Apple of my eye

(Getting a bit hung up on Vocabulary here again...)

I was playing ‘string’ with the cats this morning and Maddie was cavorting ‘unusually’ and the expression that came to my mind was “Oh Maddie, you’re just cuter than the dickens.”

Dickens?

Where do these odd expressions come from? Of course, being me, I launched into an investigation. First, how many could I think of? For example:

At loggerheads
Dog eat dog
Dressed to the nines
Chew the fat
Cut the mustard
By the skin of my teeth
Curiosity killed the cat

Dogs seem particularly subject to the creation of idioms: bark up the wrong tree, every dog has his day, dog eat dog world…

But they have nothing over birds, evidently: early bird catches the worm, eat like a bird, cooked goose, cold turkey (during narcotic drug withdrawal, one’s skin becomes sweaty, pale and nodular - like the skin of a plucked turkey), chickens come home to roost, chicken out, duck soup, as the crow flies, bird brain, sitting duck, lame duck (originally an old London stock exchange term for a member unable to meet their obligations on settlement day, since they 'waddled' out of the exchange.)

“Eat crow” has a colorful story behind it from the War of 1812 in which an American soldier broke a ceasefire when he shot a crow. A British officer came over, complimented the soldier on his shooting, asked to see the gun, and then turned it on the soldier, accusing him of trespassing, and forcing him to eat some of the dead crow. When the American got the gun back, he pulled it on the officer in turn and made him eat the rest of it.

Incidentally, “Dressed to the nines” is one of many references to the number nine as a symbol of perfection, originating from ancient Greek, Pythagorean theory: “man is a full chord (eight) and deity (Godliness) comes next. Or, three represents the Trinity, twice three is the perfect dual, and ‘thrice three’ (nine) is the 'perfect plural'.”

And ‘red herring’ (a distraction initially appearing significant) comes from the metaphor of dragging a red (smoked) herring across the trail of a fox to throw the hounds off the fox's scent. I’m familiar with herring. This should work.

According to my research, the ‘apple of his eye' expression first appeared in Deuteronomy, chapter 32, verse 10, in which Moses speaks of God's caring for Jacob: "He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye". (In ancient times the pupil of the eye was thought to be a small hard ball, for which an apple was a natural symbol.)

And so, finally, back to ‘dickens.’ It is, evidently, another word for devil and came from the word ‘nick’ which goes back as far as Scandinavian folklore as a mythological water-wraith or kelpie that delighted when travelers drowned. The ‘Nick’ reference was further emphasized by association with Niccolo Machiavelli. Shakespeare has Mistress Page using the 'what the dickens' expression in the Merry Wives of Windsor.

I guess Maddie is more the ‘apple of my eye’ than ‘cuter than the dickens?’ Maybe.

(Thanks to http://www.businessballs.com/clichesorigins.htm for some of this information.)