The average person eats three times a day, which is more than 1,000 meals in a year. Add that to the amount of time we spend ordering happy hour appetizers, planning party potlucks, and discussing where to have dinner, and it’s no surprise that food has found its way into our everyday phrases, sayings, and expressions, too. Whether we’re “walking on eggshells” or “going bananas,” food seems to be always on the tip of our idiomatic tongues. Here are seven delectable idioms that really take the cake.
The person who is the “apple of your eye” is someone you prize above all others. The original context of this saying referred to the “aperture” or “pupil” of the human eye. The phrase appears in William Shakespeare’s 1590s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“Sink in the apple of his eye”), as well as in the King James translation of the Bible from 1611 (“Keep me as the apple of the eye,” Psalm 17:8).
When earning a living by making money, you’re “bringing home the bacon.” This idiom has a few origin stories, one of which suggests that in the 1100s, married couples in a small town in England who visited the church and swore they hadn’t argued in the last year would be awarded a side of bacon to bring home. Another story that popularized the phrase involves boxer Joe Gans receiving a telegram from his mother in 1906, encouraging him to “bring home the bacon” (the prize money) in a fight.
Folks have been baking bread almost as long as they’ve been growing crops. But buying presliced bread? That’s a newer option that requires automated machines to pull off in mass. The earliest effective bread-slicing machine was created by an Iowa inventor in the late 1920s. Chillicothe Baking Company was the first to sell presliced bread, so they used a version of this idiom in their advertising: “The greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped.” Today, the phrase refers to excitement for a new concept or idea.
It’s important to diversify your efforts and assets — that’s why you shouldn’t “put all your eggs in one basket.” This idiom comes from an early 17th-century Spanish proverb commonly attributed to the 1605 novel Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes. Translated from the original Spanish, it reads, “‘Tis the part of a wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not venture all his eggs in one basket.”
When you’re in an easy situation with lots of benefits and low risk, folks might say you’re “riding the gravy train.” Some sources indicate this expression may date back to 1920s railroad workers who used it to describe an easy assignment that paid handsomely.
When taking something with “a grain of salt,” you view it with a skeptical eye and don’t interpret it literally. The phrase possibly originated with Pliny the Elder in 77 CE. He advised ingesting an antidote for poison with a grain of salt to make it more palatable. However, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that the figurative sense of swallowing hard-to-believe material with a grain or pinch of salt came about.
In life, as in cooking, sometimes you have to sacrifice one thing to make something else worthwhile. This idiom is generally attributed to the French soldier François de Charette, who defended King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution. Presumably, his quote, “Omelets are not made without breaking eggs,” was more about battle than breakfast. Since the sacrificial eggs in question for de Charette were people, perhaps it’s time we take this idiom off the menu.
More from our network
Word Smarts is part of Optimism, which publishes content that uplifts, informs, and inspires.
