Last night, I was talking about sex with some guys . . . wait, that doesn’t sound right. I was talking . . . I was minding my own business when suddenly someone asked me what ‘the birds and the bees” had to do with . . . the subject at hand.

Today I have an answer from our Etymology Desk: We don’t know. The phrases appears to have developed last century, but note this article from The Phrase Finder on suggested origins. None of them actually use “the birds and the bees” in reference to the act of marriage. There’s a 1927 newspaper article, but it couldn’t have been the coining of the phrase. Perhaps this is the influence of teachers whose oral instruction permeated the culture.

As for a related phrase, The Word Detective tells us that we don’t know the origin of “naked as a jay bird.” Why pick on jays when they aren’t unclothed any more than any other animal? Evan Morris says maybe it’s because blue jays are stand out among birds, obnoxiously so, in color and volume. On a discussion forum, someone says the folk wisdom he was told has to do with baby jays being pushed out of their nests before they have any feathers. Still, the printed evidence of this fails.

I wondered today how the word harp came to mean “talking tediously or nagging.” Is that meaning of the word related to the instrument by the same name? Are they different words which have developed into the same one over the years? Apparently, they are the same word, and the phrase “to harp on one string” was used in print as far back as 1513. I have no doubt that this phrase has something to do with bar patrons whistling for their beer at one time, but that story has yet to be concocted.

The stories are being concocted for the origin of the phrase “with bells on,” because there isn’t enough print material to argue well for any of them. Have you ever used this phrase or had it used on you? Why would anyone go to a party with bells on, or the British variation, “with brass knobs on”? How did the phrase develop to mean not only enthusiasm but also intensity, such as “He retaliated with bells on”?

Roy asks if you are a writer or an editor? “Are you more comfortable with writing, or editing? And what are some other ways we can describe our creative DNA?”

Author Ingrid Hill has some remarks on the suffering needed to view the world and the choice of magical realism. “Asked how he developed his magical realist style, García Márquez demurred: it wasn’t a style at all, just his way of articulating how things looked to him as a child. His child-mind took over.” (via Mindy Withrow)

Also from Mindy, a quote from writer Joe Meno on the reality of throwing out most of what you write. “In order to write one good story, you’re going to probably write ten bad ones.”

Courage, friends. Courage.

Writing good fiction is hard because it must be outside the writer, not focused on him. If he can define something of the larger world, his work may live beyond his memory. (HT: Frank Wilson)

Picking up on Lars’ post on idioms a few days ago, Dr. Goodword is all over idioms and slang this week like white on rice.

One of the greatest tricks of the comedian is to find situations where an idiom may, in fact, be analyzed, leaving the listener in a quandary—does he or she mean the idiom or the literal meaning? In an episode of the TV series Mash, hearing that a soldier has been dishonrably discharged, Hawk-eye asked, “Why? Was he rotten to the corps?” Now, when you hear this, it sounds identical to the idiom “rotten to the core”, which means simply to be extermely bad. Which did Hawk-eye mean, corps or core?

And no, I don’t know that the good doctor was inspired by Lars’ post. Possible–probable–but I can’t say.