“There was something about Prohibition that went against the American grain,” a high school history teacher once said, quite innocent of her pun on this phrase, which means contrary to expecta- tions, custom, or common sense. The literal meaning, against the natural direction of the fibers in a piece of wood, was turned figurative by Shake- speare in Coriolanus (“Preoccupied with what you rather must do than what you should, made you against the grain to voice him consul”). By the time Dickens used it in Edwin Drood (1870) it probably was already a cliché.
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