This volume contains entertaining trivia about clichés, word origins, historic events, classical literature, and frontier humor used in the English language. It reveals the sometimes surprising, often amusing, and always fascinating roots of more than 2,000 vernacular words and expressions. From "kangaroo court" to "one-horse town", from "face the music" to "hocus-pocus," it tells the stories of hundreds of these sayings and the circumstances that brought them into our everyday speech.
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