The Curious Origins of Four English Expressions: Including 'Will-o'-the-wisp' and 'Against the Grain'

Sometimes, when we use a specific expression, our words don't exactly mean what we are saying. However, people around us understand them clearly, without the need of thinking about their meaning. This is not due to complex cognitive processes. It's just that we are automatically led, by our linguistic habits and conventions, to attribute to some sentences and phrases a meaning that is not apparent, although we recognise it immediately and without thinking about it. The English language is characterised by some curious expressions which have a very clear meaning in our everyday speech, while literally portrait something completely different or, apparently, don't mean anything. Those expressions have a history and specific origins, but we are not always able to reconstruct them and to understand the cognitive aspects and social contexts which made them widespread and commonly accepted by speakers over centuries. Etymology, the discipline in Historical Linguistics that studies and recovers the origins and original meanings of words, doesn't work only on 'lexical items'. Structural Etymology, for example, deals with morphemic units and (typological) constructions. There is a less well-defined branch of Etymology (which only in part identifies with Phraseology) that focuses on the origins of phrases, idioms, and common expressions. Sometimes the components of an idiom, when combined, produce in the speakers' perception a meaning which becomes semantically specialised or completely different from that of the single related words. This generates very interesting and unpredictable expressions, which look often like captivating etymological puzzles. This article briefly analyses some of them.