Skid Row

Meaning: Rough neighbourhood, usually full of homeless drunks.
Origin: 19th Century, America.

Although probably not as commonly used today as it used to be, the term “Skid Row” still refers to a rough, tumble-down suburb, neighbourhood, or even just a street, where transients, drunks and the homeless reside.

The expression dates from the days when lumberjacks felled enormous trees using nothing but colossal axes, saws, and their own two hands. After a tree had been felled and de-branched, it would have to be transported. In the days before motorised vehicles, this was all done by hand. Because it’s not easy transporting a huge tree across open ground, especially when it’s wet, soggy and muddy, lumberjacks would team up and build a simple boardwalk out of smaller logs, on which they could slide, or ‘skid’ the huge tree-trunk along. Literally a “skid row”.

Lumberjack work was often seasonal and it wasn’t unknown for these men to be unemployed for a good part of the year, when trees couldn’t be felled (such as during winter). Pay was often low, so they didn’t have much of a chance to save up enough money to last them through the off-period. They would gather in rough, cheap-rent parts of town, which were named “Skid Rows” after the cheap, throwaway boardwalks which they constructed to transport trees.

By Hook or By Crook

Meaning: To attain something by any means possible.
Origin: Medieval Europe.

Back in the days of feudalism, when peasants and serfs toiled day in, day out, just to survive, working their lordship’s land and living in simple wood and stone huts, a vast array of rules governed their lives. What they could eat, what they could hunt and trap, what and how much of a particular crop they could grow, how much of the harvest was taken as taxation, and what animals they could own and raise.

One of the rules was the one regarding firewood. As essential for life as oxygen, peasants required firewood for cooking, light and heat during the winter. To get firewood, they could either buy it off the landlord, or they would have to go and forage for it.

It was illegal to pick up dead wood off of forest floors. That wood was on the land, and the land belonged to the local landlord. However, peasants were allowed to take whatever wood and branches which they could retrieve from the trees on their lord’s estate. Since firewood was so essential, peasants would use whatever means they had at their disposal, to retrieve firewood…even using their reaper’s hooks or scythes, or their shepherd’s crooks…to reach into treetops and pull down whatever branches they could snag and break off the tree.

Hit the Hay & Make the Bed

Meaning: Go to Sleep.
Origin: Medieval Europe.

Before the days of the modern mattress, people slept on crude pillows and cushions, stuffed with hay or straw, which they had to empty and change periodically. These cushions and pillows gave rise to mattresses which were stuffed with crushed hay or straw. Hence the term to ‘hit the hay‘, meaning to go to bed.

‘Making the Bed‘ goes back to medieval times, when the bed would have to be made up each evening before sleeping. This was a lot more than just neatening everything up before getting some shut-eye; it also meant tightening up the webbing (ropes) underneath the mattress, to prevent it from sagging through the wooden bedframe during the night (resulting in uncomfortable sleep). The phrase “Goodnight, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite!” comes from this, as well! To sleep tight literally meant tightening up the webbing, so that your mattress wouldn’t fall through the bed and dump you on the floor in the middle of the night!

Burn the Candle at Both Ends

Meaning: Waste and extravagance, hectic lifestyle or to be extremely busy.
Origin: 18th Century England.

These days, to ‘burn the candle at both ends‘, is similar in meaning to the phrase ‘burning midnight oil‘. It suggests long hours, hard work, and staying up late to finish off working by candlelight or by the light of an oil-fired lamp.

While it may be today, it wasn’t, when this phrase was coined back in the 1700s.

Originally, to burn the candle at both ends meant to be wasteful and overly extravagant. This may seem silly to us today, but when a candle was your only source of light, it makes more sense.

It makes even more sense when you consider that every household in England needed candles, and that candles were heavily taxed! To save money, a householder would use only the smallest number of candles possible. To burn a candle at both ends (which could only be done when the candle was horizontal, or on an angle), produced more light, at the expense of wasted wax and candle-longevity. Only someone who could really afford the expense would ever bother to be so wasteful with his only source of light after dark.