Once I hit college and began seriously studying Homer, Shakespeare, and other literary greats, I learned the mini-delights of discovering origins of beloved clichés. Embedded amidst joys found in the company of immortal characters peopling the epics, plays, and stories, were the expressions of their time. Some phrases we still use actually are very old.
For instance, I’d always thought “bit the dust” was an American western saying. It evoked images of Montana gunslingers and lawmen wearing silver stars. Not so. The ancient Greeks used the phrase to describe what happened to those slain in epics such as The Ilaid and The Odyssey, epics of the Trojan Wars.
Shakespeare, especially with Hamlet, gave us phrases that have become idiomatic to English speakers. Among them (Thank you, Wikipedia) are “the primrose path,” “the mind’s eye,” method in his madness (a paraphrase of the original), “What a piece of work is man!”, “…protest too much,” “The…dog will have his day,”
Then, there are characters themselves who have become so well known as to stand for human types in our culture. Goethe wrote a play featuring a man called Faust. Now, Faustian people are commonly known as those consumed by ambition or desire to the extent that they’ll sell their souls to the devil to achieve their ends. With Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe gave us the title character as a certain type of black man, and Simon Legree, a name now synonymous with slave drivers. Pollyanna remains the one who can always find something “to be thankful for,” even if a more normal reaction might be giving in to doom and gloom. As for that approach, Dickens gave us Scrooge and the words to use when the holidays become overwhelming to the point where the only proper reaction is the well worn, “Bah Humbug!”