5 Misconceptions About How We Got Popular Phrases

We’re on a quest to track down the origins of phrases here at Mental Floss. And when an origin perfectly explains some strange figure of speech, it feels extremely satisfying.

For example, “pushing the envelope” is a weird phrase when you think about it, since postal delivery isn’t a very risky occupation. But once you learn that the proverbial envelope originally referred to a part of a plane, and that pushing it meant pushing the plane to its structural limits, the phrase feels much more fitting, and you’ll share this info with everyone you know. 

There’s just one problem with these cute origin stories. Some of them are so interesting and shareable that people will believe them even when they aren’t true. 

1. “Turn a Blind Eye”
2. “Red Herring”
3. “Bring Home the Bacon”
4. “Saved by the Bell”
5. “Let the Cat Out of the Bag”

“Turn a Blind Eye”

You might know that British hero Admiral Horatio Nelson had only one arm, having lost the right one after being shot by a musket. He also had only one working eye, thanks to another injury three years earlier. 

A few years after both those incidents, in 1801, Nelson found himself in the harbor outside Copenhagen, fighting Danish ships. Things didn’t go great for his side, and Nelson’s commander, Hyde Parker, lifted a flag that signaled the following instruction to his fleet: “Discontinue the action.” Nelson was on a different ship at the time, and when an underling reported seeing the signal, Nelson ignored the order and went on fighting, which eventually pushed the enemy into agreeing to a truce. 

The way this story gets told, when he was approached about the signal, Nelson told his captain, “You know, Foley, I have only one eye — and I have a right to be blind sometimes.” Then he raised his telescope to his nonfunctional eye and said, “I really do not see the signal!” And so, we got the phrase “turn a blind eye,” which refers to willfully ignoring something.

Now, we don’t really know if Nelson ever did say that line or raise the telescope to his blind eye. That could be some fanciful account written to glorify the guy. But whether or not it really happened, we still know that the shared story is not the true origin of “turn a blind eye,” as many sources say.

That’s because we see the phrase in text from a century before that. “Turn the deaf ear and the blind eye to all those pomps and vanities of the world,” wrote an English philosopher named John Norris, who died 40 years before Nelson was born.

If we did want to invent a story to give the origin of “turn a blind eye,” a man using one eye to look through a telescope would actually be a pretty ill-fitting one. That’s the one situation where fixing a single eye toward a subject does not require any turning. 

“Red Herring”

A red herring is a decoy that distracts you from what’s important. It’s also a herring that is red. A literal red herring is a herring that has been strongly smoked and salted in the name of preservation, giving it a red color and a sharp odor.

The figurative meaning came from the literal one, say many sources, because there was a time when people used smelly fish as decoys. Criminals fleeing the authorities would lay down red herrings to lead away the hounds chasing them. Red herrings were also used to distract hounds during fox hunts. 

The truth is, it does appear that the phrase “red herring” came from a famous account of using fish to distract hounds. But the account was false. No one’s ever really used fish for that, and when MythBusters tried testing if you can, they found that it’s impossible. 

That famous account of decoy fish came from William Cobbett, a 19th-century British journalist. Cobbett wrote of using red herrings to confuse some hounds who were chasing hares, but he must have made that up. It seems that he got that idea by misunderstanding earlier descriptions of horse training, in which trainers used carcasses to teach horses the correct direction to go, rather than to show dogs the wrong way to go. 

As for the idea that fugitives distracted hounds using fish, that seems to be a story made up by people who heard Cobbett’s story and replaced it with something that made marginally more sense. At least fugitives have a reason for distracting hounds. During a fox hunt or a hare hunt, on the other hand, no one’s trying to stop the hounds from finding their quarry. That’s not how hunts work. 

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“Bring Home the Bacon”

Here’s another expression based on smoked preserved meat. “Bringing home the bacon” means fulfilling your obligations, particularly when it comes to making money. Ask around, and sources will tell you it comes from a custom that lasted for centuries in Dunmow, England. 

In 1104, according to legend, a man and his wife approached the head of the local monastery one year after their wedding. They asked for a blessing, and the monastery head was so pleased to see that the two still loved each other one year into their marriage that he gave them a slab of bacon. It turned out that the man was really the lord of the manor, Reginald Fitzwalter, who had disguised himself, and he now willed his lands to the monastery. 

While this legend may or may not be true, Dunmow really did go on to have a tradition whereby couples who lasted a year with no regrets were awarded a flitch (a slab) of bacon. A revived version of the tradition continues even today, and naturally, reports will joke that the couple is bringing home the bacon. However, we have zero evidence that the tradition gave rise to the phrase, and getting gifted a prize for devotion really isn’t what bringing home the bacon is all about.

Instead, we can trace the phrase to a single newspaper cartoon drawn in 1909. “He will have to go a long way to land him, but he’ll bring home the bacon as sure as you’re wearing a hat,” read the text in this comic by Thomas “Tad” Dorgan.

Thanks to memes, you should know well the power of captioned images to spread funny phrases, and many phrases from Dorgan cartoons became famous parts of speech. His cartoons are also the origin of the expression “for crying out loud” and of calling someone stupid a “dumbbell.”

So, we trace the wide use of the phrase to Dorgan—but it did also exist in the years immediately before that cartoon. In 1906, boxer Joe Gans won a championship bout after receiving a telegram from his mother that said, “Bring home the bacon.” It was an evocative way of saying to deliver the goods. He won $30,000 for that fight (that’s over $1 million in today’s money), and he said afterward that he’d brought home “not only the bacon, but the gravy.”

“Saved by the Bell”

The boxing world is also the source for our next phrase. When a boxer goes down, the ref counts to ten, and if the fighter doesn’t get back in that time, they lose. The way boxing used to work, if the bell rang during that time, signaling the end of the round, the boxer remained in the match even if he didn’t stand up in those ten seconds. He had been saved by the bell.

Today, boxing rules more often say that a fighter cannot be saved by the bell: They have to get up or lose within those ten seconds, regardless of whether the bell sounds.

That’s where the phrase “saved by the bell” came from, and this will be no surprise to fans of boxing. It will be a surprise to fans of morbid trivia, who have heard an entirely different explanation.  

Back in the days before modern embalming, people feared being mistaken for dead and being buried alive. They imagined waking in a coffin underground and having no way to escape. To remedy this, a series of inventors in the 18th and 19th centuries came up with safety coffins that allowed the departed to signal that they were still alive. One such design allowed someone in the coffin to pull a rope and ring an aboveground bell, alerting those nearby to come to their aid. 

Despite reports to the contrary, this was not the origin of the phrase “saved by the bell.” These coffins were never even widely used, and never once were they recorded as saving anyone. We have to assume that in modern times, someone describing them quipped that the hypothetical occupant had been saved by the bell, playing on the common boxing phrase. Then someone else misunderstood them and thought that was where the phrase came from. 

“Let the Cat Out of the Bag”

Given that bags are terrible storage places for cats, you might suspect that this phrase derives from something other than pet transport. Indeed, there’s an explanation floating around that the “cat” there actually refers to a cat o’ nine tails, a type of whip used for dealing out punishment in the military. The “bag” referred to a special red sack in which the cat o’ nine tails was stored.

Unfortunately for fans of corporal punishment, it appears that origin story is false. Also, there’s no evidence that cat o’ nine tails were ever stored in any specific sack; it seems someone just made up that fact to make this explanation more convincing.

The best explanation we have is that “let the cat out of the bag” is one of several expressions related to a retailer claiming to sell something but secretly selling something else.

In Spanish, the idiom dar gato por liebre (“a cat instead of a hare”) refers to a cat being sold as a hare, in the form of chopped-up cat meat being sold as hare meat. In English, we have “let the cat out of the bag,” for when a shopkeeper has been claiming to sell a pig, but now you open the bag to reveal the truth. 

Keep in mind, however, that even if the phrase comes from that image, that doesn’t mean anyone ever did successfully pass off a cat as a pig simply by keeping it sealed up in a bag. Even if the alleged item for sale were a suckling pig, hardly bigger than a cat, cats and pigs are shaped so differently that it’s hard to imagine anyone being fooled this way.

If you’re ever in the position of that customer, be sure to open the bag and check the contents. That’s the only way to bring home the bacon.