Historical origins of some idioms.

Here is a passage that was forwarded to me, which describes the origins of many English idioms, such as 'one for the road' and 'raining cats and dogs'. I'm not sure it's 100% accurate, but I think you'll find it interesting anyway:

There is an old Hotel/Pub in Marble Arch, London, which used to have a gallows adjacent to it. Prisoners were taken to the gallows (after a fair trial of course) to be hanged. The horse-drawn dray, carting the prisoner, was accompanied by an armed guard, who  would stop the dray outside the pub and ask the  prisoner if he would
Like ''ONE LAST DRINK''.  If he said YES, it was referred to as ONE FOR THE ROAD.   If he declined, that Prisoner was ON THE WAGON.
 
They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot and t hen once a day it  was taken and sold to the tannery. If you had to do this to survive you were "piss poor", but  worse than that were the really poor folk, who  couldn't even afford to buy a pot, they "Didn't  have a pot to piss in" and were the lowest of  the low.
 
The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water
Temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to  be.
 
Here are some facts about the 1500s: Most people got married in June, because t hey took  their yearly bath in May and they still smelled  pretty good by June. However, since they were starting to smell, brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odour. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.
 
Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water.  The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it.  Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water!" 

Houses had thatched roofs, thick straw piled high, with no wood underneath. It was t he only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof.  When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof.  Hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs."      
  
There was nothing to stop things from  falling into the house. This posed a real
problem in the bedroom, where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence. The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying, "dirt poor." The wealthy
Had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their  footing. As the winter wore on they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance. Hence: a thresh hold.
 
In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung
over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate
mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for
dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight, then start over the next
day.  Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence
The rhyme: ''Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot, nine days old''.   
  
Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When
visitors came over they would hang up their bacon, to show off. It was a sign of
wealth that a man could, "Bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to
Share with guests and would all sit around talking and  ''chew the fat''.    

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning and death.  This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.   

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf,
The family got the  middle, and guests got the top, or ''The Upper  Crust''.  
 
Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and  wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of ''Holding a Wake''.      
  
England is old and small and the local folks started  running out of places
to bury people, so they  would dig up coffins and would take the bones to 
a bone-house and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out
of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realised they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, thread it through the coffin and up  through the ground and tie it to a  bell.   Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night  (the graveyard shift) to listen for the bell;  thus someone could be, ''Saved by the Bell ''or  was considered a ''Dead Ringer''

Who invented English grammar rules?

If you've ever wondered why English has such odd grammar rules, here's an excerpt from the book 'English Grammar for Dummies':

The next time you try to decide whether you had run or had ran home, thank the Angles and the Saxons. Those old guys were members of Germanic tribes who invaded England about 1500 years ago. Their languages blended into Anglo-Saxon, which came to be called Englisc. Nowadays it's called "Old English."

Old English lasted about 400 years; this English would look and sound like a foreign language to English-speakers today. Although it's gone, Old English isn't forgotten. Remnants remain in modern speech. You can thank (or blame) the Anglo-Saxons for most of the irregular verbs, including the fact that you say ran instead of runned.

In the Middle English period (1100 to about 1450) England was speckled with local dialects, each with its own vocabulary and sentence structure. Nobody studied grammar in school, and nobody worried about what was correct or incorrect. (There were a few more important items on the agenda, including starvation and the bubonic plague.)

In the fifteenth century the printing press was invented and the era of Modern English began. At this time, folks were more interested in learning to read and also more interested in writing for publication. But writers faced a new problem. Sending one's words to a different part of the country might mean sending them off to someone whose vocabulary or sentence structure was different. Not to mention the fact that spelling was all over the place! 

Suddenly, rules seemed like a good idea. London was the center of government and economic life — and also the center of printing. So what the London printers decided was right soon became right. However, not until the eighteenth century did the rules realty become set Printers, in charge of turning handwriting into type, were guided by "printers' bibles," also known as the rules. 

Schoolmasters tried to whip the English language into shape by writing the rules down. But they grafted Latin concepts onto English, and it wasn't always a good fit. In fact, some of the loonier rules of English grammar come from this mismatch. In Latin, for example, you can't split an infinitive because an infinitive is a single word. In English, infinitives are formed with two words (to plus a verb, as in to dance, to dream). Nevertheless, the rule was handed down: no split infinitives.

The History of English in 10 Minutes

Here is an interesting link. It's a YouTube video playlist featuring ten one-minute videos by the Open University.

Altogether, they make up the 'ten-minute history or English'.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?p=PLA03075BAD88B909E