If there’s one thing we can all agree on from years of speaking, reading and writing, it’s that the English language seems to operate in the most mysterious of ways. Between all the archaic grammatical rules and words that are a mishmash of several other different tongues, it’s a wonder non-native speakers manage to understand what we’re saying half of the time. 

As well as this, it means that we often don’t fully understand where the phrases we use originally come from. It is a topic which has recently been tackled by an enlightening thread started by @caitiedelaney. 

After having the revelation that «howdy» is just a shortened version of «how do you do», Twitter users far and wide came together to share numerous other phrases that they had been astonished to learn the origins of. It seems like when it comes to English, a lot of things boil down to dumb puns, Christianity, or stories so weird it’s almost a shame that we’ve come to forget them.