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Okay. Hear that? That's what it sounds like when you plant more trees than you harvest. Work done by thousands of working forest professionals like Adam, a district forest manager who works to protect our forests from fires. Keeping the forest fire resistant is synonymous with keeping a forest healthy, and we do that through planting more than we harvest and mitigate those risks through active management.
It's a long-term commitment. Visit WorkingForestsInitiative.com to learn more. 10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points. You are the fittest of the fit. Only one of you will leave here with an IFIT contract for $250,000.
This is where mindset comes in.
Someone will be eliminated. Pressure is coming down. This It's Trainer Games. Watch it on Prime Video starting January 8th. Is it this one?
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This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something. Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or OSA in adults with obesity? They may be happening to you without you knowing. If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA. OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation.
Learn more at don'tsleep on osa.com. This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. The English language is filled with curious, intriguing, and bizarre phrases. Here with the recurring series is Hair of the Dog author Andrew Thompson as he shares another slice from his ultimate guide to understanding these baffling mini mysteries of the English language.
Apple of your eye is an expression referring to someone who you cherish above all else. like a grandmother might say that my grandson is the apple of my eye. It's an expression that dates back centuries. And it's from, in Old English, the pupil of the eye was known as the apple because of its round shape. and sight was regarded as the most essential sense.
So when damaged it was a terrible incident. It was used figuratively by King Alfred in 885 and by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1605. but the reference is actually from the Bible. A segment of which reads, He led him about, He instructed him, He kept him as the apple of his eye. As bold as a badger, is an expression to mean that someone's bald, has no hair on their head.
And it's one that I've always found the origins of this one interesting. Because a lot of people think that a badger's head being white. Giving it the impression of baldness is where the expression comes from, but it actually is a contraction of the expression as bald as a badger's bum. Because at the time male shaving brushes were made with badger's hair. plucked from the rear of the badger.
Badgers were trapped for this purpose, plucked, and then set free. The hair would grow back eventually, but before it did, it was common to see badgers running about the countryside of England that looked bald in the rear. As sure as eggs is an expression that means to describe an absolute certainty.
sort of as as sure as eggs, he'll be back asking for more money tomorrow. It's got a really strange origin, this expression. It's actually a corruption of the logical mathematical formula x equals x. and is a contraction of the longer expression as sure as eggs is eggs.
So x being x. But it's not known how x equals x became eggs is eggs. But Charles Dickens, who seems to be involved in a lot of expressions that we use, used the phrase in his book The Pickwick Papers in the early 1900s. and the expression became popular from then. As the crow flies means in a straight line or the shortest distance between two points.
And it's one of many, many phrases that has nautical origins. In fact, you could write a whole book about nautical expressions. But it's it derives from the early English explorers. Could go by boat looking for foreign lands. There were very few navigational aids and no maps.
So it was important to find land while at sea. and the crow was a renowned intelligent bird that would fly straight to land to try to find food.
so ships would always have a cage full of crows before they went on a journey. and the crow would be released from the crow's nest, which is another expression from this. which was at the top of the mast, and the captain would follow its path. which was usually the fastest way to land. At a loose end is another nautical expression.
which means you're idle or have no plans and nothing to do. and it's from tall sailing ships which had hundreds of ropes and sails and The ropes were essential. to ensure the sails were firmly in place, but they often became loose and unraveled. and it was a full-time job checking the ship's rigging for untied ropes or loose ends. and if ever the ship's captain found men sitting around doing nothing, he would make them check the ropes.
So they would find themselves for hours then working at a loose end, which is where the expression comes from. To keep something at bay is to fend it off or keep it at a distance. And it's an expression with pretty interesting origins. A lot of people think it comes from holding off baying hounds from a fox in fox hunting in England years ago. But that origin about the foxes only dates from the 1300s, while the phrase actually began with the ancient Romans and Greeks.
They believed that the bay tree had protective powers and it because it never seemed to be struck by lightning. And because of this, people would take shelter under the trees during storms. It became such a powerful sort of image that soldiers started wearing bay leaves on their heads as protection during thunderstorms. They believed that that would keep the lightning at bay and would shield them from the enemy also. And the supposed power of the bay leaf then spread to London during the Great Plague in 1665, where many people wore bay leaves in an attempt to keep the disease at bay.
At full blast, which means as loudly as possible or using full power. is strangely a rare expression that has pretty obvious origins. Most expressions don't. It's from the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century where iron and other metals were essential commodities and factories used huge blast furnaces to smelt the metals. Fuel was continuously supplied into the furnace, while a hot blast of air was blown into the lower section, causing the chemical reactions to produce the molten metal.
When the furnace was operating at full capacity and producing as much iron as possible, it was considered to be at full blast. At sixes and sevens is an expression you often hear which means a state of confusion. And it comes from London in the 1300s. There were two livery companies there. and they each re received their charter within a few days of each other, so they were the sixth and seventh companies listed.
but a dispute arose between them as to which would be placed sixth in the processions around the city.
So, to resolve this, the two companies would swap between 6th and 7th place each year, but that resulted in confusion for a lot of people watching. At the drop of a hat is a sporting expression. which means something happens suddenly or with little warning. It came from the 19th century from a couple of sporting contests. Sporting referees at the time usually wore hats.
And they would raise it in the air as a signal that an event was about to begin. Then, as soon as the hat was dropped, the contest would start. This is most commonly used in horse racing and boxing, where an event would start at the drop of a hat. It was actually also used in the American West where a man would sometimes drop his hat as a challenge to fight another.
So as soon as the hat hit the ground, it was morally right that the fight should start. An axe to grind is an expression that means a selfish or ulterior aim or motive. And it's credited to one of the founding fathers of America, Benjamin Franklin. In his autobiography, Franklin wrote an anecdote about a man who wanted his axe ground. and a blacksmith agreed to do it, but only if the man turned the grindstone himself.
The man did this, but soon feigned fatigue and gave up. making the blacksmith finish the job for him. and that the expression we know today came from that story. And you're listening to Andrew Thompson. The book is Hair of the Dog.
Go to Amazon.com and buy it. The story of curious phrases in the English language here on our American stories. Lee Habib here, and I'm inviting you to help Our American Stories celebrate this country's 250th birthday coming soon. If you want to help inspire countless others to love America like we do and want to help us bring the inspiring and important stories told here about a good and beautiful country, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to Our American Stories. Any amount helps.
Go to ouramericanstories.com and give. 10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and and mental breaking points. You are the fittest of the fit. Only one of you will leave here with an IFIT contract worth $250,000. This is when mindset comes in.
Someone will be eliminated. Pressure is coming down. This It's Trainer Games. Watch it on Prime Video starting January 8th. Is this this one?
Shh. You won't believe what my new friend just told me about dinosaurs. Is your child having conversations you never imagined? Are they learning without realizing it? It's not a tablet.
It's not a toy. It's Miko Mini Plus, the AI-powered companion that turns curiosity into endless learning. Hear the future of playtime. Meet the extraordinary Miko Mini Plus. Only at Costco.
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That's W-I-I-M-S-O-U-N-D. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.
Mm-hmm.
