Don’t you hate it when people arrive late after you tell them to be somewhere at a specific time? Or how about when people wear outside clothes on the bed? Or maybe it annoys you when people loudly scroll through TikTok on a public train and all you want to do is yell at them to use headphones!

… Sorry, that last one really rubs me the wrong way.

These are examples of pet peeves, or seemingly minor but still annoying issues. The term “pet peeve” is a recent creation that dates back to a little over a century ago, but let’s break down each component.

The word “pet” has been used as an adjective since the late 16th century, originally referring to privately owned animals. In the 19th century, the meaning broadened to include things or beliefs we hold near and dear. Soon, people began using it ironically in terms such as “pet hatred” and “pet aversion.” 

“Peevish,” meanwhile, is a 15th-century term used to describe things that evoke a feeling of spite or fretfulness. “Peeve” was created from “peevish” via back formation in the 20th century to fulfill a need for a term to describe personal annoyances. A back formation is when a new word is created by chopping off a real or supposed suffix or affix from an existing word.

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“Pet” and “peeve” were combined in print in the 1910s, cementing the term in the public lexicon. A 1916 article from The Chicago Daily Tribune asked, “What is your little pet peeve? Hearing the baby scratch hubby’s collar.” This denoted one of the first known published instances of the term “pet peeve,” but people continued complaining in print throughout the 20th century. From a 1976 edition of the National Observer: “Poorly designed parking garages have riled me for a long time, but they’ve become a full-fledged pet peeve in recent years.” And in a 2002 copy of Time Out New York: “This touches on my biggest peeve with today’s..society.” More than a century after the term’s creation, folks continue to vent their pet peeves. The Instagram hashtag #petpeeve has 158,000 posts and counting. 

If you’re a fan of TV’s How I Met Your Mother, then you’re aware that “nothing good happens after 2 a.m.” The show’s writers may have been onto something, as popular beliefs pin the “witching hour” to one hour later at 3 a.m. (or midnight, depending on which traditions you’re following). Does this phrase evoke images of women flying through the air on broomsticks and turning children into mice using their magical powers? *Insert spooky noises here* Yes, the origins of the phrase bring us to stories of witchcraft, but parents of young children also use “witching hour” to refer to a stretch of early evening when babies seem more prone to crying. And stock traders will be familiar with the term as the last hour of trading in each month — the market is especially volatile during that time period.

But back to the magical witches. Around 1600, William Shakespeare wrote a soliloquy in Hamlet that included the line, “‘Tis now the very witching time of night.” This denoted the first known use of a phrase similar to “witching hour.” Elizabeth Carolina Keene then penned the specific pairing of the words with the line “Tis the baleful witching hour” in the 1762 poem “Nightmare.” The term held onto its literary presence through the end of the 20th century with the publication of Anne Rice’s 1990 supernatural horror novel, The Witching Hour.

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While it may be used for babies and stock markets, it still primarily refers to  an hour of the night/early morning when supernatural events are more likely to occur. But there’s a debate about when exactly the witching hour takes place. Many people think it falls between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m., a belief that’s rooted in religious history. Biblical scholars posit that Jesus Christ died at 3 p., and in turn, 3 a.m. became known as the “devil’s hour” — a term that evolved into “witching hour.” Other traditions claim the witching hour begins at  midnight, but in essence they all agree on the same thing: The witching hour is when supernatural and mysteriously diabolical events take place while shrouded in darkness.

If I ended a phone call with you with the sign-off “roger that,” you may think to yourself, “Who’s Roger and why is he so important?” I could be talking about tennis legend Roger Federer; Roger Moore, former James Bond star; or Roger Rabbit, who was 100% innocent, by the way. But “roger that” isn’t referring to a person named Roger at all. It’s a reference to the NATO phonetic alphabet and old-school radio communications in the United States.

You may have heard “roger” is an acronym for “received order given, expect results,” but that’s a myth, and the actual meaning is far simpler. “Roger that” dates back to the early 1940s, when “Roger” was used in place of the letter “R” in the Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet. It was nicknamed the Able Baker alphabet after its first code words. In radio communications, using the code word “Roger” indicated a message had been received loud and clear. While “Roger” was replaced by “Romeo” in the NATO phonetic alphabet that was adopted in 1956, many two-way radio users still say “Roger” for the same reason that it’s always been used. 

According to Dictionary.com, “Roger” became widely used after public broadcasts of NASA’s Apollo missions of the 1960s, when the term was used during radio communications between mission control and the astronauts. The public began using “Roger” as a verb, noun, and interjection, all of which meant that something was understood. So, when someone says “roger that,” you know that they’ve heard the message clearly and concisely.

The term “pipe dream” may sound like the title of a Blue Man Group song or what the Nintendo character Mario thinks about while he’s sleeping, but according to Merriam-Webster, it refers to “an illusory or fantastic plan, hope, or story.” Let’s say that someone who has never been in a movie wants to earn fame as an Oscar-winning actor, or someone who has never played a sport has dreams of being an all-star athlete. While both of these goals are possible, they’re also improbable, and are thus considered pipe dreams.

This turn of phrase originated in the late 19th century, though at the time, it had a provocative connotation. It came from the dreamlike state people would fall into after smoking an opium pipe (the 1800s version of opiates). People who smoked opium often experienced hallucinations, and the thoughts in that trance were called “pipe dreams.”

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The first-known usage of this phrase in print is in the 1870 book Tales of Life and Death by Grantley F. Berkeley, when a feverish character recalls “last night’s pipe-dream.” Skipping into the mainstream just a few decades later, in 1890, the Chicago Daily Tribune reported how aerial navigation “has been regarded as a pipe-dream for a good many years.” However, in this case, the pipe dream became a reality with the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903.

Today, the term rarely refers to drug use, as many countries around the world have long outlawed opium. Instead, “pipe dream” is simply an expression of the unlikely hope that someone’s far-fetched dreams will come true. However, stranger things have happened, and it’s sometimes worth keeping a cherished pipe dream alive.