Expressions, sayings, metaphors, we use these everyday to illustrate what we mean,
add spice to our language, or to simply seem wise.
However, so many of the ones that are embedded in our common language are just plain wrong.
So let's find out what idioms we use to sound smart,
actually end up making us sound like idiots.
I’m Stu. This is Debunked. And we’re here to
sort the truths from the myths and the facts from the misconceptions.
This video is sponsored by Private Internet Access VPN.
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‘Sweat Like A Pig’
To Sweat like a pig is to perspire so profusely that you resemble a hot sweaty swine.
“I WAS SO NERVOUS, I WAS SWEATING LIKE A PIG!”
Research suggests this may have evolved from an earlier expression - “bleed like a stuck pig”
But the truth is if you sweated like a pig, you’d be dry as a bone,
to mix idioms. You see, Pigs don’t sweat.
In humans, and other mammals, the process of perspiration
and evaporation of sweat beads transfers energy in the form of heat. It effectively
disperses heat from our bodies, which in turn lowers our body temperature.
In pigs however, the few sweat glands they have don’t function to cool the
animal down as their body temperature rises.
So what do the poor overheated swines do? Well they bath and cover themselves in cool
water to produce a similar sweating effect.
And if water’s not available
then they roll themselves in mud to keep themselves cool in the heat of the day.
"A PIG, LIKE ANY ANIMAL, IS GOING TO TRY TO BE COMFORTABLE,"
"IF THAT MEANS GETTING DIRTY TO STAY COOL THEN THAT'S WHAT IT'S GOING TO DO.”
‘Happy As A Pig In…
“...MUD! Mud.”
Experts also believe that the ‘Suidae’ family use mud as a sort of sunscreen
to stop their skin from burning in the midday sun, and as an insect repellant to protect them
from the likes of mosquitos. It’s also a method for removing parasites once they rub the mud off.
The stereotype of a filthy pig, is infact the poor animal trying to keep on top of its hygiene.
But wait! There’s more. Believe it or not,
despite popular belief the term ‘Sweat Like A Pig’ may not even refer to the animal at all. Instead
research has unearthed an earlier accreditation to Pig Iron.
So called because the smelting system resembled a bunch of piglets suckling at their mother.
At the end when the Pig Iron cools, beads of moisture form on its surface. So when the ingots
or ‘pigs’ sweat it indicates that the metal is cool enough to handle safely. Sweating like a pig.
‘As Blind As A Bat’
Keeping to the animal theme, to be ‘as blind as a bat’
is often attributed to people with very impaired vision
“I’m as blind as a bat without my glasses”
But where does it come from?
Generally speaking, bats are nocturnal and so hunt for food in the dark.
To aid their nighttime movements most bats project clicking sounds that bounce off of surfaces and
return as an echo to their highly tuned ears. This ‘echolocation’ system can happen over 10
to 20 meters / 33 to 66 feet and allows them to judge distances, and map out their surroundings.
But this doesn’t mean they’re blind,
in fact in low light conditions their vision may even be better than ours.
Mammals like us have eyes that are made up of rods and cones.
Cones are for daylight vision and colour, and rods give you night vision.
Until recently it was believed that our dark night winged cousins only possessed the night
vision rods, but studies have discovered they also have cones that specialize in detecting reds
and, ULTRAVIOLET, something which is OUTSIDE OF OUR COLOUR SPECTRUM.
Reds help Megabats like Fruit Bats find the ripest fruits and distinguish between foliage.
While ULTRAVIOLET, something that eyes are most readily exposed to when the sun is lowest,
helps Microbats when they go hunting at dusk and dawn.
UV vision is also beneficial for nectar feeding bats.
This allows them to detect a flower’s UV-reflecting ‘Nectar
Guide’ which is like a neon sign telling bats where to get their next nectar fix.
In fact species of Fruit bats, or Flying Foxes,
rely solely on their vision to navigate, and if the dark hours lack enough moonlight then
they can’t even leave the roost, and go hungry until the following night.
But there are exceptions to the ‘bat nocturnality rule’. In areas that lack predators, several
species of bat have even been recorded as daylight hunters and are most active between 9am and 4pm.
You could say...
“I’m as colourblind as a bat”
...but then you’d have the cool ULTRAVIOLET VISION,
so I can’t see that simile catching on.
‘It’s Darkest Just Before Dawn’
This implies that a situation can often seem at its worst, just before it gets better.
“Things are worse than ever” “yes they are…’ “But the night is darkest just before the dawn.”
The earliest record of this proverb,
is in a book by historian Thomas Fuller from the ,mid-17th century.
“It is always darkest just before the Day dawneth.”
The theory behind this, uses the literal meaning of Dawn,
and that dawn provides us with the FIRST light.
Taken literally this expression claims that the night gets darker and darker,
and at the point just before dawn we see the least amount of light.
Then dawn begins and provides us with the first light since dusk.
But the confusion about whether this is accurate or not is based around people's
misunderstanding of the sun’s position at the start of dawn.
You see, dawn doesn’t begin as soon as the sun starts returning to your side of the planet.
Scientifically it’s broken down like this,
with Dawn beginning at the start of Astronomical Twilight
which occurs when the centre of the sun is 18 degrees below the horizon.
Before that it’s night time and the night has varying degrees of darkness.
Generally speaking the darkest part of the night is smack bang in the middle, when the sun
is shining it’s bright beams down on the exact opposite side of the Earth from where you are,
leaving you in the shadows. The closer you get to dawn the brighter the sky becomes.
But then there’s the moon to take into account. The levels of illumination that
this provides can shift the darkest point of the night closer, or further still from dawn.
In the 2 weeks following a New Moon, the sky is in fact darker closer to dawn,
simply because the moon is not visible. But alternatively in the middle of the lunar month,
the moon is instead not visible after sunset making that the darker part of the night.
Also, depending on the time of year, you can also bring the Zodiacal Light into the equation. This
phenomenon occurs just before dawn and causes a cone of light to form from particles of
interplanetary dust that reflect sunlight. It’s otherwise known as the ‘false dawn’.
One thing that is a constant, is that the night is coldest just before sunrise. This is because the
surface on your part of the planet will have been without the sun’s heat for the longest possible
time, before the sun pops over the horizon and once again starts to warm your patch of the Earth.
Talking of heating things up...
‘‘Lightning Never Strikes The Same Place Twice’’
This is often used to convey, that when something unusual has happened
it won’t happen again to the same person or the same place.
“Love. They say lightning never strikes twice. But I know that I will love again.”
Let’s start with what one actually is. A lightning bolt is a result of an electrical imbalance
between a cloud and the ground. The spark that is discharged, produces up to a billion volts and
can be up to 60,000 degrees F or 30,000 degrees C. The lightning travels at around 300,000,000
km or 200,000,000 mi per hour and the whole process takes place over just a few thousandth
of a second. Given that these flashes occur so quickly and their jagged strikes appear
so randomly, it seems obvious to conclude that lightning wouldn’t hit the same place twice.
But the simple response to this one? YES. IT. DOES.
If you're a tall pointy building like the Empire State you’ll get struck around 25 times a year!
SPrimarily, because tall objects offer the shortest gap, to bridge
the negatively charged upward streamer, to the positively charged downward lightning leader.
This formation is where we get the idea that lightning travels both up and down.
But, even if you’re just a regular homosapien, while you may not be struck in the exact same
spot every time, you can definitely be hit by lightning more than once.
The world record for the MOST LIGHTING STRIKES SURVIVED by a human-being,
is held by Roy C Sullivan, a Park Ranger in Virginia, USA.
This poor guy was struck a total of 7 times over a period of 35 years!
The effects he suffered ranged from losing his big toe nail, to having his hair set on fire... twice,
and burning his leg, stomach and chest, but he survived every time.
Oddly enough, while we all think of lightning bolts being attributed to a storm, this natural
phenomena can occur in a range of other situations including volcanic eruptions and wildfires .
‘‘Once In A Blue Moon’’
If something happens once in a blue moon, it is thought to be a very rare occurrence.
‘I only eat takeaway once in a blue moon since I started my diet’
“SO I TALKED TO THE VET AND HE SAID, ONLY ONCE IN A BLUE
MOON DOES A DOG'S EAR GROW BACK. SO STILL HOPING.”
The earliest reference to a blue moon
being an unlikely thing comes from an anti-clerical pamphlet published in 1528;
“O CHURCHE MEN ARE WYLY FOXES […] YF THEY SAY THE MONE IS BLEWE /
WE MUST BELEVE THAT IT IS TRUE / ADMITTYNGE THEIR INTERPRETACION.”
In other words, it’s criticising churchmen for making outlandish statements,
like the moon being blue, and expecting people to believe them.
Although that might provide some basis for the phrase, chances are the blue
moon proverb as we know it today, referring to a rare event, stems from a book published in 1821
“HOW’S HARRY AND BEN? – HAVEN’T SEEN YOU THIS BLUE MOON.”
So what is a blue moon? Well it’s time to get astronomical again because there are 2 official
scientific definitions, and neither of them have to do with the moon being the colour blue.
You see, for the moon to complete all of its phases takes 29.5 days,
so we get 12 full cycles every 354 days -
which means that the lunar months
and calendar months don’t quite align over the course of a year.
The 12 full moons that appear each year in these cycles have their own special names,
and the ‘BLUE MOON’ acts as a kind of rounding error created by the two
calendars not quite matching up. This means in some years we end up with a 13th full moon.
It’s this 13th moon that is the proverbial blue moon.
Strictly speaking it is the third moon in an astronomical season
that has four rather than the normal three moons.
But are they actually that rare? Well, it depends on your definition of rare I guess, but in
astronomical terms they’re relatively common, coming around every 2 and a half years or so.
However, in 2018 there were two blue moons in the same year,
which were only two months apart! How is that possible?
These Blue Moons occurred under the, relatively, more recent astronomical definition which means
According to this, the second moon in any calendar month
is a blue moon, and this occurs for roughly 3% of all full moons.
This definition can be traced back to a misinterpretation of the correct
definition, which was printed in Sky & Telescope Magazine in 1946 and has been
widely repeated ever since, even making it into the Trivial Pursuit board game at one point.
Due to its popularity,
this definition is now widely considered an acceptable definition of a blue moon.
So in summary neither are particularly common nor especially rare.
If you really want to compare something to a truly rare lunar event though you should say
“ONCE IN SUPER BLUE BLOOD MOON”
They occur on average every 2380 moons, that’s around once every 265 years!
‘‘Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire’’
If someone suspects something is happening,
or there is a sliver of evidence for something happening, then it’s probably happening.
Or at its most basic level, there is an element of truth to every rumour.
‘A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE SAYING THE CHIEF OF POLICE TOOK A BRIBE,
AND WHERE THERE’S SMOKE, THERE’S FIRE.’
This reportedly dates back to at least 1546.
‘There is no fire without some smoke’.
On the surface, this original proverb feels right from a scientific perspective.
We’ve all seen it where someone rubs a couple of sticks together,
heating things up with friction. We’re then treated to some smoke before the fire catches.
“FIRE!”
There’s no fire without the smoke.
Except, that’s obviously not true.
Anyone who has used a gas stove will know that you don’t end up with a load of smoke every time you
rustle up some grub. So what’s going on? Well, when fuel is burned in the presence
of oxygen it creates a chemical reaction known as combustion.
However, when there isn’t enough oxygen to burn up all the fuel we end up with incomplete combustion
- some of the material is not burned up and it’s these tiny unburned particles that make up smoke.
In the gas stove example, there is no smoke because the fuel is burned entirely
and is undergoing complete combustion,
So of course we can get fire without smoke.
Looking at the more recent incarnation of this proverb,
can we get smoke without fire? Well, yes, we’ve already seen this.
In the bushcraft technique smoke appears,
and the fire doesn’t ignite until more oxygen is added to the mix.
When a material is placed under high temperatures, but there isn’t enough oxygen to burn the fuel,
this can cause a chemical reaction known as pyrolysis.
A much more common example of this is when you’ve charred food using an electric cooker.?
The cooker hasn’t used a flame at any point, yet it can pyrolyze your pizza
and kick out a load of smoke without ever catching fire.
So whichever way you look at it, either fire or smoke can be present
independently of each other, meaning this proverb doesn’t really work in any sense.
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