Interesting Facts

The idiom used to describe something that's really boring is "It's like watching paint dry", and you might think you have the most boring job in the world. Think again; Dr Thomas Curwen's is exactly that.   (He has worked for a major paint company in Twyford, England, for the past four years watching the changing colour of paint as it dries – both on walls and up close through a microscope. He says it is fascinating.  He needs to get out more.)

A funeral is the ceremony that is held after someone dies. (In the UK the dead person is usually buried in a coffin or cremated, and the ashes scattered. The reason I'm mentioning this word is that Elizabeth Taylor's funeral was held, and her coffin arrived 15 minutes late. She had requested this in her will, in order to fulfil the idiom "She'd be late for her own funeral". If someone says that someone would be late to their own funeral, they mean that they are always late for meeting or appointments.)

It costs British taxpayers £140,000 a year to send a young offender to prison. (This is six times more than a place at Eton. So, instead of making them "do time", maybe we should send young offenders to Eton, that should help the famous public school with its demographics too - win win.)

According to the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, the saying "Finders keepers (losers weepers)" dates as far back as the early 19th century, recorded as "No halfers-findee keepee, lossee seekee". (It's something that you might say when you find something that belongs to someone else and decide you are going to keep it, but by law, you don't have any right to keep something you 'find'.)

Winston Churchill felt he had been "sold a pup" when he found out that the bunkers he used as his wartime headquarters in Whitehall were not bomb-proof. (The idiom, to be sold a pup, means to be swindled, or tricked into buying something that is not worth what you paid. The saying comes from medieval times, where sometimes if you bought a piglet and the seller placed it in a bag or sack he might slip a puppy into the sack instead of a piglet.)

"Charlie's dead" means that someone's slip is showing. (Slip means petticoat and of course this is from a time gone by, when ladies wore petticoats. "Charlie's dead" was said when a ladies' petticoat was showing below her dress or skirt, along with the equally bizarre "It's snowing down south", which probably started because ladies' petticoats were usually white. There are a couple of different explanations for Charlie's dead though. The first explanation is that the Jacobites wore white ribbons to identify themselves to each other as supporters of "Bonnie Prince Charlie. And after he died you could point to someone who had a piece of white in their clothing and say "Charlie's dead". The other explanation that I found is that it may stem from Charles I, where apparently at his execution the women in the front row dipped their petticoats in his blood. Of course, like most idioms, nobody really knows for s...