Example: Tell me who is the king of the hill around here, so I will know who to knock off.
Origin: This goes back to battlefields of long ago. All sides fought to conquer the high ground, the hills. This was often the best vantage point and the point of most advantage. Whichever unit won or took the hill was likely winning.
Example: Monica Lewinsky was told to keep it under her hat.
Origin: Back when men wore hats regularly, it wasn't unusual for them to put important things inside. To keep something under your hat was to keep it out of sight and shown to no one.
More probably, hats are worn on the head. "Keep it under your hat" is just a sly way of saying keep it in your head, to yourself.
Origin: Pigs to be slaughtered are bled, that is the blood is drained from the body. One way this is accomplished is to hang the pig upside down from a bar (by one foot) that used to be known as a "buchet," a French word for it. The pig's throat was cut or opened with a sharp spike (See "bleed like a stuck pig"), and it would rapidly be bled. In its death throes, it would always, always kick the buchet.
Alternatively,
Refers to an inverted bucket that a person who is being hung might stand on. When the bucket is kicked out, the person is hung and dies.
Example: His new job has all the perks, corner office, fat salary, pretty secretary, the whole kit and caboodle.
Origin: Kit and caboodle is a phrase that evolved over time. Most recently from the earlier phrase "kit and boodle".
Boodle (or Buddle) is an old word, and probably evolved from the Dutch "boedel" meaning a crowd or bunch. "The whole boodle" was heard as long ago as the early 19th century.
Kit is also a time honored word with many meanings, one of which is a collection of tools or possessions that a person might carry with them. "The whole kit" was used by 1785.
Caboodle is essentially a nonsense word, and is perhaps a contraction or rhyme of "kit and boodle".
Stephen Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage" contains it: "Of course it might happen that the hull (whole) kit and boodle might start and run, if any big fighting came first-off."
Meaning: Quickly lock the door before something unwanted gets in (or out).
Example: When the tax man comes to call it's Katy bar the door.
Origin: From a book of poems called "King's Tragedy" by D. G. Rossetti published in 1881. It tells of an attempt by one Catherine to save the life of Scotland's James I by throwing her arm across a doorway to bar his enemies
The phrase was further popularized in a 1980s Miller Lite Beer commercial featuring ex-baseball player Bob Eucker.
