Everyday expressions

Where does the phrase “close, but no cigar” come from? 8 idioms' origins

Image: Pisit Heng

Idioms are a rare breed, aren’t they? They confuse non-native speakers to no end, as they can’t simply be deduced from the meaning of individual words. After all, who in their right mind would accuse someone of stealing their intangible thunder? Or complain about having to burn lamp oil at midnight?

English speakers use these idioms all the time but rarely stop to figure out where they come from. If you were ever curious about how spilling beans might connect to confessing a secret, then this article is exactly what you need.

Image: Michał Mancewicz

The very literal origin of this idiom comes from the play "Appius and Virginia," written by English dramatist John Dennis in the early 1700s. For the production of his play, Dennis created a new method to imitate the sound of thunder. Sadly, "Appius and Virginia" had disappointing attendance and was canceled shortly after. However, Dennis soon after discovered that a production of Macbeth was using his thunder device, to critical acclaim. According to literary scholar Joseph Spence, Dennis angrily exclaimed, "Damn them! They will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder."

Image: Yohan Cho

This idiom has a surprising lighthearted aspect to it. While its meaning entails soul-crushing defeat, one can’t help but also imagine a Groucho Marx-looking character chewing on a big cigar. And this lightheartedness might not be completely accidental: After all, this idiom comes from the cheerful world of carnival games.

In the late 19th century, carnival games were targeted for adults, not children. Therefore, instead of handing out oversized stuffed animals of undefined species, winners might receive objects like cigars as prizes. The idiom "close but no cigar" was born from those players that almost won, but didn’t earn a prize.

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The most widely accepted use of this idiom comes from America’s very own national pastime: baseball. In 1916, the New York Giants (now known as the San Francisco Giants) had an incredible winning streak of 26 consecutive games. The Giants believed that, if they were in the lead during the last inning of a game, moving a bag filled with extra baseballs off the field would secure their victory. They had "captured" the game in the bag. This team’s superstition has now evolved into an everyday idiom that means secured and complete success.

Image: Milada Vigerova

Picture this: You are at work, hanging by the water cooler, and you are trying to get your favorite coworker to reveal a piece of office gossip that promises to be huge. We have all been there, but did you know that by asking your coworker to "spill the beans", you might be referencing one of the very first instances of democracy?

The origins of this idiom are still debated, but the consensus is that it most likely comes from a voting system from Ancient Greece. This process involved placing colored beans in a vase (white for yes, black for no). Tallying up the votes would then literally require someone to spill the vase and count each bean that was cast.

Image: Ritabrata Das

Almost every student can attest to spending many sleepless nights burning the midnight oil in front of a seemingly endless pile of textbooks. While the origin of this idiom comes from oil lamps used in the 17th century, students all across the world still refer to this expression when talking about working late into the night.

The first known use of "burning the midnight oil" comes from a book written by English poet Francis Quarles in 1635. More recently, in 1972, country music legends Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner recorded a collaborative studio album titled The Right Combination • Burning the Midnight Oil.

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While turning a blind eye might make us think about that lenient schoolteacher who occasionally gave us a pass on our missing homework, the most commonly accepted origin of this idiom comes from the nautical world. Specifically, from the iconic 18th century British Admiral Horatio Nelson.

In 1801, Nelson led the British attack alongside fellow Admiral Sir Hyde Parker in the Battle of Copenhagen. Nelson, who was blind in one eye, received a flag message from Parker that urged him to retreat. However, Nelson believed that the British fleet should continue to push forward, so he held his telescope to his blind eye and pretended he hadn’t seen Parker’s message.

Image: Raimond Klavins

Weirdly enough, another unexpected nautical term has found its way into this list! While nowadays feeling "under the weather" means feeling ill, the origin of this idiom dates back to slang used by sailors as far back as the 19th century.

The term "under the weather bow" was used to refer to the side of the ship that was exposed the most during storms. Sailors would seek shelter in their cabins to avoid getting seasick, literally going under the ship’s deck to escape the weather. The first literary use of this term was by American author Donald Grant Mitchell in his 1855 book Fudge Doings. In the book, a character describes a nasty experience in a steamer as feeling "a little under the weather."

Image: Carlos Felipe Ramírez Mesa

Throughout the years, countless parents have repeated the same question to their misbehaving children at the dinner table: "Were you raised by wolves?" And, while the current intention of these parents is to highlight bad manners and improper etiquette, it might hurt their case to learn that several outstanding characters from myths and literature were, in fact, raised by wolves.

Perhaps the first and most famous story of children raised by wolves is that of the founders of Ancient Rome, Romulus, and Remus. In the myth, the brothers are abandoned on the bank of a river, where they are found and nurtured by a she-wolf, before being eventually adopted by a shepherd. Furthermore, the protagonist of Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 novel The Jungle Book is a boy named Mowgli who is raised in the jungle by wolves.

Let’s get candy!

Read about the chocolate bar that took this sports icon to court and won

You may bite into a Milky Way bar and think of stars, when it’s really about an old-fashioned milkshake. Maybe it’s Life Savers you like but don’t know that their name refers exactly to the object they resemble. Candy names have some intriguing stories behind them: a beloved horse, a president's daughter, a boy who charmed the girls at the corner shop. Grab your favorite treat, and read about 10 confectionery brands and why they are called that.

Few candy names have sparked as much debate as Baby Ruth. When the Curtiss Candy Company relaunched its Kandy Kake as Baby Ruth in 1921, baseball legend Babe Ruth was in the middle of a record-setting season, having just hit 54 home runs the year before.

Naturally, everyone assumed the candy was cashing in on his fame. But Curtiss always insisted otherwise, claiming the bar honored Ruth Cleveland, the daughter of former President Grover Cleveland, who had died of diphtheria back in 1904 at just 12 years old. Skeptics point out the timing seemed suspicious, especially since Curtiss's factory sat on the very same Chicago street as Wrigley Field. When the real Babe Ruth tried to sell his own candy bar in 1926, Curtiss took him to court over the name and won. To this day, the company has never had to pay him a cent.

When Mars, Incorporated launched the 3 Musketeers bar in 1932, right in the middle of the Great Depression, it wasn't one candy bar at all. It was three separate mini bars in a single wrapper, one flavored chocolate, one strawberry, and one vanilla, a nod to Alexandre Dumas's classic novel, The Three Musketeers.

At just five cents, families could split the three flavors between them, which made the bar an instant hit during hard economic times. Everything changed a decade later. When the United States government rationed sugar during World War II, Mars could no longer justify producing three separate nougat flavors. The company kept only the most popular one, chocolate, and reshaped it into the single, larger bar recognized today. The name stuck around even after two of its three namesakes disappeared from the wrapper.

The story behind Snickers begins not with chocolate, but with a horse. In 1930, Frank and Ethel Mars owned Milky Way Farm, a sprawling 2,800-acre property in Pulaski, Tennessee, where they raised prize Thoroughbred racehorses. One of their favorites was a horse named Snickers.

Around the same time, the Mars candy company was preparing to launch a new bar combining nougat, caramel, peanuts, and milk chocolate, and it still needed a name. According to family accounts, Snickers the horse died shortly before the bar's debut, and the Mars family decided to honor their beloved animal by naming their new candy after him. The bar has kept that name in the United States ever since, though in the United Kingdom it was oddly sold as Marathon until 1990, when Mars finally unified the branding for most countries.

Back in 1923, Frank C. Mars ran a modest candy operation out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. His son Forrest, reunited with his father after years of a strained relationship due to his parents’ divorce, suggested turning a popular soda fountain treat, the malted milkshake, into something you could carry in your pocket. Frank combined whipped nougat with malt flavoring, and the Milky Way bar was born.

Many assume the name pays tribute to the galaxy, especially given the family surname, Mars. But the real inspiration was far closer to home: the taste and name came straight from those creamy malted shakes soda jerks were slinging across America at the time. The bar was such a hit that it grossed roughly $800,000 in its very first year, which equals roughly $15.6 million today. The chocolate remains the oldest candy bar still made by Mars, Incorporated.

In 1923, the Curtiss Candy Company of Chicago, Illinois, needed a name for its new chocolate-covered peanut butter bar, so founder Otto Schnering did something unusual: he asked the public.

The company launched a naming contest through mail-in entries, and a participant from Chicago suggested Butterfinger, borrowing a term sportscasters used for baseball players who couldn't hold onto the ball. The name stuck immediately. Schnering, who had already scored a hit with the Baby Ruth bar, leaned into showmanship to promote his new candy. He famously had airplanes drop thousands of Butterfinger bars, each rigged with a tiny parachute, over American cities like New York and Atlanta. Nearly a century later, the bar's crispy, flaky center is still instantly recognizable, even if most people eating one today have no idea it's named after a baseball insult.

In 1949, candy maker James O. Welch was ready to launch a new chocolate-covered peppermint from his company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

For the name, he reached back to a personal favorite: Junior Miss, a Broadway play based on Sally Benson's New Yorker stories, which had run from 1941 to 1943 and even inspired a radio show starring Shirley Temple. Even though the play had already closed six years earlier, this was his way to honor it. Food chemist Charles Vaughan, who also created Sugar Babies for the same company, was the one who actually developed the chocolate-covered mint.

Long before it was a chocolate bar, Kit Kat was a mutton pie. In early 1700s London, a pastry cook named Christopher Catling ran a pie house on Shire Lane near Temple Bar, where his savory pies, nicknamed Kit-Kats after his own nickname (a nod to his own name), became so popular that a gathering of politicians from the Whig party and writers started meeting there regularly. They eventually became known as the Kit-Cat Club.

Two centuries later, in 1911, the English candy company Rowntree's trademarked the names Kit Kat and Kit Cat, likely as a nod to that historic club. The chocolate wafer bar itself, originally called Rowntree's Chocolate Crisp, didn't take on the Kit Kat name until 1937. It was a clever way to tie a new treat to old British tradition.

When Hershey's introduced its little chocolate drops in 1907, the candy needed a name that matched its size and shape. The most repeated explanation involves the factory machines themselves: as they dropped dollops of chocolate onto a moving conveyor belt, the motion and sound reportedly resembled a smacking kiss, and the name Hershey's Kisses was born.

However, the word "kiss" was simply common candy-making slang at the time for a small, bite-sized treat, so the truth may be a little less romantic than the story suggests. What's certain is that the Kisses were originally wrapped by hand until 1921, when a new machine automated the process and added the paper plume, that little strip peeking out of the foil, so shoppers could tell a genuine Hershey's Kiss from a copycat. Milton Hershey trademarked the shape in 1924, and the candy has barely changed since.

According to company legend, the Oh Henry! bar owes its name to a charming young man named Henry who used to stop by George Williamson's candy shop in Chicago sometime around 1920.

Henry became a favorite of the young women working behind the counter, who often sent him on errands, calling out "Oh, Henry!" whenever they needed his help. Williamson supposedly overheard the phrase so often that he decided to name his new peanut, caramel, and fudge bar after it. Not everyone buys the story, though. Some chocolate buffs believe the bar actually started as the Tom Henry Bar, invented by a candy maker in Kansas and later sold to Williamson, who simply renamed it. Whichever version is true, the Williamson Candy Company trademarked Oh Henry! in 1922, and the catchy exclamation has stuck around for more than a century.

In the summer of 1912, Cleveland chocolate maker Clarence Crane had a problem: his chocolates kept melting in the heat, and sales always dropped once summer arrived.

Looking for a candy that could survive warm weather, Crane borrowed an idea from an unlikely source, a pharmacist's pill-making machine, which pressed round, flat tablets instead of the square mints then popular in Europe. The machine happened to punch a small hole through the center of each mint. Rather than see it as a flaw, Crane noticed the shape resembled a ring-style life preserver used on ships, and he named his new peppermint candy Life Savers. He sold the rights just a year later, in 1913, to businessman Edward Noble for $2,900 —something close to $100,000 today— who switched the packaging to tinfoil and turned it into one of the best-selling candies in American history.