Everyday Canvas

Sunday Snippets: Places that Inspired Figurative Meanings

Did you know that the term skid row comes from Washington State’s logging industry? Loggers there built roads out of logs and then skidded newly cut logs down these “skid roads.” Later on, saloons and brothels were built along these skid roads and that’s when the phrase turned to mean a district abounding in vicious characters and the practice of vice, with the word road changing to row in colloquial speech. Then, somehow the idiom to be on the skids came to mean to be in a decline as to celebrity relationships.

Another idiom we associate with a place is to eavesdrop, which is to stand under the eaves of a house so to hear the talk inside the house. In its metaphoric meaning, to eavesdrop is to listen secretly to private conversation.

Yet, another noun that came from a place refers to our bathing suits, not that I wear one for the obvious reasons of aging. Anyhow, the word is bikini, the two-piece bathing suit for women that came from the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, where atomic bombs were tested in 1946, hinting at the "explosive" effect.

One of my favorite place nouns is donnybrook, with the figurative meaning of a brawl or scuffle, derived from Donnybrook Fair, the horse fair in a Dublin suburb, disreputable for fighting and drunkenness.

Then, who can give up on The Bronx cheer, the noise people make with the intention of mockery, after a borough of the New York City?