{"id":366688,"date":"2018-06-25T10:28:47","date_gmt":"2018-06-25T09:28:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/you-probably-use-these-every-day\/"},"modified":"2018-06-25T10:28:47","modified_gmt":"2018-06-25T09:28:47","slug":"you-probably-use-these-every-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/you-probably-use-these-every-day\/","title":{"rendered":"You Probably Use These Every Day"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t                            \t<!-- S3 Cache --><!-- S3:S3:Non-Original -->\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p>Our favorite basketball writer is ESPN\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ZachLowe_NBA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Zach Lowe<\/a>. On his podcast, the conversation often takes detours into the origins of certain phrases. We compiled a list from Zach and added a few of our own, then sent them to language expert\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.linguisticsociety.org\/news\/2015\/10\/22\/arika-okrent-announced-winner-lsa-linguistics-journalism-award\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Arika Okrent<\/a>. Where do these expressions come from anyway?<\/p>\n<p><strong>1. BY THE SAME TOKEN<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Bus token? Game token? What kind of token is involved here? Token is a very old word, referring to something that\u2019s a symbol or sign of something else. It could be a pat on the back as a token, or sign, of friendship, or a marked piece of lead that could be exchanged for money. It came to mean a fact or piece of evidence that could be used as proof. \u201cBy the same token\u201d first meant, basically \u201cthose things you used to prove that can also be used to prove this.\u201d It was later weakened into the expression that just says \u201cthese two things are somehow associated.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>2. GET ON A SOAPBOX<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The soapbox that people mount when they \u201cget on a soapbox\u201d is actually a soap box, or rather, one of the big crates that used to hold shipments of soap in the late 1800s. Would-be motivators of crowds would use them to stand on as makeshift podiums to make proclamations, speeches, or sales pitches. The soap box then became a metaphor for spontaneous speech making or getting on a roll about a favorite topic.<\/p>\n<p><strong>3. TOMFOOLERY<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The notion of Tom fool goes a long way. It was the term for a foolish person as long ago as the Middle Ages (<em>Thomas fatuus<\/em>\u00a0in Latin). Much in the way the names in the expression Tom, Dick, and Harry are used to mean \u201csome generic guys,\u201d Tom fool was the generic fool, with the added implication that he was a particularly absurd one. So the word tomfoolery suggested an incidence of foolishness that went a bit beyond&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lewrockwell.com\/2018\/06\/no_author\/you-probably-use-these-every-day\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our favorite basketball writer is ESPN\u2019s\u00a0Zach Lowe. On his podcast, the conversation often takes detours into the origins of certain phrases. We compiled a list from Zach and added a few of our own, then sent them to language expert\u00a0Arika Okrent. Where do these expressions come from anyway? 1. BY THE SAME TOKEN Bus token? [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-366688","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}