By The Archivist · February 4, 2025 · Fact-checked against primary and reference sources Everyday phrases attract fake origins the way a magnet attracts iron filings. The formula is always the same: take a common saying, attach a colourful and preferably gruesome backstory, and deliver it with total confidence — “that’s where the phrase comes…
By The Archivist · January 28, 2025 · Fact-checked against primary and reference sources The objects of childhood tend to arrive with suspiciously clean origin stories: a kindly inventor, a flash of inspiration, a happy accident tied up with a bow. The real histories are messier, more human, and usually better — shaped by newspaper…
By The Archivist · January 21, 2025 · Fact-checked against primary and reference sources No corner of everyday life attracts confident origin myths like the holidays. Every December someone explains that a soft-drink company invented Santa’s red suit; every spring the roots of Easter get flattened into a single Babylonian goddess; every wedding season the…
By The Archivist · January 14, 2025 · Fact-checked against primary and reference sources Here is the section where the disturbing version is usually the true one. The fairy tales most of us absorbed — the singing princesses, the tidy rescues, the weddings — are heavily laundered descendants of older stories, and those older stories…
By The Archivist · January 7, 2025 · Fact-checked against primary and reference sources Sing a nursery rhyme to the end and someone will eventually lean in to tell you what it “really” means. This one is about the plague. That one is about a beheading. The other is a coded jab at a king….