In its earliest use, the phrase pin money did mean the money to buy pins, the primary fasteners for clothing before buttons and zippers were invented.
But by the sixteenth century, the phrase came to mean the money used for incidentals.
You should not use the word irregardless ever. The word is redundant because the negative prefix “ir” does the same work as the negative suffix “less”. Use regardless instead. Irregardless, some folks use it anyway.
The phrase “to look a gift horse in the mouth” is as old as the fourth century A.D. and once had a literal meaning. Up to a certain number of years, a horse’s age can be determined by examining its teeth. To perform such an examination on a horse you’ve been given is looking a…
The term Stark Naked is a corruption of the term start naked. In the thirteenth century, when the phrase originated, start took the Anglo-Saxon form steort, which meant “tail” or “rump.” Therefore, stark naked refers to someone naked to the tail.
In Old English, scot meant a payment, or one’s share of a payment. To go scot free meant escaping that charge.
The practice, also called anthropophagy, is derived from the Spanish word for the Caribs. The Caribs were a West Indian tribe known for cannibalism.
Rather than measuring the time that passes during a meeting, the word minutes refers to the Latin minutus, or “small.” This is because the occurrences of the meeting are meant to be noted shortly and quickly, not that the events themselves are unimportant.