SHAGGY DOGS: TO LAY it on with a trowelis to be especially generous with your flattery and praise. The expression is thought to have been invented by the two-times British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who said of the royal family, when speaking to Matthew Arnold: "Everyone likes flattery and when you come to royalty you should lay it on with a trowel." (No wonder he was such a successful Tory leader.)
However, the origin can be found in Shakespeare's As You Like It(1598), where the bard describes flattery being "slapped on thick and without nicety, like mortar".
When we are down in the dumpswe are feeling low in spirits, and thinking that perhaps life is passing us by. This expression started life as "in the doleful dumps" and can be connected to the Dutch word domp, which can be translated as "hazy" or "doleful". The phrase has been in use since the Anglo-Dutch wars of the mid- to late 17th century and crops up repeatedly in Samuel Pepys's diary.
The phrase has the cat got your tongue?is used when a normally talkative person suddenly has little or nothing to say about a subject, perhaps out of guilt.
There are two possible origins for this expression and we know that it was first recorded in print in 1911. The first suggestion is that the cat in question is the cat o' nine tails and that the hapless victim would be rendered speechless by the punishment imposed.
A slight extension to this is the idea that if the captain or his officers discussed any official secrets, then the punishment for revealing them to others would be flogging with the "cat". Others would consider them too afraid to speak and suggested the "cat had hold of their tongue".
The version I favour, however, can be traced back to many years before England ruled the waves.
In the Middle East, it was a traditional punishment during medieval times - a custom that dates back to 500BC - for liars and blasphemers to have their tongues cut out and then fed to the cats. The ancient Egyptians were the first to keep domestic cats and used them to control vermin and other pests that infested their food stores.
These voracious felines were known to eat anything, including human tongues, which even the dogs would turn their noses up at.
In ancient Egypt, the cat was also revered as a hunter and even worshipped as a deity. Therefore feeding them the tongues of liars was seen as a human offering to the gods.
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Extracted from Shaggy Dogs and Black Sheep by Albert Jack
(Penguin Books)