![]() You buy an Xbox, and then a trip to Cancun, and then a car, and then go into debt: that string of purchases has a snowball effect on your finances. While an avalanche is usually bad, a snowball effect can be a bad thing or a good thing. Next thing you know, you’re running from an avalanche. Just picture it: a snowball is rolling down a snowy hill, and as it rolls, it gathers more and more snow, getting bigger and bigger. If something has a snowball effect, that means it might start out small, but keeps growing in importance. If you go on a diet cold turkey, you might feel like you did this to yourself in cold blood. Therefore, to do something dispassionately was to act “in cold blood.” Medicine back then wasn’t exactly what it is now, so people thought that blood got hot in the heat of passion. It’s usually used pretty violently: “The victim was murdered in cold blood,” or “Darth Vader killed Obi-Wan in cold blood.”Įtymologists trace the idea to the 1700s or even 1500s. “In cold blood” means without mercy or emotion, suggesting that a cruel act was committed in a calculated, unfeeling way. If you’re feeling sniffly, consider yourself lucky you’re not also on a ship at sea. Etymologists believe that the first folks to say it were probably sailors in the 1800s. If you ever forget, just visualize getting followed around by a raincloud. So if you’re feeling sick, “under the weather” is a way to say so. If you’re under a raincloud, chances are you’re not going to feel 100% healthy, happy, and ready to party. In the case of this idiom, the idea is the latter. Weather can be nice and sunny or cloudy and miserable. (Note: Grammarly is not licensed to give medical opinions about turkey.) Under the weather The phrase may come from addiction doctors in the 1970s, noting the “cold, clammy feel of the skin during withdrawal,” while its earlier uses (back to the 1800s) have to do with straightforward talk or a sudden occurrence. People often use this term when they talk about ways to stop smoking or taking a drug, but you can also use it when you’re talking about diet or other habits. That’s called “going cold turkey”: abruptly stopping a habit that’s bad for you. Really? You can’t just slowly ease off it, eating a little less turkey each day until you’re down to none? NO. Then, the doctor tells you it’s bad for you. With that literary proof, you can turn a cold shoulder on the meat story. Now.” But etymologists are chilly on that origin, tending to favor reports that Scottish author Sir Walter Scott coined the phrase “cauld shouther” in 1816. Some unsavory sources claim that a custom back in Shakespearean times was to serve unwelcome guests a “cold shoulder of mutton”-i.e., not the tastiest meal, and a hard-to-miss sign of “would you be so kind as to get out. And the act shows dismissal or indifference to Dion, so it’s pretty unfriendly, or “cold.” Boom: an idiom is born. If Cher turns her back on Dion, Dion will see Cher’s shoulder. If you’re stressed about the actual origin, we’ve got one thing to say: take a chill pill. It might have shown up in the early days of ADD and ADHD medications like Ritalin, which were designed to calm hyperactive folks and therefore very logically dubbed “chill pills.” Other sources attribute the origin of the phrase to 1990s slang, specifically, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you’re going to tell someone to calm down, why not do it in rhyme? “Chill” means a feeling of coldness, as in, “there was a chill in the air.” Sometime in recent decades, probably the 1970s, the word also came to mean “relax”-just imagine a hippie flower child flashing a peace sign and saying “Chill out, dude.”Įventually, “Take a chill pill” emerged. Feeling under the weather? Walking on thin ice with your vocabulary variety? These idioms will have a snowball effect on your language use this winter.
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