This episode of Appraise The Phrase is about the history of the phrase "behind the eight ball". Mario and Twenty are joined by Brandon Miller to unveil the origin, confirm the meaning, and assess the value of "behind the eight ball" and it does not come from the game you are picturing.

It comes from Kelly pool, invented in Chicago in 1893 by a man named Calistus Mulvaney, who nobody called Calistus. Sixteen numbered markers, called peas or pills, go into a bottle, and every player draws one in secret before a single shot is taken. That number is your ball, and the balls have to come off the table from lowest to highest. Draw a nine, a ten, a twelve, and you may never get a turn at all. "Behind the eight" was never a position on a table. It was the number in your hand.

The game everyone assumes it came from did not exist yet. Eight-ball arrives around 1940, and the phrase is already in American newspapers through the 1920s. Steve Mizerak, a multi-time world billiards champion, went on record with it plainly: it cannot come from the game, because the phrase predates the game. And when the version we know was first marketed, the set contained seven balls of one color, seven of another, and one unnumbered black ball. The eight ball did not have an eight on it.

Then the eight ball outgrows pool entirely. In 1946 a man in Cincinnati patents a fortune-telling device built from his clairvoyant mother's spirit-writing slate. It is called the Syco-Slate, it is a cylinder, and it fails completely. He dies before the patent clears in 1948, having never seen a single sale. In 1950 Brunswick Billiards asks for it rebuilt in the shape of a black-and-white eight ball, and that is the Magic 8 Ball, now on TIME's list of the hundred greatest toys of all time. The object cemented in your head was never about billiards.

Brandon Miller runs Stepping In The Right Direction out of Los Angeles — HBCU tours, mentoring programs, and more than twenty-five million dollars in scholarships facilitated over five years. He puts the phrase to work on his own life: a conditional acceptance to Howard in March 2001, ten weeks left in the semester, and a 46 percent in a math class he had to get to 70. His read is that sometimes it is your own shot that puts you behind the eight ball, and not somebody else putting you there.

Also in this episode: what the San Francisco school board voted to change and why all three of them think it is the wrong fix, the eight-ball jacket that sold for twelve hundred dollars in Harlem, Bow Tie Wednesday, and a Dictionary of Misinformation entry about bulls and the color red.

Then the appraisal. Power, speed and preference.

Guest: Brandon Miller, Stepping In The Right Direction. HBCU tours and spring trip dates at hbcuboundhub.org, and @strdprograms and @hbcuboundhub on Instagram.

Watch the video version on the Underdog Podcasts channel on YouTube. Every phrase gets a grade, and some of them get a mug: appraisethephrase.com/shop

Appraise The Phrase is part of the Underdog Podcast Network.

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Mario and Twenty unveil the origin, confirm the meaning, and assess the value of "put all your eggs in one basket" — and it does not start on a farm.

The oldest record in English is from 1662, in Giovanni Torriano's The Second Alphabet of Proverbial Phrases. Torriano was an Italian language teacher in London compiling Italian proverbs for English readers, and his entry reads: "to put all one's eggs in a panyard, viz. to hazard all in one bottom." A panyard is a basket. A bottom, in 1662, is a ship — not a crate in the hold, the hold itself. So the original warning is about putting all your cargo in one vessel, in an era when marine lending was real and there was no second ship.

Then there is Cervantes, who gets three hundred years of credit he never earned. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations puts the eggs line in Sancho Panza's mouth. Go to Thomas Shelton's translation, the first into any language, and there are no eggs in it at all. What Sancho actually says is that the wise reserve something for tomorrow without venturing all upon one cast — and one cast means dice. Cervantes was writing about gambling. The eggs arrive a century later, when Peter Motteux swaps in an English proverb because he assumes English readers will not follow the Spanish one.

Dice is a bet you chose. A basket is a thing you are carrying. The metaphor got gentler in translation.

In 1894 Mark Twain wrote the most famous inversion of any proverb in American letters: the fool scatters his eggs, the wise man puts them all in one basket and watches it. That same stretch, one concentrated bet on the Paige typesetting machine destroyed him financially. He watched the basket. It took everything anyway.

In 1952 a twenty-four-year-old graduate student at the University of Chicago settled the argument with math instead of philosophy, and won a Nobel for it. If you have a 401(k), there is a default fund in it you never chose, and it exists because of Harry Markowitz's paper.

Also in this episode: what "China pays the tariff" has in common with an eighteenth-century translator, why ignorance is bliss might be the most powerful phrase ever spoken, Twenty ranking the holidays as the Miami Heat Big Three, and a Dictionary of Misinformation entry about the fan in your window.

Then the appraisal — impact, speed and preference. The two of them do not start in the same place.

Watch the video version on the Underdog Podcasts channel on YouTube. Every phrase gets a grade, and some of them get a mug: appraisethephrase.com/shop

Appraise The Phrase is part of the Underdog Podcast Network.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this episode of Appraise The Phrase: Origins of Everyday Expressions...

Six dictionaries have no definition for "knocking on the devil's door." We found out why — and then we found the actual door.

Where does "knocking on the devil's door" come from, and what does it actually mean? Merriam-Webster, Cambridge, Oxford, Collins, dictionary.com and TheFreeDictionary all come up empty — the first phrase in six seasons of this show that no published dictionary will touch. Wiktionary's only nearby entry is "devil's doorbell," which is something else entirely.

So we went looking for the origin ourselves. There is a real devil's door: a sealed entrance on the north wall of medieval English churches, including Durham Cathedral, built to be used and then bricked shut. But the name is nowhere near as old as the door. The earliest record of anyone calling one a "devil's door" comes from an 1832 demolition in Nottinghamshire — three centuries after the doors went up, when nobody could remember what they were for and the Victorians were ready with an explanation.

Along the way: why Terrence Howard's line in Four Brothers is where most people have actually heard this phrase, how Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" swallowed the devil version whole, and why the Robert Johnson crossroads legend belongs to a different bluesman named Tommy Johnson.

Mario and Twenty are joined by cunda, Rello and angie of Circle The Block — Where Culture and Nostalgia Come Full Circle — for the phrase submitted by Coach Trav of The Mental Health Playbook. Both shows are Underdog Podcasts affiliates.

An etymology podcast on the origins of everyday expressions. Every episode we unveil the origin, confirm the meaning, and assess the value. This one graded out at a B−.
Value is in the eye of the appraiser.

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