English Words and Phrases

The person who talks up the storm exaggerates the situation beyond normal or due proportions. It means to talk emphatically, with a lot of energy and gesticulation. It can also mean that someone is talking non-stop, gabbling on about almost anything.

You use this phase to say that it is better to spend a little more time to deal with problems or act right now than wait until they get bigger. If you wait until it’s too late, things will get worse, and it will take much longer to deal with them.
The “stitch in time” notion has been current in English for a very long time and was first recorded in Thomas Fuller’s Gnomologia, Adagies and Proverbs, Wise Sentences and Witty Sayings, Ancient and Modern, Foreign and British, 1732:
“A Stitch in Time May save nine.”

We use this phrase to say that everyone can be successful during some period of their life. Everyone gets a chance at some point. This proverbial saying alludes to the lowly status dogs once held. The phrase is around 500 years old. It became popular from the times of William Shakespeare.
The full quote spoken by the title character in Hamlet Act 5 is:
“Let Hercules himself do what he may;
the cat will mew and the dog will have his day.”

The term days of the dog or dog days has not much to do with dogs. It dates back to Roman times, when it was believed that Sirius, the Dog Star which is the brightest star in the night sky, added its heat to that of the sun from July3 to August 11, creating exceptionally high temperatures. Sirius is located in Canis Major (Greater Dog) constellation. The Romans called the period dies caniculares, or “days of the dog.” The name “Sirius” is derived from the Ancient Greek Seirios (“glowing” or “scorcher”). Also it is an important star for navigation around the Pacific Ocean.

The phrase refers to the use of rough and ready practical experience rather than formal procedures in getting something done. It’s most likely that the saying comes from carpenters using the length of the first joint of the thumb, which is about an inch long, to measure things. So “rule” refers to a ruler in the sense of measurement, not of despotism or male chauvinism. Other parts of the body were used as a ruler, too. A foot was determined by a pace, the distance from the tip of the nose to the outstretched fingers is roughly a yard.

Winging is all about complaining or protesting, especially in an annoying or persistent manner.Word comes from a Northern variant of Old English hwinsian to whine; related to Old High German winsan, winisan, whence Middle High German winsen. To whine means to complain or bitch about something.
Examples of use:
He’s always whining about the weather.
Quit whining and finish the dinner.
The workers were whining that the office was too hot.
The electric saw whined as it cut through the wood.

When you are snookered it means being in an untenable situation. It comes from the game of snooker where you are unable to hit the ball because the shot is blocked by your opponent’s ball. One can use also use the phrase – up the creek without a paddle – which has similar meaning. This example of this common, famous American English idiom plays a major part in the common speech, slang or dialect that is natural to the people of the United States and Great Britain.

This concept is known as the law of the instrument, Maslow’s hammer, or a golden hammer. It means an over-reliance on a familiar tool; as Abraham Maslow said in 1966, “It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” The hammer and nail metaphor has been attributed to Mark Twain as well, though there is no documentation of this origin in Twain’s published writings.
The notion of a golden hammer, “a familiar technology or concept applied obsessively to many software problems”, has been introduced into the information technology literature in 1998 as an anti-pattern: a programming practice to be avoided.