Have you ever wondered where some of our stranger sayings and words come from? I do. I was surprised to find that reading about these origins is often very entertaining. Its surprising how some of them originated. Here are some of my favorites from Wordorigins.org:

Balls To The Wall

Originated during the 1950's by pilots describing an all-out effort. The levers controlling throttle and fuel mixture were often topped with round metal balls. Pushing the levers all the way forward, or as close to the front wall of the cockpit as possible, would result in the highest speeds possible making the plane go "all-out."



Goody Two-Shoes

The term for an overly pios or moral person originally came from the 1766 book titled The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes. The term "goody" is actually a shorterning of the title "goodwife" which was the 17th century equivalent of "Mrs."

Geek

It is commonly touted that geek originally meant a sideshow performer who bites the heads off chickens or snakes. While this is a sense of the word, it is not the original one.

Geek is actually a very old word. It is a variant of geck, a term of Low German/Dutch origin that dates in English to 1511. It means a fool, simpleton, or dupe. Geck is even used by Shakespeare in Twelfth Night:

Why haue you suffer'd me to be imprison'd. And made the most notorious gecke and gull That ere inuention plaid on?

The geek spelling is an American variation, even though Shakespeare uses the spelling geeke in Cymbeline V.iv., but this is probably just a misspelling. Geek first appears (outside the single Shakespearean usage) in 1876 America. American usage adds the connotation of offensive or undesirable to the original foolish and stupid sense. The Carnival sideshow sense appears in 1928.

Fuck

Deriving the etymology of this word is difficult, as it has been under a taboo for most of its existence and citations are rare. The earliest known use, according to American Heritage and Lighter, predates 1500 and is from a poem written in a mix of Latin and English and entitled Flen flyys:

Non sunt in celi quia fuccant uuiuys of heli.

Translated:

They [the monks] are not in heaven because they fuck the wives of Ely [a town near Cambridge].

Fuccant is a pseudo-Latin word and in the original it is written in cipher to further disguise it.

Some sources cite an alleged use from 1278 as a personal name, John le Fucker, but this citation is questionable. No one has properly identified the document this name supposedly appears in and even if it is real, the name is likely a variant of fuker, a maker of cloth, fulcher, a soldier, or another similar word.

The taboo was so strong that for 170 years, from 1795 to 1965, fuck did not appear in a single dictionary of the English language. In 1948, the publishers of The Naked and the Dead persuaded Norman Mailer to use the euphemism "fug" instead, resulting in Dorothy Parker's comment upon meeting Mailer: "So you're the man who can't spell fuck."

The root is undoubtedly Germanic, as it has cognates in other Northern European languages: Middle Dutch fokken meaning to thrust, to copulate with; dialectical Norwegian fukka meaning to copulate; and dialectical Swedish focka meaning to strike, push, copulate, and fock meaning penis. Both French and Italian have similar words, foutre and fottere respectively. These derive from the Latin futuere.

While these cognates exist, they are probably not the source of fuck, rather all these words probably come from a common root. Most of the early known usages of the English word come from Scotland, leading some scholars to believe that the word comes from Scandinavian sources. Others disagree, believing that the number of northern citations reflects that the taboo was weaker in Scotland and the north, resulting in more surviving usages. The fact that there are citations, albeit fewer of them, from southern England dating from the same period seems to bear out this latter theory.

There is also an elaborate explanation that has been circulating on the internet for some years regarding English archers, the Battle of Agincourt, and the phrase Pluck Yew! This explanation is a modern jest--a play on words. However, there may be a bit of truth to it. The British (it is virtually unknown in America) gesture of displaying the index and middle fingers with the back of the hand outwards (a reverse peace sign)--meaning the same as displaying the middle finger alone--may derive from the French practice of cutting the fingers off captured English archers. Archers would taunt the French on the battlefield with this gesture, showing they were intact and still dangerous. The pluck yew part is fancifully absurd. This is not the origin of the middle finger gesture, which is truly ancient, being referred to in classical Greek and Roman texts.

Shit

Shit is a very old word, with an Old English root. Scítan is the Old English word. It has cognates in most of the other Germanic languages and shares a common Germanic root with modern equivalents like the German scheissen.

Scítan, however, doesn't appear in extant Old English texts and is only assumed to have existed in Old English. The verb to shit dates the Middle English period (c. 1308), and the noun form is from the 16th century. The interjection is of quite recent vintage, not found until the 1920s.

Dork

Popular etymology would have it that this American slang term comes from a term meaning a whale's penis. That is half right.

The term did originally mean a penis, but human not cetacean. This slang sense dates to at least 1961 and is probably a variant on dick or dirk (another name sometimes used to personalize the phallus). The sense meaning a stupid or obnoxious person follows a few years later, 1967.