“Well, that takes the cake!” This statement, said with different intonations in two different contexts, can be interpreted as either high praise or derision. How can the exact same words convey such disparate meanings with only a shift in tone? 

“It takes the cake” can mean something is ranked first — or something is foolish or annoying. Let’s take a look at how this idiom has been used over the decades.

The earliest recorded use is from 1839, when a Lexington, Mississippi, newspaper alluded to cakes being offered as prizes at a fair: “We have been shown some [cotton bolls] that we thought hard to beat, yet this takes the cakes.”

That usage seems to be literal, but less than a decade later, the phrase was being used metaphorically, still referencing a prize. In 1846, an account of a horse race reported, “The winning horse take [sic] the cakes.”

The wording “takes the cake” expanded in meaning over the next few decades to refer to skill, not just winning prizes. This usage is seen in an 1886 article in the Pall Mall Gazette, a London-based newspaper: “As a purveyor of light literature, Mr. Norris takes the cake.”

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As early as 1900, however, “takes the cake” acquired negative connotations. Read these next examples with a derisive tone, as opposed to the complimentary examples above. In Sister Carrie, published in 1900, Theodore Dreiser wrote: “Pack up and pull out, eh? You take the cake.” And in her 1938 book A Blunt Instrument, British author Georgette Heyer wrote: “I’ve met some kill-joys in my time, but you fairly take the cake.” This shift evolved out of the positive prize-winning, skillful sense being used ironically in negative contexts. 

As you see, “takes the cake” can refer either to something remarkably excellent, or to something outstandingly negative. Either way, it’s something extraordinary.

In werewolf myths, silver is one method to kill the powerful creatures, so a silver bullet is sometimes the hero’s weapon of choice. When “silver bullet” is used in everyday English, however, it is usually in the negative sense: “There is no silver bullet for …” You can complete that sentence with any seemingly intractable, complex problem.

How did a silver bullet earn a reputation as an all-powerful weapon? There’s a long tradition in folklore and literature. 

The ancient Greeks believed that silver was a gift from the moon goddess, Selene, and that it had mystical powers. In Norse mythology, silver was believed to have protective properties, useful for warding off evil spirits. And in medieval European folklore, silver was imbued with magic used to repel werewolves and other supernatural creatures.

Silver’s reputation of mystical powers has endured through the centuries. In 1804, American poet Thomas Green Fessenden wrote about killing a witch: “how a man, one dismal night, / Shot her with a silver bullet.”

In the Grimm brothers’ 1812 fairy tale “The Two Brothers,” a huntsman shoots a witch with a lead bullet, but it has no effect. Then, the story continues, he “knew what to do, tore three silver buttons off his coat, and loaded his gun with them, for against them her arts were useless, and when he fired she fell down at once with a scream.”

A few decades later, in 1858, French writer Élie Berthet authored a novel based on the true story of the Beast of Gévaudan, a wolf that killed about 80 people in south-central France. In the real occurrence, a local hunter killed the beast using lead bullets, but in the novel, the facts were embellished by the use of silver bullets.

More recently, starting in 1949, the TV series The Lone Ranger featured a masked lawman who left a silver bullet for grateful law-abiding frontier folks before moving on to capture more desperadoes. Although the Lone Ranger used lead bullets to injure the bad guys, he named his horse “Silver.”

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All these myths tell great tales, but they aren’t any more realistic than a metaphorical bullet solving a difficult problem. There is no such thing as a silver bullet — because of its low density and high melting point, silver is impractical for making bullets and far more expensive than lead. 

We each know of a topic we would rather not discuss — perhaps because it’s too sensitive, controversial, or emotionally charged. No one wants to cause embarrassment, sadness, or avoidable arguments. This topic that people dance around in conversation or outright ignore is called “the elephant in the room.” The idiom is widely used to mean “an obvious major problem or issue that people avoid discussing or acknowledging.”

If you break apart the metaphor, it makes sense — there’s a looming presence, but rather than deal with the elephant, everyone simply pretends it doesn’t exist. 

The elephant in question can be traced to a short story published in 1814 by Ivan Krylov, a Russian writer. “The Inquisitive Man” is an ironically titled fable about a man touring a museum who notices tiny things, such as beetles, but fails to notice an elephant in the room.

Fyodor Dostoevsky alluded to Krylov’s museum-going character in his 1871 novel, Demons: “Belinsky was just like Krylov’s Inquisitive Man, who didn’t notice the elephant in the museum.”

In 1882, Mark Twain further popularized the idiom in his short story “The Stolen White Elephant.” He wrote about the inept, far-ranging antics of detectives trying to find an elephant that was right before them. 

The elephantine metaphor evolved into its modern usage of avoiding difficult and obvious conversations as it spread through the public lexicon in the 20th century. In 1902, The New York Times published an article about a scandal involving vote-buying and corruption allegations surrounding NYC Police Chief Thomas J. Devery and the political organization Tammany Hall, in which the journalist used “elephant in the room” metaphorically to describe the way that scandal was being ignored by the media. In the 1950s, many journalists used “elephant in the room” to depict reluctance to discuss racism in America, even though it was a major societal problem. Sometimes the phrase is used to suggest big topics that can’t be ignored. In 1959, The New York Times used it in reference to school financing: “Financing schools has become a problem about equal to having an elephant in the living room. It’s so big you just can’t ignore it.”

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The metaphor is now so widely known that it can be recognized visually. The New Yorker’s cover on November 17, 2014 (immediately after Republicans gained control of the Senate), featured a very large elephant on the couch in the Oval Office, with a glum President Obama at the Resolute Desk.  

“Begs the question” doesn’t always mean what you think it does. It’s often used as a synonym for “raises the question,” but by formal standards, that’s not quite right. Consider this example: “Another major department store is closing its doors. This begs the question: Are shopping malls going extinct?” As you can see, the phrase often introduces a follow-up question, or, as Merriam-Webster puts it, it “elicits a question logically as a reaction or response.” However, this modern usage isn’t historically accurate.

The phrase dates back to Aristotle’s principles of formal logic. It comes from the Latin petitio principii, meaning “assuming the original point.” “Begging the question” is the fallacy of assuming the conclusion is within your premises. In simpler terms, it’s when your argument already assumes the very thing it’s trying to prove. This results in a logically flawed circular argument.

In the context of this philosophical argument, petitio principii was translated into English as “begging the question” during the 16th century, originally meaning “to pass over or ignore a question by assuming it to be established or settled.” It uses an archaic definition of “beg,” meaning “to take for granted the matter in dispute” or “to assume without proof.” 

A more precise modern translation of petitio principii might be “assuming the original conclusion.” For example, “Wool sweaters are better than cotton sweaters because they contain more wool” begs the question, since it assumes what is already established (wool is better than cotton). A correct philosophical usage of “begs the question” would be: “The car commercial begs the question when it says the brand is superior because it sold more cars last year.”

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You can now see why those who favor the philosophical version dislike the modern usage — the two are very different. However, in informal situations, using “begs the question” to mean something like “raises the question” is widely understood, and dictionaries  recognize it as valid. Nevertheless, this usage should be avoided in formal writing.

What’s a shebang, is there such a thing as part of a shebang, and what’s the origin of the idiom “the whole shebang”?  

These are important questions, and we find some answers in the earliest usage of the word. Merriam-Webster says it appeared in English during the Civil War, as seen in Walt Whitman’s diary entries. He used “shebang” to refer to a type of crude dwelling: Soldiers were living in “shebang enclosures of bushes” and coming “out from their tents or shebangs of bushes.”

A few years later, Mark Twain used “chebang” (an alternate spelling) to refer to any matter of concern. “I like the book, I like you and your style and your business vim, and believe the chebang will be a success,” he wrote in a letter to his publishers in 1869. To complicate matters, in 1872, Twain used “shebang” in reference to a vehicle in his novel The Innocents at Home: “You’re welcome to ride here as long as you please, but this shebang’s chartered.”  

The meaning of “shebang” as it relates to a structure was expanded in 1878 in Hallock’s American Club List & Sportsman’s Glossary: “Shebang, any sort of structure from a shanty to a hotel.” And in 1901, Canadian novelist H. G. Parker authored a book about a heavy-drinking Montreal lawyer, in which he wrote, “There were people who called the tavern a ‘shebang.’”

None of these writers coined the term — they were using it because it was already in the wider lexicon. So where did “shebang” come from? Both Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary point out its obscure origin, but that obscurity hasn’t stopped etymologists from speculating.

There are a few possibilities:

• Irish, seibin, “a small mug,” which in English became “shabeen, shebeen,” meaning an illegal drinking establishment 
• Irish, síbín, meaning “illicit whiskey”
• French, chabane, meaning “hut”
• French, char-á-banc, meaning “a carriage or coach with benches”

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Each of these options can address some 19th-century usage of “shebang,” but what about the idiom “the whole shebang”? “The whole shebang” is recorded from 1869, but how it relates to huts, structures, hotels, taverns, or vehicles is unclear. The saying is used to mean “everything that is included in something.” The fact is that some idioms have unknown origins. It may simply be that “shebang” came to refer to so many disparate things that it now refers to the whole of just about anything — the whole shebang.