I have always been interested in the etymology of phrases, and I recently had the epiphany that a lot of our common idioms are Biblically based.  I can assure you I am not trying to proselytize; I can only write about that which I know.  I was aware that a “doubting Thomas” is referred to as someone who is a skeptic; one who will not believe without direct personal experience.  It comes from the Apostle Thomas who refused to accept that Jesus was resurrected from the dead until he could see and feel Christ’s wounds received on the cross for himself.  I also knew that to “cast the first stone” referenced Scripture.  John 8:7 says, “When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.'”  Those are the words of Jesus Christ.  My Daddy always told me to “go the extra mile.”  I had no idea that was based in Scripture.  In Matthew 5:41 Jesus declares, “Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two.”  “Pride goeth before a fall” is rooted in Proverbs.  In chapter 16 verse 18 it says, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”  To “wash your hands of the matter” stems from Matthew 27:24 which reads, “When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, ‘I am innocent of the blood of this just person:  see ye to it.'”  This was when Pontius Pilate, the prefect of the Roman province of Judaea, demonstrated his objection to Christ’s crucification.  Researching expressions I knew and used unearthed a whole lot more.  “Hold your horses” is predictably American in origin; a term that arose when “settlers” and gold miners were traveling westward across America via the horse.  By the 1840’s in the U.S. that phrase came to mean to restrain oneself.  The term “close, but no cigar” is said to have started in the mid-20th century at American fairgrounds when they gave cigars away as prizes.  I have always been tickled by the phrase “long in the tooth” for someone getting older and “not playing with a full deck” to describe one who is perhaps slightly crazy.  I frequently use sayings like “cough up,” “fishy,” and “jump the gun.”  Others have made their way into my vernacular curtesy of my mother, who would say “fire” for heat and “blinky” for when milk went bad.  Maybe at this point though I should just let sleeping dogs lie; I think perhaps with some of this, the cat’s out of the bag.