Example: Since the introduction of Windows 95, Apple Computer has been sucking hind tit.
Origin: Many female mammals have multiple rows of breasts, for example dogs. Typically the rear most pair of breasts is smaller and less developed than the rest. Hence a pup nursing from the rear most breast is likely to receive less milk than other nursing pups. Hind means rear most. Tit is slang for breast.
Meaning: Youthful inexperience, a time of early success and promise.
Example: The salad days for Apple computer are over.
Origin: Popularized in Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra," Act 1, scene 5, written in 1606. Cleopatra, at one point, is lavishing praise on her new love, Antony. One of Cleo's female attendants reminds her that she (Cleo) once felt the same passion about Caesar.
Cleopatra retorts that was in her "salad days, when I was green in judgment: cold in blood".
In this specific context, the phrase means "naive," but it also has the sense of "in one's youth," a time of blooming health and infinite prospect.
One might wonder if those were Cleo's "Caesar salad days"! Perhaps Shakespeare's statement was a reference to green being the color of salad, and cold the temperature of said salad.
Green is frequently used to describe youth or inexperience. Of course salad refers to many dishes (potato salad, egg salad, pasta salad) not just the lettuce based salad so popular today.
Meaning: To have something to hide about ones past.
Example: Kennedy has more than a few skeletons in the closet.
Origin: Comes from the fairy tale of Blue Beard and his closet. He gave all the keys of the house to his wife when he left on business, forbidding her access to only one room, a closet at the end of a long corridor. She opened it, of course, and there she found the dead bodies of his previous wives.
Meaning: To get away with something without paying a price.
Example: Some might say OJ got off scot free.
Origin: Scot was the Scottish term for a unit of taxation. Anyone who did not have to pay taxes got off "Scot free". Alternatively, A slate for marking pub bills is called a scot. Scot free is to not pay the bill on your Scot.
Alternatively,
Refers to Dred Scott, a slave who crossed from a "slave state" to a "free state". In the days of US slavery, the Dred Scott case was a landmark US Supreme Court decision that ruled that slaves were property and had no rights.
