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In the mid-19th century, on Texas’s Gulf Coast, Samuel Maverick was given four hundred head of cattle to settle a debt.  Maverick had little interest in ranching, and didn’t even brand his calves. As a result, in southwest Texas, “mavericks” referred to unbranded cattle.  This term subsequently was applied to independent human beings as well. …

An op ed I wrote is in today’s Christian Science Monitor: https://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0526/p09s01-coop.html

When most homes were heated with burning logs, woodsheds were a common sight outside. Most of these ramshackle outbuildings were far from houses themselves, making them an ideal location for smoking corn silk and touching one’s privates, or someone else’s.  It also was where parents beat their children.  They were “taken to the woodshed.”

“Iron curtain” was the name given fireproof metallic curtains that were first installed in theaters during the late eighteenth century. Since the early twentieth century iron curtain has been used by many a speaker or writer to refer to a country sealed off from its neighbors.  Before Churchill used this term in 1946, Nazi propagandists …

During the 1820s a new type of lamp incorporated a rotating container of incandescent lime which was heated to the point that it gave off intense light. So-called limelighting was used by theaters around the world until it was replaced by electric arc lamps late in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless we still say that actors …

In the comic strip Li’l Abner, a gnomish, scowling hoodlum named Evil Eye Fleegle could flatten any man or woman alive by focusing one eye on his targets while pointing in their direction. That was a whammy.  When Fleegle used both eyes and two fingers, this double whammy was powerful enough to topple a skyscraper …