I am plainly saying no, and I mean just that.

Origin

The phrase ‘won’t take no for an answer’ has been in the language since at least the mid-19th century. It’s included in Thomas Haliburton’s exhaustively titled Sam Slick’s wise saws and modern instances; or, what he said, did, or invented, 1853:

“You first of all force yourself into my cabin, won’t take no for an answer, and then complain of oncivility.”

(Note: Oncivility doesn’t seem to be a real word – I don’t know where Haliburton dug that up from.)

‘What part of no don’t you understand’ is a modern-day rejoinder to that. It’s an American phrase and the first printed reference to it I can find is in the California newspaper The Mountain Democrat, October 1988:

‘He wouldn’t take no for an answer,’ which gave meaning to the T-shirt Jim presented Carl printed with ‘What part of No don’t you understand?’

The context there suggested that this was already an understood phrase and so probably dates from before 1988.

It is an example of the many phrases of a mildly confrontational nature that emerged in the USA in the late 1980s and 1990s. For example, ‘talk to the hand’, ‘so sue me’, etc.

There are many variants on the phrase and it has mutated into the generic ‘what part of [insert topic here] don’t you understand?’.

Whatever the source, this phrase, and its variations, have become T-shirt slogan favourites.

The phrase got a wider audience when it was used as the title of a popular country music song, written by Wayne Perry and Gerald Smith, and recorded by Lorrie Morgan:

“What part of no don’t you understand?
To put it plain and simple
I’m not into one night stands
I’ll be glad to explain it
If it’s too hard to comprehend
So tell me what part of no
Don’t you understand?”

- Special thanks to Gary Martin of The Phrase Finder

Excited, and/or turning cartwheels to demonstrate one’s excitement.

Origin

Head over heels somersault

‘Head over heels’ is now most often used as part of ‘head over heels in love’. When first coined it wasn’t used that way though and referred exclusively to being temporarily the wrong way up. It is one of many similar phrases that we use to describe things that are not in their usual state – ‘upside-down’, ‘topsy-turvy’, ‘topple up tail’, ‘arse over tea-kettle’, ‘bass-ackwards’ etc.

Herbert Lawrence’s Contemplative Man, 1771 is the first known citation of ‘head over heels’:

“He gave [him] such a violent involuntary kick in the Face, as drove him Head over Heels.”

The first mention of love comes in 1834, by which time the phrase had crossed the Atlantic, and into David Crockett’s Narrative of the life of David Crockett:

“I soon found myself head over heels in love with this girl.”

Note: Non-American readers might not realize that Davy Crockett was a real person. Certainly in the UK he has the semi-mythic status of characters like Robin Hood and William Tell. Crockett is best known here by the old joke: “Did you know Davy Crockett had three ears? A left ear, a right ear and a wild frontier.”

‘Head over heels’ is a good example of how language can communicate meaning even when it makes no literal sense. After all, our head is normally over our heels. The phrase originated in the 14th century as ‘heels over head’, meaning doing a cartwheel or somersault. This appeared later in Thomas Carlyle’s History of Frederick the Great, 1864:

“A total circumgyration, summerset, or tumble heels-over-head in the Political relations of Europe.”

Another note: Carlyle’s spelling of summerset for somersault. John Lennon reinvented that in ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite’ – “Ten somersets he’ll undertake on solid ground.”

‘Head over heels’ isn’t alone – many everyday idioms make no literal sense. Another nice example is ‘putting your best foot forward’. Anyone trying that should arrange to have at least three legs. We humans should limit our efforts to ‘putting our better foot forward’, unless we want to end up ‘heels over head’.

- Special thanks to Gary Martin of The Phrase Finder

Falling down ill or dead in large numbers.

Origin

The origin of this phrase isn’t known. It is clearly a simple allusion to the transitory and fragile nature of an insect’s life. It is known from around the turn of the 20th century. The earliest printed version I have found is in The Atlanta Constitution newspaper, May 1902:

“I saw men and women rushing back and forth within the flames. They would run along, then came the choking smoke and they would drop like dead flies.”

In the early 19th century the Brothers Grimm’s published ‘The Brave Little Tailor’, which is a cautionary fable of a child who easily and thoughtlessly kills numerous flies. It seems that they chose flies as being synonymous with something even a child could kill with little effort. The phrase doesn’t appear in that text.

– Sincerest thanks to Gary Martin of The Phrase Finder

A story, generally untrue but sometimes one that is merely exaggerated or sensationalized, that gains the status of folklore by continual retelling. Such stories, which may be old and cliché-ridden, are often given a degree of plausibility by being updated in a contemporary setting, or by the teller’s claims of personal involvement.

Origin

Note: This is a language site and so we are primarily concerned here with the meaning and origin of the term ‘urban myth’ rather than with the myths themselves, although it’s hard to write about myths without straying into that territory. Suffice to say, if you want to know about any particular urban myth there are numerous web sites, newsgroups and books to accommodate you.

It is impossible to manage a web site about etymology without coming into daily contact with ‘folk etymology’, which is the linguistic branch of urban mythology.

This topic is such a cans of worms that I hardly know where to begin. The words used in the little term ‘urban myth’ are contentious in themselves, so let’s start there. Why ‘urban’? The setting of these stories isn’t limited to cities. For example, the Vanishing Hitch-hiker tale is usually set on some deserted back road. The stories that fall in the ‘urban myth’ category aren’t limited to city life – they are those that are set in contemporary industrialized societies, as distinct from traditional folklore tales.

Then there’s ‘myth’. Many students of this field prefer the terms ‘urban legend’ or ‘urban folklore’. ‘Myth’ implies that the stories are all false and, whilst most of them clearly are, some may contain elements of truth. In fact, one of the essential factors in a plausible retelling is the introduction of real events; top of that list of course being the claim that ‘I was really there – it happened to me’. If the teller wasn’t there then you can be sure that a ‘FOAF’ (friend of a friend) was. This word has now also entered the language via these stories and has its own definition in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Perhaps a name that is nearer to being definitive of this form of story would be ‘contemporary legend’.

Another source of dispute is the origin of all of these terms. Mythology and the need to tell tall tales are obviously ancient, but the term ‘urban myth’ isn’t especially old. A version of it dates from 1960, when it was used by William H. Friedland in conference paper entitled Some Urban Myths of East Africa. This isn’t a reference to ‘urban myth’ as defined above though. It refers to myths that happen to be set in an urban context, i.e. Friedland was using the term in its literal sense.

Likewise, the term ‘urban legend’ was put in print as early as 1925, when it appeared in a New York Times piece headed ‘Europe’s Population Growth’:

“Around the subject of population there has been a growth of popular legend hard to remove. Great Britain illustrates the urban legend.”

This again isn’t the contemporary meaning but refers to stories about urban life in Great Britain that were myths (and there the author chose to use legend when really meaning myth – I said this was a can of worms).

The first reference I can find to ‘urban legend’ in the sense we mean here is Richard M. Dorson Our Living Traditions, 1968:

“Urban legends deal with the ghostly hitchhiker, the stolen grandmother, and the death car.”

One of the first of the ‘urban myths’, and surely now a classic, is the tale of alligators living in New York City’s sewers. There are many references in print to ‘urban myth’ from the 1960s onwards but the first that I can find that uses it in the contemporary legend sense is in an alligator story from The Frederick Post, in August 1984. This reports on a borderline insane scheme by Little Rock Council to buy alligators from New York and use them to chase away beavers:

‘The ordinance authorized the mayor to negotiate “at arms length” with New York City officials for the alligators, which urban myth says thrive in the city’s sewer system.’

Now; have you heard the one about the ghostly etymologist who microwaved his grandmother’s pet monkey…?

– Sincere thanks to Gary Martin of The Phrase Finder

To join a growing movement in support of someone or something, often in an opportunist way, when that movement is seen to be about to become successful.

Origin

A typical bandwagon

The word bandwagon was coined in the USA in the mid 19th century, simply as the name for the wagon that carried a circus band. Phineas T. Barnum, the great showman and circus owner, used the term in 1855 in his unambiguously named autobiography The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself, 1855:

“At Vicksburg we sold all our land conveyances excepting four horses and the ‘band wagon’.”

Barnum didn’t coin ‘jump on the bandwagon’; that came later, but he did have a hand in some other additions to the language. He was nothing if not a publicist and, even though there is no definitive evidence of his inventing any new word or phrase, he certainly can be said to have made several of them popular. Firstly, there are a couple of celebrated quotations:

“There’s a sucker born every minute.” and

“You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.”

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations lists those as ‘attributed to’ Barnum. Abraham Lincoln is also often cited as the author of the second one. Two other coinages that we can thank Barnum for popularising are ‘Jumbo’ and ‘Siamese twins’. Jumbo was a little-used slang term in Barnum’s day and was recorded in John Badcock’s Slang. A dictionary of the turf, 1823:

“Jumbo, a clumsy or unwieldly fellow.”

It came into widespread use in 1882 as the the name of the giant elephant that Barnum exhibited in his shows. Those shows also featured the ‘joined at the hip’ Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker.

Back to the bandwagon. Circuses were skilled at attracting the public with the razzmatazz of a parade through town, complete with highly decorated bandwagon. Politicians picked up on this and began using bandwagons when campaigning for office. The date of the transition from the literal ‘jumping on a bandwagon’, in order to show one’s alliance to a politician, to the figurative use we know now isn’t clear, but it was complete by the 1890s. Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt made a clear-cut reference to the practice in his Letters, 1899 (published 1951):

“When I once became sure of one majority they tumbled over each other to get aboard the band wagon.”

- Special thanks to Gary Martin of The Phrase Finder