"Avoiding things like the plague" because people did not actually seem to want to avoid the plague last time around.
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“Burning the midnight oil”
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Don't put the cart before the horse.
Don't submit your post before you write it.
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Oh, man, when it comes to nautical idioms, I could go on all day. There are so many, and they've lost their literal connections so thoroughly, you probably don't even think of some of them as idioms. A few that occur to me immediately:
- taken aback (wind on the wrong side of the sails)
- give a wide berth (extra space for a vessel to maneuver)
- leeway (unwanted downwind slippage of the vessel when in motion)
- above board (on deck, the board being the section of the hull running fore and aft just above the water line)
- onboard (to load onto the deck of the ship)
- go by the board (to fall off of the ship into the water, passing the board on the way)
- hand over fist (two-handed motion to pull in sails, ropes, etc. as quickly as possible)
- high and dry (above the tide line)
- loose cannon (a gun insufficiently secured would cause havoc on a warship when fired, or as the ship rolled in waves)
Honestly, I'm not sure that I want modern equivalents, since many are so rich in imagery.
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FYI this can still happen on liquid propane stoves, so not totally lost to time.
Maybe "Kill two birds with one stone", because who hunts with stones anymore?
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Dollars to donuts originated in an age when a dollar could buy a considerable quantity of donuts. Inflation has since reduced the literal interpretation of the expression to nearly even odds.
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"Have your cake and eat it too" doesn't really make sense. Cake is not rare or expensive enough that simply possessing it feels good. If you have cake, all you want is to eat it.
The italian version, "you want a full barrel and drunk wife" illustrates the same situation much more clearly.
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(to do something) "on your dime," i.e. at your expense - A reference to public coin operated phones, which for a long time cost 10c/a US "dime" coin per call.
Inflation by the late 70s had made the single dime call a thing of the past, but USD20c was still possible, and inflating phone fees in the 80s required increasing amounts of coinage. Public pay phones were decimated when mobile phones gained popularity and are virtually extinct today in the US.
"on your card" might be a more modern version, but cards are slowly disappearing with NFC phone payments.
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In Portuguese the equivalent expression is timeless: "o sujo falando do mal lavado" (the dirty one talking about the badly washed).
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"Pulling my leg." Meaning you are making something up/joking at someones expense.
It does not have any real connection to the present. The idiom came about in the mid-19th century. There's two competing theories about how it came about. The prevailing theory is that pick pockets, particularly child pick pockets, would pull on people legs to distract their mark. The darker theory is that it was related to pulling someone's legs when they were hanged in order to finish the ordeal if they didn't die from the initial drop.
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I don't know if its literal origin doesn't make sense to a modern person, but I think that most people still get the literal meaning of "pot calling the kettle black", that that is still understandable, so...
We still use "penny-wise and pound-foolish" in the US. We haven't used the pound since we seceded from the British Empire, and we just ended minting of the penny.
The saying apparently predates the US by about 200 years.
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