eat one’s cake and have it, too, to

To have it both ways; to spend something and still possess it. This metaphor was already a proverb in the sixteenth century, included in John Heywood’s collection of 1546 (as “You cannot eat your cake and have your cake”) and has reappeared with great regularity ever since, probably because, as A. C. Benson wrote (From a Col- lege Window, 1907), “There still remains the intensely human instinct . . . the desire to eat one’s cake and also to have it.”

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eat like a bird/horse, to

To eat very little/very much. The first comes from the misconception that birds don’t eat much, and indeed, they seem to peck away at tiny bits of seed and other food. In fact, however, they do eat quite a bit relative to their size, some birds actually consuming their weight in food each day. In print the term appeared only in the twentieth century, as in Barnaby Ross’s The Tragedy of X: Drury Lane’s Mystery (1930): “She ate like a bird, slept little.” To “eat like a horse,” based on the idea that horses eat a great deal, dates from the eighteenth century.

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dead ringer

A person or object that exactly resembles another, an exact counterpart in appearance. The usage of “ringer” for look-alike has been around since the late 1800s, when it was used for a horse that was fraudulently substituted for another in a race. It also was applied to the person who made such a substitution, but this usage has died out. However, in 1891 the term was made more emphatic with the addition of “dead,” here used in the sense of “exact,” as it is in DEAD HEAT for an exact tie.

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dead on one’s feet

Extremely tired. This graphic hyperbole, with its use
of “dead” in the meaning of “utterly fatigued,” is probably related to dead
tired, where “dead” means “very” or “absolutely.” This locution has been
traced to Irish speech and appears in such clichés as dead wrong for “com-
pletely mistaken,” dead right for “absolutely correct,” dead certain for “totally
sure,” and others. “Dead on one’s feet” became common in the mid-
twentieth century. John Braine used it in Life at the Top (1962): “Honestly,
I’m dead on my feet.”

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dead of night/winter, the

The time of most intense stillness, darkness, or cold. This usage dates from the sixteenth century. Shakespeare had it in Twelfth Night (1.5), “Even in the dead of night,” and Washington Irving used the alternate phrase in Salmagundi (1807–08), “In the dead of winter, when nature is without charm.”

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dead in the water

A failure. The analogy here is to a dead fish floating. The cliché dates from the second half of the 1900s and is most often applied to a struggling business that is about to fail completely.

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dead horse, to beat/flog a

To pursue a futile goal or belabor a point to no end. That this sort of behavior makes no sense was pointed out by the Roman playwright Plautus in 195 B.C. The analogy certainly seems ludicrous; what coachman or driver would actually take a whip to a dead animal? The figurative meaning has been applied for centuries as well; often it is used in politics, concerning an issue that is of little interest to voters. However, some writers, John Ciardi among them, cite a quite different source for the cliché. In the late eighteenth century British merchant seamen often were paid in advance, at the time they were hired. Many would
spend this sum, called a dead horse, before the ship sailed. They then could
draw no more pay until they had worked off the amount of the advance, or
until “the dead horse was flogged.”

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