Why English Puts a Hat on Everything

 

Our heads serve many purposes. They hold our brains, cover our hairline losses, and give eyeglasses somewhere to sit. But one of their most important functions is as a hat rack, which may explain why so many of our idioms involve headgear. Apparently, English looked at the human head and thought, “Yes, but what if we put a metaphor on it?”

I had an Aunt Joyce who my dad always declared was “mad as a hatter.” When you’re seven years old, that’s funny as heck, mostly because you picture a woman in a giant hat chasing the mailman down the street with a cane, cursing him for bringing more junk mail. It made absolutely no sense, of course, but at that age, neither did taxes, liver, or why adults thought prunes were food. For decades, I never bothered to investigate, but the saying has an interesting origin.

“Mad as a hatter” means extremely eccentric, irrational, or “crazy,” and its origin is tied to 19th-century hat making. Hatters commonly used mercury nitrate in the process of turning animal fur into felt for hats. Long-term mercury exposure led to tremors, mood changes, irritability, memory problems, and erratic behavior. Many hat makers became mentally unstable due to the exposure to mercury, and the phrase stuck.

So imagine my dad said to me, “Your Aunt Joyce is nuts, but keep it under your hat.” That’s an adult way of saying “Don’t tell anyone.” It likely comes from the idea that a hat was a private, personal place to hide or cover something. In older times, a person might tuck small items, notes, or money inside a hat lining. So if something was “under your hat,” it was hidden from view and kept to yourself. Your secret is safe with me, Aunt Joyce.

But while Dad and I were laughing at Aunt Joyce's bizarre antics, my mom comes in and starts yelling at us for ridiculing her sister. I ask my dad what’s wrong, and he says, “Oh, your mother goes off at the drop of a hat. I look around. No hat, but I kind of figured out that it meant something that happens immediately, without hesitation, or with very little notice. What Dad didn’t tell me was that in the old days, races, fights, or contests were often cued to begin by the starter dropping a hat as the signal to commence. Once the hat hit the ground, everyone was expected to begin right away. So doing something “at the drop of a hat” came to mean being ready to act, or react, instantly. Mom didn’t need a hat. It was inherent.

There are many more sayings involving hats, and if you put your thinking cap on, I’m sure you can come up with a few yourself. But why would you need a thinking cap? Because … the phrase dates back at least to the 1800s and grew from the older idea that certain hats or caps were associated with scholars, students, judges, or serious study. Smart people wore smart caps. Anything else?

Yeah:

• Old hat — Something familiar, outdated, or no longer exciting.
  Origin: a hat, once new and stylish, eventually becomes worn, common, and unimpressive. By the time it’s an “old hat,” nobody is admiring it anymore—it’s just that thing hanging by the door, collecting dust and possibly judging your life choices.
• Talk through your hat — speaking nonsense, bluffing, or talking confidently about something you don’t really understand.
• .Origin: if a person is “talking through his hat,” the words are not coming from his brain, mouth, or any respectable source of knowledge. They’re coming through his hat—which is to say, from nowhere useful at all.
• Hat in hand — Humbly asking for help or forgiveness.
  Origin: For centuries, men were expected to take off their hats when entering certain places, greeting superiors, speaking to women, or showing respect. So if you came to someone “hat in hand,” you weren’t swaggering in like you owned the place—you were standing there politely, maybe apologetically, with your dignity folded under one arm and your hat in the other.
• A feather in your cap — An achievement or honor.
  Origin: warriors or hunters would place a feather in their headgear to mark a success—often killing an enemy in battle or bringing down game. In some traditions, the feather was not just decoration; it was proof you had done something worth noticing.

SALT - Worth or Wound?

 
Today we’re talking about salt. Why? Because I wanted to know why we say someone is worth their salt. Salt may not be doing your blood pressure any favors, but for most of history it was valuable enough to measure a person’s worth—which is impressive for something now sold in a cardboard cylinder next to the pepper. To find out why, we have to go back to the Romans.

Salt—sodium chloride—has long been essential to human life. Before refrigeration and canning, it was one of the main ways to preserve food, so was a valuable commodity. That helps explain the phrase worth one’s salt, meaning worth one’s pay. The exact Roman connection is still debated: some say soldiers were paid in salt, while others say they received money to buy it. Either way, the point is the same—if you did your job well, and were worth the money you were being paid, you were worth your salt. If you didn’t, you were basically the ancient version of a guy getting paid to lean on a shovel.

And then we have those people who are the salt of the earth, meaning they are genuine, trustworthy, and of great worth or reliability. The idea behind it is that salt was small, ordinary, and easy to overlook—but incredibly important. So the phrase suggests that truly good people are often not flashy or powerful; they are the ones who quietly preserve what’s good, add character, and hold communities together.

After nine years in the Navy, I heard salty dog plenty of times. It simply refers to someone with a lot of sea time—an experienced sailor seasoned by years on the water. Or, more briefly, an old salt.

Enough about salty people. If you’re skeptical, take this with a grain of salt—in other words, accept it cautiously, the way you’d listen to a man who begins a sentence with, “Now, I’m no doctor, but …” One theory links the phrase to the ancient belief that salt helped unpleasant things go down more easily, both literally and figuratively. Around 77 A.D., King Mithridates VI of Pontus was said to build immunity to poison by taking small doses mixed with salt. True or not, the phrase came to mean treating doubtful claims with caution—because some ideas deserve belief, and others deserve a raised eyebrow.

And then we have those who like to throw salt in the wound. The term transitioned into a popular English idiom—meaning to deliberately make an already bad or painful situation even worse. You know how it goes: a man loses his job, and before he’s even finished cleaning out his desk, somebody says, “Well, maybe now you’ll finally have time to fix your golf swing.” It’s what happens when life knocks you flat, and someone helpfully leans over to critique your landing. That’s not comfort—that’s throwing salt in the wound.

The phrase "throwing salt in the wound" originated as a literal act of torture and hygiene. Historically, military flogging, such as in the British Navy, broke the skin. Salt was rubbed into the wound to prevent infection, but it caused agonizing pain, becoming a severe secondary punishment.

And finally, there’s the custom of throwing salt over your left shoulder.

For centuries, salt was so precious that spilling it was considered wasteful and unlucky. Some believed it invited misfortune—or even the devil—to meddle in one’s affairs. Throwing a pinch over the left shoulder was thought to ward off bad luck and cancel the curse.

Giving Someone the Cold Shoulder

 

Today I’m writing about something I know a little too much about: “the cold shoulder.” Not just receiving it, mind you, but apparently handing it out with the confidence of a maître d’ at a restaurant called Emotional Distance. My wife has been telling me for years, “Boy, you sure know how to give someone the cold shoulder.” And after some reflection, I have to admit she may have a point. The phrase means giving someone a deliberately chilly, unfriendly reception—ignoring them, shutting them out, or treating their presence as a clerical error in human form.

There are a few theories about where this saying came from. It appears in print in Sir Walter Scott’s writing in 1816, and some people connect it to a verse in Nehemiah that roughly translates as, “They turned their backs on you.” Which is historically interesting but also sounds like the kind of explanation that makes people suddenly need to check the oil in their automobile.

To keep things lively, here’s the fun and widely accepted explanation—the one with meat and passive aggression. Imagine it’s 1453 and you’re hosting a grand banquet. Your guests arrive ready for an evening of roasted delicacies, overflowing goblets, and the sort of witty banter that usually ends with someone challenged to a duel. Then an unwelcome visitor appears at the door. You don’t want them there, but medieval etiquette frowns on faking a plague to get them to leave.

So you let them in. Only, instead of serving them the feast everyone else is enjoying, you plop down a leftover cold shoulder of mutton. Not hot. Not fresh. Not even pretending to be hospitable. Just a slab of refrigerated resentment on a plate. Message received. They gnaw in silence, realize they are about as welcome as a hangman at a christening, and leave vowing never to return. Giving them the cold shoulder worked, which, quite frankly, is the best possible result for your hosting strategy.

Rite or Wrong, It's a Passage

 My brother is so stupid. While watching an old Western many years ago, a cowboy (wearing a white hat) was about to ride through a mountain pass with his Indian sidekick, Falling Feather. As they entered the pass, wild, savage Apaches lined the tops of the hills, ready to rain down a hail of arrows and kill our hero. But they did nothing. I asked my brother, “Why don’t they just kill him?”

“Because,” he explained, “he’s riding with Falling Feather. Indians don’t want to kill their own kind, so he has a ‘right of passage.’” As an eight-year-old kid, I learned something. Years later, when I was in high school, a black friend of mine invited me over to his house after school. We rode into a less-than-salubrious part of town—in fact, I was probably the only white kid with six city blocks. Was I scared? Heck no. I was with my black friend in a black neighborhood, so I had a “right of passage.”

Then one day I saw “rite of passage” in a book. I couldn’t believe I found such a blatant typo in a book. I told my English teacher about my discovery, half-expecting him to write to the publisher, telling them of their gross incompetence, and that I’d get extra credit on my next English paper. Once he explained that “rite of passage” wasn’t a free pass to get to the other side, I felt really stupid. Damn my brother.

But rather, “rite of passage” was something to be endured to gain acceptance into a new realm. And it turns out that it’s more than just being told that discomfort is character-building, like drinking copious amounts of alcohol to become a bona fide sailor.

The phrase actually comes from the French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, who coined rites de passage in 1909 to describe the ceremonies that mark life’s grand transitions—birth, marriage, adulthood, and other moments when society collectively decides you are no longer who you were five minutes ago. Rite, meaning a ceremonial act or formal custom, and Passage is movement from one state or stage to another.

Van Gennep’s big insight was that these moments usually come in three parts: you leave one stage behind, wander through a confusing in-between phase, and emerge with a new title, new responsibilities, and a new outlook on life. Consider a timid farm boy who leaves home, survives some humiliating or painful trial, and comes back changed — no longer merely someone’s child, but a person with a firmer sense of self.

So when we now call some significant change in life a rite of passage, we are borrowing a serious anthropological term to dress up the chaos of becoming a more mature person.

Luckily, I never watched a movie with my brother where a priest comes into the prison to eat the final meal with a death row inmate. I would imagine the priest would be there to offer “last rites,” a general label for the final sacraments or prayers given before death. Where a rite is a formal ceremony and last means the final one before you check out of Hotel Earth. The word rite traces back to the Latin ritus, meaning a religious observance or prescribed ceremony, so last rites literally means the final sacred rituals given to someone nearing death.

My brother’s version would probably be something like “He gets to order whatever he wants for his final meal. That’s his last rights.”