You say these phrases all the time, but do you know their grim origins?

We toss around old sayings all the time—some without thinking twice. But have you ever wondered where these phrases actually came from? You might be surprised (and a little unsettled) to find out that many of them have pretty grim backstories. Even if we’re keeping things light and curious, you’ll never look at everyday expressions the same way again!

Image: Jonathan Larson

The Mad Hatter may have been lovable and quirky in Alice in Wonderland, but the origin of the phrase isn’t nearly as charming. In the 18th and 19th centuries, hat-makers, especially in England, used mercury in the felt-making process. Long-term exposure to the toxic substance led to tremors, confusion, hallucinations, and even full-blown insanity. So, when someone was "mad as a hatter," it wasn’t a joke, it was actually a tragic side effect of their trade.

Image: Markus Winkler

These days, "deadline" means you’re rushing to finish your taxes or meet your grandson’s birthday RSVP. But during the Civil War, it was a deadly serious term. Prison camps had an actual line drawn in the dirt—step past it, and guards had permission to shoot without warning.

Image: Greg Rosenke

If your grandkids ever run through your living room like a tornado, you’ve probably said they were "running amok." Originally, this referred to sudden, violent rampages by certain warriors in Southeast Asia. European colonizers didn’t understand it and blamed the devil, but it was likely tied to deep psychological distress. Over time, the phrase softened, but its origins are quite dark, don’t you think?

Image: wilsan u

It might sound like gentle teasing today, but "pulling someone’s leg" used to mean something far more sinister. In the crowded, foggy streets of old London, thieves would trip unsuspecting victims by yanking their legs from behind—either to rob them or help an accomplice mug them more easily. So next time someone says they’re "just pulling your leg," be glad it’s only a joke.

Image: Alin Meceanu

You’ve probably said you were "taken aback" when someone shocked you with unexpected news, right? Did you know this phrase has nautical roots? On a sailing ship, if the wind hit the sails from the front, it could stop the boat dead in the water, or even pull it backwards. That "aback" feeling was equally surprising as it was alarming!

Image: Tom Pumford

We call fake emotions "crocodile tears," but the story behind it is a bit strange. People once believed crocodiles cried while eating their victims, like they were able to show some kind of twisted remorse. Of course, science has since debunked this theory, but the legend stuck around. So when someone puts on a sad face to get out of chores, just remember: even reptiles have better excuses.

Image: Aarón Blanco Tejedor

Before painkillers and numbing gels, wounded soldiers had one brutal option during surgery. Can you guess what it was? That’s right, bite the bullet. Literally. On the battlefield, doctors had to work fast and without anesthesia. A bullet between the teeth gave patients something to focus on while wounds were stitched (or worse!)

Image: Alvaro Reyes

We know that Shakespeare loved creating new words and phrases, and "the be-all and end-all" is one of his most dramatic. It first appeared in Macbeth when the title character thinks of ending the king’s life as a final, all-important solution. These days, we use it for less murderous things—like the ultimate plane has for some things.

Image: Ben White

Saying "God bless you" after a sneeze might seem polite, but it stems from a much darker place. In the time of the bubonic plague, a sneeze could be an early symptom, and people feared it meant death was close. Saying "God bless you" was like a quick prayer that you’d survive. Other theories suggest it was meant to keep your soul from escaping. Whatever the origin, it was more panic than politeness.

Image: Brett Jordan

We say someone’s "wreaking havoc" when they’re causing trouble. But centuries ago, it was an actual military command. Once a battle was won, officers might yell "Havoc!" and soldiers were free to do and destroy whatever they wanted. As you can imagine, the chaos was so brutal that King Richard II officially banned the cry in the 14th century.

Beloved lyrics

"For what is a man?": Some of the wisest lyric lines ever written

Paul Anka was terrified when he sat down to write the lyrics for a song that Frank Sinatra would be singing. Jokingly, he started with a dramatic, "And now, the end is near…" The rest is history. Who are the people who pen the words that others will spend decades repeating? How did they come up with words so precise and true that listeners would compare them with those of great philosophers? Here are 10 of people’s favorite lyrics of all time, decoded.

"For what is a man? What has he got? If not himself, then he has naught." The melody of "My Way" wasn't originally American. It began as a French song called Comme d'habitude, a number about a couple stuck in a stale marriage. Paul Anka heard it on the radio while in France and bought the rights on the spot, before he had any use for it.

That use arrived at a dinner in Miami, when Sinatra told him, almost in passing, that he was quitting the business. Anka flew home, sat down at a typewriter, and spent one night writing lyrics as if Sinatra himself were speaking them. Sinatra recorded it in two takes and later called it his "national anthem," and many agreed; Anka had written the exact words one wants to belt while closing an episode of their life.

In "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)," John Lennon wrote: "Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans." But the phrase originated with American writer and cartoonist Allen Saunders, who published it in a 1957 issue of Reader's Digest ("Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans").

The line outlived everything else about the song, repeated at graduations and eulogies for decades since. Lennon was murdered shortly after the album's release, which means the song now carries a weight of hindsight neither he nor his listeners could have intended at the time.

"How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?" A young Bob Dylan wrote "Blowin' in the Wind" in 1962. He later claimed he wrote the entire song in about ten minutes at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village, borrowing its melody from the old spiritual "No More Auction Block." He was twenty-one, barely a year into his New York career, and insisted at the time it wasn't a protest song at all.

The song never answers its questions, but keeps asking them. First published in the folk magazine Broadside in May 1962, it became the unofficial anthem of the civil rights and antiwar movements once Peter, Paul and Mary's cover shot to number two on the charts in 1963.

"... is equal to the love you make." This is the last song the four Beatles ever recorded together, and Paul McCartney built it deliberately as a farewell. He gave Ringo Starr his only drum solo in the band's history, a fight McCartney had to win through what he called "gentle persuasion," since Starr detested solos on principle.

For the closing line, McCartney said he'd been thinking about Shakespeare, who often ended a scene with a rhyming couplet so the audience would know it was truly over. Even John Lennon, who generally disliked the Abbey Road medley and rarely praised his old partner's work by 1980, admitted the closing thought was "a very cosmic, philosophical line."

"... but it’s better than drinking alone." "Piano Man", by Billy Joel, narrates a song in which the character is real. Joel wrote it about the six months he spent playing piano under the fake name "Bill Martin" at a Los Angeles lounge called The Executive Room. Even the waitress "practicing politics" was Elizabeth Weber, the woman who'd soon become his wife.

Joel wrote it while hiding out from a record label he was desperate to escape after his debut album flopped. It became a bittersweet anthem that many people love singing with others; it seems like, as the song suggests, singing sorrows together at the bar is better than feeling them at home.

The whole song "Both Sides Now," by Joni Mitchell, is often quoted as a deeply philosophical observation of life. It concludes that some mysteries of life are as unknowable as the clouds, or love, despite accumulating experience.

When she wrote it, Mitchell had recently given up a daughter for adoption after being left by the child's father. She was twenty-three, mid-flight, after a passage in Saul Bellow's novel Henderson the Rain King described its narrator looking down at clouds from an airplane, something human eyes had only been able to do for a few decades. Judy Collins released it first in 1967 and won a Grammy for it; Mitchell's own version didn't appear until her 1969 album Clouds.

Kris Kristofferson’s song, "Me and Bobby McGee", contains one of people’s favorite quotes from song lyrics. Its title came from producer Fred Foster, who suggested Kristofferson write a song about his colleague's secretary, Barbara "Bobbie" McKee.

Its most quoted idea about freedom and loss was inspired, Kristofferson later said, by the final scene of Fellini's La Strada, in which a man realizes too late what he threw away. Roger Miller released it first, but it was Janis Joplin's posthumous 1971 recording, finished mere days before her death, that turned it into a number one hit and an accidental epitaph.

"... and I'm getting older too." Nicks says she wrote "Landslide" in about five minutes, sitting in a rented house in Aspen while her partner and musical collaborator, Lindsey Buckingham, was on tour rehearsing with the Everly Brothers. The song's real subject isn't romance, but the vertigo of watching time pass. She was twenty-seven, broke, working as a waitress and a cleaner, and their duo album had just been dropped by its label.

Looking at the snow on the Rockies, she found herself deciding whether to keep chasing music at all. Three months later, Mick Fleetwood heard Buckingham's guitar work on a demo and invited the pair into Fleetwood Mac, which changed their lives. The song has now aged into an anthem for anyone facing a hinge point in their own life.

"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime you'll find you get what you need." Mick Jagger sketched this one alone on an acoustic guitar, calling it "one of those bedroom songs." It closed 1969's Let It Bleed just as the decade's peace-and-love optimism was cracking.

The song is upbeat and simple, and unexpectedly insists on an idea of acceptance or surrender that has more to do with Stoic philosophy than with pop rock optimism. But the listeners liked it, and many quote it often.

"...that's how the light gets in." Leonard Cohen worked on "Anthem" for roughly a decade, discarding draft after draft, before it finally appeared on his 1992 album The Future. He wasn't a man given to explaining his own lyrics, having spent years training as an ordained Zen Buddhist monk and generally preferring silence to self-analysis.

But "Anthem" has the clearest statement of a philosophy he'd circled his entire career: that brokenness can give way to grace. It has since been invoked by human rights activists, quoted at protests, and performed at civic ceremonies.