Quote:
Originally Posted by NatCh
At the risk of being anti-socially pedantic: that should be "row" (as in garden row) not "road" -- it's a common misperception, though.
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To quote again my
Dictionary of Cliches: "Once the hoe was about the only tool available for weeding a row of plants in a garden that was too small for a horse-drawn rig, and working one's way down such a row (or more likely several of them) was a tedious business...David Crockett was using the expression in that way in his
Tour of the North and Down East (1835): 'I never opposed Andrew Jackson for popularity. I knew it was a hard row to hoe.'"
Did you know that the phrase "bring down the curtain" is a misquotation of "ring down the curtain"? "At one time the signal to raise or lower a theatrical curtain was actually a bell rung backstage. Sheila Kaye-Smith had a figurative meaning in
John Galsworthy (1916): 'Thus the curtain rings down on Irene Forsyte, crushed under the heel of prosperity.'"
I love this book. It's just too short and is missing so many cliches of which I would like to know the origins. I should mention that Amazon has two or three dictionaries of cliches by various authors for the Kindle. Sadly, Sony does not.