50 People Share Sayings They Grew Up With Only To Later Find Out They Were Unique To Their Family

According to Mike from 'Know Your Phrase,' it's possible that some popular sayings that we all use nowadays may have started in a family home.

"After all, these phrases had to have come from somewhere, so a family home is certainly a possibility. When you think of the people who coined certain phrases—for example, the 33rd president of the United States, Harry S. Truman is said to have coined the phrase, 'If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen'—you might wonder if they came up with that themselves, or if maybe they heard it from within their family home. Maybe they heard it from a friend! Who knows?"

Mike stated that, in his opinion, an important factor that increases how likely a saying or an idiom is to spread or become common had to do with the popularity of its source. The more popular the source, the higher the likelihood.

"For example, several common idioms today originated from sports like baseball, boxing, and horse racing. Lots of eyes are on sporting events like these, so if a particular term is said frequently enough by, say, the sports commentators, then the many people watching and listening in might pick up on it and thus that particular phrase spreads."

The majority of idioms that Mike writes about on 'Know Your Phrase' are from the early 1900s, the 1800s, and some are even older. However, this doesn't mean that there aren't any modern idioms; but we do have to widen our gaze a bit and look further back than we'd expect to.

"The closest 'modern-day' idioms I can think of are: 'It's not brain surgery' and 'It's not rocket science.' I believe the former dates back to around the 1960s, while the latter dates back to the 1980s," Mike shared, adding that there are most likely newer examples, but he focuses mostly on older phrases himself.

"The world and families are becoming increasingly diverse," redditor Tysmily told Bored Panda, adding that new languages and idioms have driven new sayings and adaptations as people look to translate their mother tongue sayings to match their new environments. The redditor also revealed that in their family, their mom would say "little birdie" and "little frog" to refer to their and their sister's private parts, respectively, when they were kids. "I haven’t heard anyone else use that," Tysmily shared.

The redditor said that they started the thread out of boredom. "I grew up in a multilingual household, so I was curious about the kind of responses I’d see from across the world," they explained.

While the redditor didn't expect the thread to be a success when they first posed the question, they believe that people like platforms that allow them to share more about themselves and their stories that wouldn't make sense to share with stranger online otherwise. Tysmily believes that this is what lies behind the thread's roaring success.

Whether you call them sayings, idioms, expressions, phrases, or proverbs, they all overlap at some point and it all boils down to having some pearls of wisdom, information, and small lessons to share with someone else in a poetic, metaphorical way. That’s the beauty of language! And once you realize just how much humankind relies on metaphors, there’s no putting that particular genie back in the bottle.

Some of the most popular sayings have very interesting, even mythical, origins. For instance, the phrase ‘turn a blind eye,’ which means willingly refusing to acknowledge reality, supposedly dates back to the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801 when Horatio Nelson brought his telescope to his bad eye and refused to withdraw when ordered to.

Nelson won the engagement, but History.com explains that some historians have dismissed what happened as a battlefield myth. Regardless, the phrase persists to this very day!

Meanwhile, another popular saying, ‘crocodile tears,’ which talks about someone pretending to be sad, comes from the 14th-century belief that crocodiles shed tears of sadness when they ate their prey. The myth was outlined in a book called ‘The Travels of Sir John Mandeville’ and 2 centuries later wound its way into Shakespeare’s plays where the phrase ‘crocodile tears’ became an idiom.

It’s hard to say which sayings will become universal, but one thing’s almost for sure—someone somewhere is already uttering the next popular idiom in their family kitchen, unaware that they might change literary history forever.