Some, such as James Rogers (The Dictionary of Cliches,1985) think that the expression can be traced all the way back to the Roman poet Catullus, who used the Latin expression “per caputque pedesque” (literally, over both head and feet) in a poem written around 60 BC; others, such as Robert Hendrickson (QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, 2004) claim that a direct line of descent from the Latin phrase to the English cannot be proven and is therefore best ignored. At any rate, it is certain that the phrase has been around for a very long time in English, and that for most of its lfe it was indeed in inverted order: “heels over head” rather than “head over heels.” That is how it appears, for instance, in its earliest documented appearance in English, in a mid-fourteenth-century alliterative poem, where it is used to describe someone turning a cartwheel or a somersault, and that is the form in which it appeared for the following four centuries. In the late eighteenth century, however, it began to appear in reverse order, for some unknown reason, and, again for some unknown reason, that is the form that has survived and is still used in our own day. It may have begun, indeed in all likelihood it did begin,as a silly mistake: the kind of mindless inversion that every writer sometimes makes when writing too quickly. But the inverted (and illogical) form caught on. The earliest recorded instance of it comes from 1771, when a poet named Herbert Lawrence wrote a work called The Contemplative Man, which contained the line “He gave [him] such a violent involuntary kick in the Face, as drove him Head over Heels.”

In that example, the phrase still means tumbled over, fallen backward,(physically) upset. This was the meaning that prevailed for the first five centuries of the phrase’s life: it was akin to such expressions as upside-down, bottoms up, topsy-turvy, ass over teakettle, etc. Nowadays, however, it is used almost exclusively in a figurative sense, and almost exclusively in the expression mentioned in the first paragraph of this article: head over heels in love. That refinement of application we owe to a rather unlikely source: the American frontiersman and hero of the Battle of the Alamo, Davy Crockett, who was a real person and who first used the expression in this way in his Narrative of the Life of David Crockett (1834): “I soon found myself head over heels in love with this girl.” English speakers around the world have been falling head over heels in love ever since.

It should be noted, however, that not all writers have been content to use an expression that makes no literal sense; a few purists have heroically tried to revive it in its original (and more logical) form. Michael Quinion (http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-hea3.htm) notes two of the most famous of these:

. . . as late as the beginning of the twentieth century L. Frank Baum consistently used the older form in his Oz books: “But suddenly he came flying from the nearest mountain and tumbled heels over head beside them.” And Lucy Maud Montgomery stayed with it in her Anne of Windy Poplars, published as late as 1936: “Gerald’s pole, which he had stuck rather deep in the mud, came away with unexpected ease at his third tug and Gerald promptly shot heels over head backward into the water.”

The enormous popularity of both of these writers has not proved enough, however, to reintroduce logic into everyday usage: if it was “heels over head” for four centuries, it has been “head over heels” for two and a half, and it seems likely that it will remain “head over heels.” Where is it written that language has to be logical?

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First of all, who was he? Impossible to say for sure. My usual sources cannot, in fact, even agree on the spelling of the name: while most agree that it is Reilly, two of them suggest that it is Riley, and there is even one candidate for O'Reilly! Good Irish names, all of them, but the expression, in fact, was coined on this side of the Atlantic. Whether his name was Reilly or O'Reilly, the person referred to seems to have been a character in an American song popular in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.

There are two candidates: one, "Is That Mr. Reilly?" comes from 1882 and was written and performed by the vaudeville performer Pat Rooney. It concerns what the hero of the song, a man named Riley, would do if he suddenly struck it rich, promising, among other things to "swim in wine when the White House and Capitol are mine": he intends, in other words, to lead the life of Riley! This song was championed as the origin of the expression by John Bartlett, of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations fame, but the critic and essayist H. L. Mencken believed that the expression derived from.yet another song, written around the turn of the century by Lawlor and Blake and titled "The Best in the House Is None Too Good for Reilly." James Rogers, of The Dictionary of Clichés muddies the waters somewhat by telling us that the name of the Pat Roney song was not "Is That Mr. Reilly?" but "Are You the O'Reilly?" and even quotes the refrain:

Are you the O'Reilly who keeps this hotel?

Are you the O'Reilly they speak of so well?

Are you the O'Reilly they speak of so highly?

Gor blime, O'Reilly, you're looking well.

It is quite possible, of course, that Pat Rooney wrote and began performing two songs in 1882, and that they had similarly but not identically named protagonists. Whatever the case, there do seem to have been several songs involving a Riley or Reilly or O'Reilly touring the American vaudeville circuit in the last two decades or so of the nineteenth century, all of them featuring protagonists who could very well have inspired the popular expression: Riley and Reilly are pronounced identically, of course, and the difference between "the life o' Reilly" and "the life o' O'Reilly" when spoken aloud is minimal.So it is quite possible that the hero of one or both (or all three, if there were indeed three) of these songs―and of any other, as yet undiscovered, Riley/Reilly/O'Reilly vaudeville songs from the same period―could be the person referred to. Indeed, it is possible that the protagonists merged in the public mind, and provided the origin of the carefree Reilly of the expression.

But the Reillys (hoever spelled) from the world of vaudeville song are not the only candidates. There remains a contender who was a real person: in the QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, Robert Hendrickson concludes a mention of the Bartlett and Mencken choices as follows: "Yet the Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916) may just lend his name in some way to the saying. Riley's simple, sentimental poems depicting the lives of barefoot boys loafing and living a life of ease in the summer, were immensely popular at the time the phrase came into use." It is true that in past days poetry, especially sentimental poetry of the type Hendrickson describes, had a far greater audience than it has had in latter days. It is even possible that the name of the poet became confused with the vaudeville-song protagonists who led similarly carefree lives.

In Common Phrases and Where They Come From, John Mordock and Myron Korach go a bit farther, suggesting that Riley may have contributed to the expression not only through the carefree, idyllic existence of his characters, but also through the (bad) example of his own life. Noting that the poet is sometimes depicted as "one of the laziest men ever to come out of Indiana," they go on to say

Before his recognition as a poet, his neighbors often wondered about him. He left school at sixteen and occasionally worked odd jobs. He often appeared in the streets of Greenfield, Indiana, more than slightly inebriated, indulging himself with many a lark and spree. In fact, Riley was considered the town loafer. Mothers taught their children not to live the "life of Riley."

A bit fanciful, perhaps, for it does not explain how the expression could have spread beyond Greenfield, Indiana to the whole of North America (and beyond): something the itinerant nature of vaudeville and the wide popularity of Mr. Riley's poetry both do. But who knows for sure? the language develops in wonderful ways!

Incidentally, the expression "Gor blime," pronounced gor-blimey, in the O'Reilly refrain quoted above is a British-English corruption, still used today, of "God blame me [if what I say is not the truth]," and a Hoosier, for those of us who are not Americans, is a native or resident of the American state of Indiana. Why? . . . Well, perhaps another day!

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The phrase is indeed redundant, and intentionally so: it is a classic example of the linguistic phenomenon known as doubling, which is repeating the same idea using a different word, often a word with a slightly different nuance of meaning, for emphasis, to avoid misunderstanding or misinterpretation (it is used very often in legal documents for this reason), or simply for rhetorical flourish. In this case, where "all and sundry" is used as a synonym for everybody, the word all means everybody considered as a group or as a totality, whereas sundry means everybody considered as individuals, each separate and unique: it comes from the Old English word syndrig, which meant separate, and is related to the modern English word sunder. So "all and sundry" has the same meaning and is used for the same reasons as the other common doubles "one and all" and "each and every."

One of the hosts on CBC Radio Two (possibly Katie Mallek) wondered aloud why we say that somebody is "on the gravy train" to mean that they have a rather cushy job. She noted that there used to be a dog food called Gravy Train, and wondered how that brand name passed into the language and came to mean a job involving maximum benefits for minimum work. Good question!

I begin my answer by pointing out that Gravy Train dog food still exists: it is one of the brands owned by the parent company DelMonte Foods. It is sold dry but is intended to be mixed with water before being served, a process that immerses the solids in a gravy-flavoured liquid. To quote from the brand's Web site, <http://www.gravytraindog.com/:

If there's one thing dogs love, it's rich, beefy gravy. That's why every nugget of Gravy Train is basted in real beef juices. Just mix it with warm water, and you can give your dog a warm homestyle meal, dripping with the delicious gravy he loves.

The phrase is much older than the dog food, however. Like many brand names, this one is a small play on words: Gravy Train's distinuishing feature is that it produces a rich gravy when water is added, and the dog who is fed it presumably lives the life of Reilly. In other words, the expression gave rise to the name of the product rather than the other way round.

For the origin of the expression we have to go back all the way to the beginning of the last century (or, strictly speaking, to the end of the nineteenth): in 1900 we come across the first recorded us of the word gravy to mean easily acquired money, a sense that was played on in the 1951 Jerry Lewis song "The Navy Gets the Gravy (But the Army Gets the Beans)," the words to which can be found at <http://www.themadmusicarchive.com/song_details.aspx?SongID=7531>! The point of the song was that compared to the typical soldier, the typical sailor lives a life of luxury. He has climbed aboard the gravy train, in other words.

Train? What train? Why a train? That is because the expression in its present form originated as railway slang: the expression "gravy train" was invented by railwaymen in the 1920s to describe a run on which there was little work but for which the pay was good. The railways were very important in the life of early twentieth-century North America, and the expression quickly spread beyong the railway yards, in the process taking on the meaning it still has: any job that demands little but pays well or, often, just prosperity, however come by Its first appearance in print seems to have been in Benjamin Bodkin's 1945 novel, Lay My Burden Down: "They is on the gravy train and don't know it. . . ."

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Why do we say . . . that something that is spoken sarcastically, ironically, or facetiously is spoken with tongue in cheek? Have you ever tried speaking with your tongue literally in your cheek? Either what you say will be completely unintelligible, or you will end up biting your tongue!

What we all do, of course, is push out our cheek with the tip of the tongue to indicate that what we just said was uttered "tongue in cheek." And we all understand what this well-know gesture means: there's even an e-mail "smilie" for it: :-^ . But why does it mean that? What connection is there between putting one's tongue in one's cheek and not meaning one's words to be taken literally?

I am sorry to say that a careful consultation of my ever-expanding library (both computer-based and tree-based) about word and phrase origins, I have failed to come up with even a hare-brained theory for the origin of this expression. And that in itself is just a bit strange. Perhaps the expression is nothing more than a straightforward reporting of a gesture that is timeless and universal, at least in the English-speaking world. Putting one's tongue in one's cheek could be just as commonplace a gesture as, say, winking, which is used in similar circumstances.

I had, indeed, come to this conclusion when I came across this startling statement in Robert Hendrickson's QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins (New York: Facts on File, 2004):

Before Richard Barham invented this phrase in his The Ingoldsby Legends (1845) nobody stuck tongue in cheek as a humorous warning that something just said was insincere, so Barham could be creditied with inventing the custom as well as the expression. Why he chose with tongue in cheek to describe someone engaging in insincerity or irony is a mystery. Especially as anyone actually speaking with tongue in cheek—the tongue tip lodged against the inside of the cheek—wouldn't be understood at all.

In fact, this claim makes sense. Dictionaries, including the OED, agree that the first recorded use of the phrase was in Barham's work (which the OED dates three years earlier, however). Furthermore, in that instance the meaning of the phrase is clear enough from context that readers would know instantly what it meant, even if (though?) they had never heard or seen it before: "He . . . / Cried Superbe! Magnifique! / (With his tongue in his cheek.)" In all fairness, it should be mentioned that the OED does give an earlier appearance of the phrase, in Sir Walter Scott's The Fair Maid of Perth (1828), but in that instance it is not at all clear what it means, so it is not likely to have made the gesture popular. It seems highly unlikely that a timeless gesture universally understood in the English-speaking world would have gone. Without a written record of its existence until the first half of the nineteenth century: winking, for instance, was recorded as early as the year 1500.

So I am inclined to Henrickson's claim that both the gesture and the phrase were invented by Barham, at least until such time as earlier evidence of either (or, preferably, both together) should turn up. The why will have to remain a mystery—unless Barham read it in Scott and gave it his own interpretation. The Scott passage, by the way reads as follows: "The fellow who gave the all-hail thrust his tongue in his cheek to some scapegraces like himself."

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Why do we say . . . that an unexpected event or development throws a monkey wrench (or, in British English a spanner, or, sometimes, just a wrench) into the works?

This one is not too hard to explain: one can easily see how dropping a tool such as a wrench (which is indeed called a spanner in the UK) into a running piece of machinery, whether accidentally or on purpose, will cause that piece of machinery to shut down (at the very least) rather peremptorily. And indeed we use the expression in both senses, the accidental or coincidental and the intentional, all the time: "in 1980 a TAP strike threw a monkey wrench into my plans to return home from Portugal for Christmas" (I do not for a moment believe that anyone who worked for that airline had any knowledge of my plans or any concern about whether I realized them), but "when I heard what was going on I decided to stay home, throwing a monkey wrench into my colleagues' plans to hold a 'surprise' party for me" (the act was deliberate and preventive). In its intentional sense the expression is perhaps an allusion to the reported French practice of throwing one's wooden shoes (sabots) into the works in order to bring them to a halt, a practice that has given us the word sabotage.

Not that the English expression refers to anything that specific: the image of throwing (or dropping) a tool into the works and thereby causing them to derail seems to be just that: an image, as we can see from its first recorded use, in P. G. Wodehouse's 1934 novel, Right Ho, Jeeves: "He should have had sense enough to see that he was throwing a spanner into the works." This sounds so much like Wodehouse that it is possible that he in fact invented the expression rather than simply recording something he had had heard somebody say. I do hope this is true: I'm rather a fan of Wodehouse and he deserves to have contributed at least one expression to the language!

OK, so what is a monkey wrench, and why is it called that? The first question is rather easy to answer: it is an adjustable wrench without gnarling on the gripping surfaces so that it does not damage the finish of the object being gripped. Similar to a pipe wrench, the difference being in the mechanism that makes it possible to adjust the wrench. But why it is called a monkey wrench is somewhat more difficult to determine. Wrench comes from the Old English word wrenc, which meant, according to the Online Etymological Dictionary (http://www.etymonline.com), "a twisting, artifice, trick," with the modern meaning as a tool for gripping and turning something first recorded in 1794. Monkey wrench didn't appear until the next century, in 1858. The most fanciful theory is that the mechanism for adjusting the wrench consisted of a long threaded pole around which a hollow circular screw rose or fell, causing the jaws of the wrench to open or close, and that this mechanism resembled a child's toy of the period, which could be made to climb or descend a tree by means of a similar mechanism.

Another, less whimsical theory is that the monky wrench was named after its supposed inventor, an Englishman named Charles Moncke or Moncky. This would be rather odd if true, because, as we have seen, the British call a monkey wrench a(n adjustable) spanner! But Charles Moncke is not the only claimant to the honour of having invented the monkey wrench, which is also often assigned to an American inventor named Monk, in or around 1856, and that timing seems just right for the invention to have entered the language two years later, bearing a playful corruption of the inventor's name. Sounds good to me!

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Once again, as with so many expressions that have become engrained in the language, the answer to this question is that nobody knows for sure. It is just something we say, and since everybody knows what we mean when we say it, we go on saying it.

As with most expressions in this category, however, the mere fact that nobody can say for certain why we use the expression has not prevented a host of theories from arising and from sometimes being taken as fact. One of these alludes to the time when capital punishment was still widespread and the preferred means of dispatching miscreants was the gallows. Apparently it was not an unusual occurrence for the noose to fail to break the miscreant's neck, thus delaying his death and submitting him to "cruel and unusual punishment" as the much lengthier process of asphyxiation took its toll. In some such cases, we are told, it was not unusual for family members and friends to grab on to the hanged person's legs and pull, in an effort to hasten death and shorten agony. This "explanation" is often supported by quoting a Scottish rhyme (1867) in which the expression appears (but substituting the word drew for the word pulled) in reference to the rather grim practice: "He preached, and at last drew the auld body's leg, / Sae the Kirk got the gatherins o' our Aunty Meg." Among other places, this rhyme is cited in the Answerbag (http://www.answerbag.com/q-view/449905), which offers this exegesis: "The suggestion [. . .] is that Aunty Meg was hung [sic] for a crime and, at the end, the preacher pulled on her legs to ensure that she was dead." In a variation to this grisly explanation another Answerbag contributor posits that the legs of hanged criminals were pulled not by sympathizers in an act of humanitarianism but by poor children, in an effort "to get something of value to pop out"!

These explanations are colourful, if nothing else. And execution by hanging was indeed widespread at the time when the expression first made it into print, some time in the late nineteenth century: the OED dates the earliest printed appearance as 1888, in Blackbirding, by W. B. Churchward: "Then I shall be able to pull the leg of that chap Mike. He is always trying to do me." But there is where the problem with the explanation lies: there is nothing at all gruesome about the 1888 usage. Rather it suggests an activity that is a mixture of deception and good-humoured mockery, which mirrors the modern usage precisely. It is very difficult to imagine how the expression could evolve from an allusion to swinging on a hanged person's legs to a meaning of playfully taking the mickey out of someone. But gallows humour is not unknown, and it is possible that the expression first gained popularity in a work (perhaps a stage production) in which the ghoulish practice was used to comic effect. Until such a source is discovered and produced, however, the explanation must, I think, be classified as unlikely.

Slightly more likely is the explanation that the expression refers to the practice of street thieves of tripping their victims to make them fall down or at least lose their balance, whereupon they are easier to rob. Certainly there is the element of deception here that is present in the modern use of the expression; what is missing, however, is the sense of light-hearted fun that the modern usage encompasses. There was an early-twentieth-century Scottish idiom, to draw somebody's leg, which no doubt sprang from that practice, but it meant to make a fool of somebody by cheating: not quite so innocent and occupation as we now take it to be.

It seems most likely that the idiom as we now use it stems from a similar practice, but one that is a form of foolery rather than a prelude to crime: the practical joker and the slapstick comic both regularly try to make people stumble or even fall with no intent other than to raise a laugh at their expense. I have found only one authority that advances this explanation, the anonymous Why Do We Say It? (Secaucus, NJ: Castle, 1985), and their explanation is very short, but it is, on the whole, the one to which I give most credence: "The allusion is to tripping up a man by catching at his foot or 'pulling his leg.' This, of course, makes the man fall—and to see a person fall is considered comic by all mankind."

And I'm not pulling your leg when I say that!

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This is yet another of those common expressions that everybody has heard and many have used, and yet nobody can say for certain where it comes from. What we do know is that did not make it first appearance in print until the late nineteenth century. This fact alone is enough to discount two frequently advanced explanations. The first of these was originally propounded by no less an authority than Walter Skeat, editor of the Oxford Etymological Dictionary and the very first secretary of the English Dialect Society, who suggested that the phrase may once have been "dressed ’to then eyen,’" which is "to the eyes" in mediaeval English. An attractive explanation (it follows the pattern of "dressed to the teeth" which one occasionally hears), which, however has two insurmountable drawbacks: no record of the phrase has ever been found in a mediaeval document and even if one were to be found, what explanation could possibly be advanced for the several centuries between the mediaeval period and our own during which there is no record whatsoever of the phrase? The same objections can be raised against the similar suggestion made by the Online Etymological Dictionary (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?l=n&p=5): "No one seems to consider that it might be a corruption of to then anes, lit. ’for the one (purpose or occasion),’ a construction similar to the one that yielded nonce. . . ." Indeed: there seem to be good reasons for not considering it.

Another explanation that sounds almost convincing is that the expression comes from the uniforms worn by the British Army’s 99^th Foot Regiment, also known as the Wiltshire or the Duke of Edinburgh’s Regiment. Their uniforms, so the story goes, were so dapper that other regiments who served with them strove to rival them in sartorial splendour: they to wanted to be "dressed to the [standard set by the] Nines." A picture of these uniforms can be seen at http://www.directart.co.uk/mall/images/un286.jpg. The problems with this story are twofold: first, there is no evidence that the 99^th Regiment was ever referred to as "the Nines" (an equivalent would be referring to Canada’s famed Royal 22^nd Regiment as "the Twos"!), and second, there is an unexplained (nd unexplainable) time gap between the period to which this story supposedly alludes and the appearance of the expression in recorded speech (with no reference to military attire whatsoever).

A much more likely explanation, although not entirely satisfactory, is to be found in the phrase "to the nines" or sometimes "to the nine," which at one time was quite common in English (Robert Burns used it in several poems, the earliest of which is dated 1787). The OED gives several examples: "pleased to the nine," "painted to the nines" (both from Burns), "touched off to the nines," "praised to the nines," and "japanned [i.e., lacquered; varnished] to the nines," culminating in "dressed up to the nines," which appears in Thomas Hardy’s Ethelberta in the late nineteenth century. In all of these occurrences of the expression it clearly means to perfection, to the highest possible degree or point, and it is clear that the expression so used derives from the much older idea, derived from Christian symbolism but popularized by such pseudo-sciences as numerology, that nine is the perfect number: the number three represents the Holy Trinity, and nine is a trinity of trinities. Thus there are nine orders of angels, nine cardinal virtues, nine levels of Hell, nine articles of chivalry, the Nine Worthies (notable figures chosen from classical mythology, the Bible, and history), the nine lives of a cat, the cat-o’-nine-tails, etc. Fitting the pattern and also suggesting completeness or perfection were such nonaries or nonets as the nine Muses, and (between Pluto’s admission to that august body in 1930 and its expulsion from it in 2006) the nine planetary spheres.

The problem with this derivation is that in contemporary English "to the nines" is used only with the past participle dressed, and there its meaning is not so much to perfection as in a very showy and attention-grabbing manner. What were the circumstances that caused the expression to become obsolete when applied to all but one circumstance, and how did the shift in meaning occur? We simply do not know, and without that knowledge we cannot say for sure that "dressed to the nines" is a continuation (or, more precisely, the continuation) in modern English of "to the nines." But that would seem to be a better guess than either of the two explanations discussed at the beginning of this essay, or than any of the explanations I have rejected as being just too far-fetched or preposterous to even merit consideration, such as the suggestion that nine yards of cloth was the measure once required to fashion a suit of clothes, which, in the words of one Web site (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/dress-to-the-nines.html), "seems generous even for a fop"!

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I had a vague recollection of having once heard that the word was somehow Irish, and I suppose what brought it to mind was last week’s celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, although nothing connected to the celebrations of this wearer of the green (my mother’s family were O’Haras) could even remotely be described as a donnybrook! Because of the present use of its name, I had assumed that Donnybrook was perhaps the site of a famous battle or massacre in Irish history. Well, as they say, close, but no cigar!

Donnybrook is the name of what is now a southeastern suburb of Dublin. Back in the thirteenth century it was a small village, close enough to Dublin to be visited easily by city-dwellers but nevertheless separated from it by some distance. In the year 1204 King John of England (the same man who occasioned Magna Carta) granted a licence to the village to hold an eight-day fair (presumably beginning on a Saturday and ending on the following Saturday: many modern events still follow the same schedule). This began a very long tradition: the fair was held every August for well over six centuries, until it was finally suppressed in 1855 (one source gives the year as 1885, but that is clearly a misprint).

In the beginning, it seems, the Donnybrook Fair attracted no more attention or notoriety than any of the countless other fairs that were sprinkled throughout the British Isles. By the seventeenth century, however, it had become known for the riotous brawling to which it gave rise. In those days, it seems, the brawls were between members of the various trade guilds that displayed their wares at the fair, but before long these brawlers were joined by conflicting gangs of Protestant and Catholic hooligans: the fair was a perfect venue for the sectarian violence that for so long has been the pastime and the shame of the Irish population. By the early nineteenth century Donnybrook Fair was so well known for its wild, drunken brawls that its name became an eponym for any such outbreak of public disorder. A movement to discontinue the fair began in the 1830s and finally reached success in 1855, when permission to hold the fair was withdrawn.

It did not die quietly. The Irish love a good fight, and there were numerous efforts to rivive the Donnybrook Fair over the next decade. Dorothy Aucher describes the fair’s final demise as follows: "The last attempt to hold the Donnybrook fair was in 1868, when police reported that 120 people ’of the lowest class’ gathered on a Sunday afternoon to be entertained by a handful of tumblers. After this demoralizing turnout, the fair passed into memory" (Dictionary of Historical Allusions & Eponyms (1998), 71).

It also passed into the language, of course, where it will probably continue to do service as long as certain elements of society consider good times and high spirits to be synonymous with beating each other to a pulp!

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Why do we say that somebody who is with it, has a keen sense of what is going on, is competent and up to date, etc. is on the ball or has a lot on the ball?

In consulting my usual sources for this, I discovered that only one of them has written anything about it: Evan Morris, otherwise known as the Word Detective (see http://www.word-detective.com/090304.htmlon%20the%20ball. And yet the origin of the expression is not that easy to discern and there is at least one explanation circulating that is completely without founding.

To begin with where the expression does not come from. Visitors to the Royal Observatory and National Marine Museum at Greenwich, England, are sometimes regaled with this story, which is passed on as fact by some of the tour guides there. One of the buildings on that site, Flamsteed House, is adorned with two towers on the front facing of the central block (see http://www.nmm.ac.uk/server/show/nav.3483). One of these towers is surmounted by a mast, which in turn is topped with a weather vane. At 12:55 P.M. every day (except when it is too windy), ever since 1883, a large red ball rises to a point halfway up the mast. At 12:58 it rises to the top of the mast, and at precisely 1:00 o'clock it falls. Nearby residents and ships on the Thames used to set their clocks and watches by it, if they owned clocks or watches. According to the faulty etymology, this is the ball referred to in the expression: to be on the ball originally meant, so the story goes, to be exactly on time, and was subsequently extended to mean to have the very latest information, to be up to date. Presumably the meaning sometimes given to the expression, to be alert, can also be derived from the Flamsteed House ball: in order to know that it is precisely 1:00 o'clock one has to "keep one's eye on the ball": one has to see it actually fall. If the ball is in its normal position, at the bottom of the mast, it could be any time between 1:00 PM and 12:58 PM!

Unfortunately, as is the case with so many plausible explanations, the facts do no bear this explanation out. The first appearance in print of the expression did not occur, according to the OED, until 1912, and it occurred on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean, in the USA. And indeed, although the expression is now used on both sides of the Atlantic, the British perceived it as American for several decades. It derives from that most American of sports, baseball. Especially successful pitchers, those who were able to outwit and bamboozle the batters who came up against them, were said by commentators to have or to be putting a lot on the ball, "a lot" referring to what we now call spin, "English," etc. So said of a pitcher "He has a lot on the ball" meant that he is able to handle anything that comes up, he's on top of any situation that confronts him. And that's what it still means, even though the expression has now escaped the baseball stadium (and indeed, crossed the Atlantic)!

One of the morals of this story is: don't believe everything that tour guides tell you!

Apologies for the delay in postings: last week was spent marking essays and midterm examinations! If you have a suggestion for a future posting, please leave me a MySpace message or get it to me any other way you can think of!