feel someone’s pain, to

To empathize completely with someone. This hyperbolic idea is often asserted hypocritically, or by someone who is actually causing the pain. Thus, “I feel your pain” can be a politician’s response to a constituent who is complaining about the minimum wage, even though he actually voted against its being increased. This expression needs to be differentiated from feeling no pain, a slangy phrase from the mid-twentieth century describing someone who is intoxicated, and from I feel for you but I can’t quite reach you, a slangy response expressing lack of sympathy for someone’s hard-luck story.

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feel one’s oats, to

To act frisky or lively. This saying, with its analogy to a horse that is lively after being fed, is American in origin and dates from the early nineteenth century. It appeared in print in Amos Lawrence’s Extracts from Diary and Correspondence (1833): “We both ‘feel our oats’ and our youth.”

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feel it in one’s bones, to

To anticipate something; to have a premoni- tion or warning of a coming event. The expression appeared in Shake- speare’s Timon of Athens, in which the Third Lord responds to the statement that Timon is mad, “I feel ’t upon my bones” (3.6). The saying, which has been a cliché for a hundred years or so, most likely alludes to the alleged ability of those with old bone fractures and/or arthritis to forecast a change in weather (usually rain) based on their aching bones.

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feeling is mutual

See THE  FEELING  IS  MUTUAL.

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fed to the gills

Thoroughly disgusted. This American version of the ear- lier British fed to the (back) teeth and fed (up) to the eyelids is based on the slang meaning of gills for the human mouth.

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feather one’s nest, to

To enrich oneself, to provide well for oneself. Alluding to the practice of birds making a soft nest for their eggs and young, this expression originated in the sixteenth century. It appeared in the 1553 play Respublica (1:1) by an unknown author, as well as in several other works of the period. It was a cliché by the eighteenth century.

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feather in one’s cap, a

A special honor or achievement. This term comes from the custom of numerous peoples—American Indian tribes, Turks, Himalayan peoples, among others—of placing a feather in a soldier’s cap for every enemy he kills. The term began to be used figuratively by the early seventeenth century and was a cliché by the time Laurence Sterne wrote, “The feather put into his cap of having been abroad” (Tristram Shandy, 1761–67).

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