this saying and game. It has always annoyed me and I’ve always felt that it should be not be used as it conjures up a vision in my mind (is it the same for others?) of …
The phrase “dogs of war” refers, today, to human mercenaries; men who enjoy the macho thrill of killing and maiming with destructive weapons. They take a special pleasure in their work of inflicting the maximum damage on others. The phrase has connotations of particularly insensitive, …
In the interests of dog and animal welfare, it is time that humankind stopped comparing the ill-treatment of people with the typical treatment of dogs. This is what the phrase “to be treated worse than the dog” means. It implies, very strongly, that dogs are …
It is time to stop describing bad human behaviour as the behaviour of animals. We all know the saying, “He behaved like an animal”. Today, the papers report on a riot in Bristol, UK. They were protesting against a law which appears to limit their …
This is a very old saying based on superstition and it appears that the phrase “hag-ridden” applies to both people and horses. A hag-ridden person is one afflicted by nightmares or anxieties. A typical sentence might read, “He was hag-ridden by his early success”. It …
Pretty well everyone knows the famous Mahatma Gandhi saying which I repeat here: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated”. There are currently no nationwide laws in China which explicitly prohibit the mistreatment …
No doubt you will find that different people produce a different answer to this question. My research indicates that the idiom “raining cats and dogs” probably comes from a poem by Jonathan Swift entitled A Description of a City Shower. The poem was published in …
