There are many, many bogus explanations for phrase origins floating around, and they often get repeated without being properly fact-checked by seemingly-authoritative sources. For example, while Repo Man might be correct about the origins of the terms "high gear" and "low gear," his explanation seems unlikely to me. For as long as people have been using variable-gear systems to get things spinning, they have been starting in high torque, high gear ratios and then gradually moving to lower torque, lower gear ratios as whatever they are spinning gets up to speed. So if you were numbering the order in which gears were sequentially engaged during a spin-up procedure, the lower gear ratios would end up with the "high" numbers. Also, the phrase "not worth his salt" apparently actually originated in the 19th century. It is true that Roman soldiers were sometimes paid in salt, but insulting someone by saying they "aren't worth their salt" is so far as anyone can tell not something that Romans actually did.
For one thing, the Romans spoke Latin. But it could still have originated with them, in a way - the educated English speakers of the 19th century studied Latin and Roman ways. Literate and sophisticated people coin phrases too, after all. And there was plenty of opportunity for metaphor, as in the salting of worthy and unworthy meat in large quantities for the standing armies then coming into vogue. The topic was available. But, most all of our speech is echoes of the past, true? That is, we follow the goddesses gone before.
It seems very probable to me. For one reason, if true, why do bike shops have a table in inches (that correspond to the old large front wheel bikes?) Secondly why would a sequence not be called "1st gear", "2nd gear" as they indeed are, if based on the order of use. There seem no other reason I can think of to call the fastest gear "high" - that is a term of altitude. If arbitarly happen upon "high" completely without any connections to the old big front wheel bikes then one could just as well call 1st grear, "red gear", 2nd "yellow gear" etc. with "green gear" for the fastest and then to claim these color terms were related to the stop light colors would perhaps be reasonable until one notes they were in use before stop lights were invented (by a black man, BTW). Do you have any other reason why an altitude term is applied to gears?
Many of the echoes of the past in our current language do exist in other languages Often even before modern English existed. I think expressions like "An empty wagon makes the most noise" probably is one. (I know that "wagon" is derived from a very old word many thousand of years old and has passed thru many languages to become our English "wagon".) Sometimes in their evolution to another language the expressions get changed. For example in English a hard rain can be described as "Raining cats and dogs." - I have no idea why. But in Portuguese (of Brazil at least) what falls out of the sky is not cats and dogs, but "pocket knives" This leads me to guess that the original expression in some other languages (Greek or Roman most likely) was stating that the rain was "stingingly hard", or "bitingly sharp" or "cutting like a knife" etc.
"Empty vessel" surely? "High" is also a term indicating status or numerical order, not just actual altitude. Four is a higher number than one, perhaps... Sanitation problems, apparently.
I shouldn't need to tell you that it is very common for people to talk about large numbers as being "high." "He got a high score on the test," "My interest rate is too high," "His salary is higher than mine," etc. It is commonly understood that larger numbers can be called "higher" without any implication that altitude is involved. This is arguably abusing the definition of "high," but it's very common usage. It is certainly possible that his explanation is correct. But I have heard so many bogus (but oh-so-plausible-sounding!) phrase origin explanations that I generally doubt them on principle unless they are exceptionally well-referenced and persuasive. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if it turned out we were both wrong, and "high gear" is really a corruption of some similar-sounding phrase in Swedish or Hungarian or Old Norse that means "less torque" or "high speed," or god knows what.
back up a level from Dywyddyr's link and find: The meanings and origins of over 1,200 English sayings, phrases and idioms at: http://www.phrases.org.uk/ Perhaps this thread should end here or chose one you know and dispute the origin given there.
We do call the gear in which you take off from a stop "low gear" or "first gear," after all. This could be because it's the first one you use. But we also call the gear ratio invoked by selecting that setting a "low gear ratio," rather than a "high" one, as an earlier post suggested. We certainly refer to the gear at the other end of the range as "high gear" or "top gear." These days the transmissions in cars, trucks and motorcycles can have almost any number of gears. If you say, "I drove all the way home in third gear," we don't know if you have a 1980 Pontiac with an automatic transmission in which that was the highest gear, a motorcycle or a new car in which that was the middle of five or six gears, or a diesel tractor-truck with fifteen gears. So we don't know whether you're bragging about getting home quickly or complaining about encountering traffic that was crawling. So you'd say, "I drove all the way home in high gear," and we'd know what you meant without having to Google the owner's manual for your vehicle. I have never encountered that website, thanks for the link. I looked up a few idioms at random and it appears that they practice good scholarship; certainly their peer-review process is thorough. Nonetheless, we have to face the fact that the origin of many old sayings is lost in the mists of time. Anything that goes back more than a couple of centuries may simply not have been written down.
I am unsure if it may have been older, but certainly it remains alive because of Macbeth. In the play, Macduff learns of the death of his family and states: Since the kite is a hunting bird the image suggests a bird of prey snatching up or killing multiples chicks in a single (ruthless) dive. Much of language is holdover, even individual words, rather than idioms often hearken back to some earlier time. Avatar comes from Hindi and meant the earthly form of a divine being. Phony (or phoney) has nothing to do with telephones. It comes from an old cant word ("fawney") used by British thieves to describe a gilt brass ring that they would sell to the gullible telling them that the ring was solid gold. It comes from Irish "fainne" (ring). Plummers are so named because pipes used to be made out of lead, the Latin for which is plumbum. Umbrellas were originally used to produce portable shade (from "umbra" meaning shadow). Engine comes form a word for skill or cleverness, ultimately from Latin "ingenium" which meant inborn qualities or talent. By the middle ages "engin" was being used in French to describe the most complex machines they knew of, siege engines (like the trebuchet, mangonel and ballista) used in warfare. Avocado got its name from the Aztec "ahucatl" (testicle) partly because among the Aztec it was thought to be an aphrodisiac. Quintessential comes from the words for "fifth element" a substance much sought after by many alchemists. "Quintessence" was thought to be what the Sun and stars were made of. Alcohol originally means (and comes from the Arabic for) "fine metallic powder used to darken the eyelids" (in Europe the metal was antimony, which is somewhat poisonous). Hazard originally meant "to gamble with dice" in French ("hasard"), with its ultimate root possibly from Arabic. Bootleg refers to long leather boots worn by cowboys and cattlemen in the old west and the practice of hiding illicit goods (knives, guns, flasks, etc) in the boot, hidden away. Malaria comes from "mal" (bad) and "aria" (air) and dates from a time when people thought foul smells caused disease. Malaria originally referred to the fetid smell of swamps that was thought to cause fever. Tawdry was originally a silk necktie worn by women in the middle ages. It's an alteration of "St Audrey's Lace" which had the same meaning. Robot comes from the Czech word "robota" for "forced labor." It comes from the play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karl Čapek, in the 1920s. Slave comes from the word for "Slav" simply because they were so often subjected to slavery. Quarantine comes from a word for "about forty" which was the rough length of time, in days, a ship would be forced to remain offshore if there was any suspicion that it carried disease. Salary was originally an allowance paid to a soldier so he could purchase salt, from the Latin "sal" for "salt." Some Roman sources indicate that soldiers were partly paid in salt directly.
My interest in this came from a friend of mine asking me why, in terms of automotive final drive ratios, low numerical ratios were referred to as high gears, or tall gears, and high numerical ratios were referred to as low, or granny gears. I'm quite confident I'm correct, but I can find nothing online to confirm or deny it. The following is neutral, but interesting. The high-wheeler lives on in the gear inch units used by cyclists in English-speaking countries to describe gear ratios.[27] These are calculated by multiplying the wheel diameter in inches by the number of teeth on the front chain-wheel and dividing by the teeth on the rear sprocket. The result is the equivalent diameter of a penny-farthing wheel. A 60-inch gear, the largest practicable size for a high-wheeler, is nowadays a middle gear of a utility bicycle, while top gears on many exceed 100 inches. There was at least one 64-inch Columbia made in the mid 1880s,[28] but 60 was the largest in regular production. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny-farthing You have to admit, a 60 inch wheel is a tall gear indeed. For some pure conjecture, I've always assumed that referring to low gears as "granny gears" was just macho derision of cyclists towards anyone who needed a very low gear for hills.
The word mile come from the Latin milia passuum or 1000 paces. According to an essay written by Isaac Asimov (written to point out the absurdities of the standard system of weights and measures), it was the distance a fully laden Roman legion could travel on an average day. No confirmation on the Roman legion part, but no doubt about the 1000 paces part.
Given the ultimate Irish origin, I wonder if the word came into English from Shelta, the cant of the Irish Travellers. No, it's just "labor," cognate with the Russian verb rabotat', "to work." I don't know of any other English word of Czech origin. This took some sleuthing, but the original use of the word "granny" in bicycle technology was "granny ring." This was the smallest sprocket (the Brits call it a "chain ring") on the front set of sprockets connected to the pedal crank. I gather that since it has the smallest number of teeth within that set, it was named for an old woman who had lost most of her teeth.
I suspect (but cannot prove) that calling a low gear a granny gear dates from the penny farthing style bicycles. If there is a definitive answer, it apparently isn't online. I might have to actually visit a library, and see if I can find something.
Interesting. My understanding, for which I will need to find a source, is that in Czech it carried the connotation of serfdom, though it could be used figuratively to mean "work as unpleasant as a serf's. Edit: Good enough for 3 a.m.: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Birth-of-a-Robot.html?c=y&page=2 There is also the Online Etymology Dictionary: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=robot It does not mention "serfdom" but does mention forced labor and a relation to the Czech word for slave.
No, "low gear" is synonymous with "high gear ratio." It's incorrect to refer to "low gear" as "low gear ratio." "Low gear ratio" would imply "high gear."
In Sao Paulo paper today one editorial headline is: Torres de Marfim, which means Ivory Towers For me ivory tower is a reference to an academic POV, with probably some lack of reality or practical appliction. Where does this come from? Here is what the phrase link (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/210800.html) states about early use but it really does not tell why: "The first mention of ivory towers is in the Bible, Song of Solomon 7:4 (King James Version): Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus. That biblical allusion is to the notion of ivory towers as symbols of virginal purity. {I don't think so - more like we now say "skin like ivory" but that discription of the nose does not seem very kind to me!} The contemporary figurative meaning is of a place of unworldly isolation. This may be in allusion to the famous Hawksmoor Towers of Oxford University's All Souls' College, which are ivory in colour (or at least, they were when they were built in 1716). The relative lateness of the first uses of the phrase (below) tend to argue against that derivation. There are citations of the term in French in the 19th century but the earliest work in English that specifically refers to the current meaning of the phrase is a collaborative work of Frederick Rothwell and the splendidly named Cloudesley Shovell Henry Brereton -H. L. Bergson's Laughter, 1911: "Each member [of society] must be ever attentive to his social surroundings - he must avoid shutting himself up in his own peculiar character as a philosopher in his ivory tower." ..."
Not sure about all of those above, but: An agua gato is a water-cat, or alligator, in spanish. They have rough, dimply skin like an avocado. I believe that is the more likely origin of the word. As to "raining cats and dogs", the debunking link needs to be debunked. There was a breed of dogs that lived on roofs. They were called roof-dogs; or in german Dachs-hund. They had short legs so they wouldn't easily topply off the roof. The debunking page claimed that was silly. How else did the Germans come up with that name for a short-legged dog. So, it seems very plausible to me that the cats and dachshunds embeeded in the thatch would come tumbling down, and/or coming off the roof to seek shelter, when it started raining hard.
That is the one of the most bizarre etymologies I've ever heard! Der Dachs is the German word for badger. Badgers are burrowing animals so a dog that's meant to hunt badgers has to be built for following them into their burrows. Der Dachshund = badger hound. Some other languages translate that literally; we just use the German name. The confusion comes from the German word das Dach, which means "roof." But a "roof hound" would be der Dachhund. They would not put the genitive ending -s on it to build that compound.
