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Among the many common terms with musical roots:

Sunday

To be “low key” means to be restrained or mellow, a term apparently having musical origins, since lower musical keys have more muted tones. Charles Dickens was among the first to use this term.

Monday

Conversely, “keyed up” means anxious, usually in anticipation. To “key up” an instrument is to tune it to a certain key.

Tuesday

To “play it by ear” is to handle a situation as it unfolds, as opposed to following a plan or known rules. This began as a reference to people who can play music without referring to printed material, or without formal training.

Wednesday

“To pull out all the stops,” or to give something your full effort, is originally referred to the workings of a pipe organ. Each pipe has a stop which can prevent pressurized air from going into that chamber, and coordinating these stops changes the sound of the music as desired. However, when all the stops are pulled out, the instrument plays at full volume and capacity.

Thursday

The expression “swan song” for a comes from a long-debunked myth that swans live silent lives until just before dying, when they a sing a singularly beautiful, melancholy song. Though even ancient Romans knew better, this idea was used by Chaucer and Shakespeare, and the phrase remains common to describe a final performance.

Friday

“Toot (or blow) your own horn,” a term indicating praise of one’s self, has roots back to the practice of announcing the arrival of an important person with trumpets.

Saturday

To “march to the beat of a different drummer” is to have different principles and attitudes than those around you, and derives from Walden by Henry David Thoreau, where he writes: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”

Sunday

Likely the only NFL team named for gothic poetry, the Baltimore Ravens get their name from former resident Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.”

Monday

The creation of the New Orleans Saints’ franchise was approved on All Saints’ Day, and “When the Saints Go Marching In” is a song long associated with the city’s jazz heritage. It also helped that the name was also a favorite in a local newspaper’s “name the team” contest.

Tuesday

The digging of a skyscraper foundation in 1970s Nashville unearthed a saber-toothed tiger’s leg bone and fang, a very rare find. Decades later, this unique discovery inspired the naming of the city’s NHL hockey team, the Predators.

Wednesday

Hurricanes Fran and Bertha, having hit North Carolina in 1996, inspired the naming of the NHL’s newly-moved Carolina Hurricanes before the team’s first 1997 game in their new location.

Thursday

The first Catholic Spanish mission in California was in San Diego, so their MLB team is the Padres, meaning “priest” or “father” in Spanish.

Friday

“Trolley dodgers” was an early 20th century nickname for the New York pedestrians who dodged streetcars as they walked the city. Also the name of this New York baseball team, the “Dodgers” stayed with them when they moved to LA in 1957.

Saturday

There are pace horses that race, and there are pace cars in auto racing, and Indiana has a rich history of both kinds, hence the NBA team being named the Pacers.

Sunday

WPA = Wifi Protected Access

Monday

ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange

Tuesday

HDMI = High Definition Multimedia Interface

Wednesday

SEO = Search Engine Optimization

Thursday

TIFF = Tag Image File Format

Friday

DSL = Digital Subscriber Line

Saturday

SMS = Short Message Service

Sunday

There are several possible origins of the term “cat got your tongue,” but none are pleasant. A likely origin involves troublesome English Royal Navy sailors being whipped into silence and submission by the infamous “cat o’ nine tails.” Another comes from the idea that medieval cats, allegedly doing the work of witches, would steal their victims’ tongues to prevent them from warning others, and another comes from the ancient Egyptian practice of cutting out the tongues of liars and blasphemers and feeding them to cats.

Monday

Although cats aren’t known for mimicry, the term “copycat” first appeared in a handful of books by female authors in late 19th century Maine, then, in the 1960s, began to appear in the crime context to describe criminals replicating the acts of others.

Tuesday

The legend says that Atum-Ra, ancient Egyptian sun god, sometimes took the shape of a cat, and is said to have himself produced eight other gods, which is a possible origin of the idea that cats have nine lives. The number nine also has significance in ancient Chinese culture, as well as in the Bible, and Shakespeare mentions nine-lived felines in Romeo and Juliet. In other cultures, cats are still said to be many-lived, but the number varies, such as six or seven lives.

Wednesday

Do cats say “meow” in every language? Nope. A sampling of how other languages interpret that cat sound:

meong (Indonesian, Sudanese, Javanese), mijav (Slovene), niaou (Greek), nyav (Ukrainian), yaong (Korean), meo (Vietnamese)

Thursday

Think your cat only has meows for you? You might be right. After kittenhood, cats don’t meow to other animals, including other cats, but communicate with them in other ways. Thus, that classic cat sound is largely saved for humans.

Friday

Though often relaxed when not stealthily hunting, cats nonetheless scatter and hide when faced with unfamiliar situations or even voices. This tendency is the origin of the taunt “fraidie cat,” which first appeared in 1897, and “scardy cat” which appeared about 9 years later.

Saturday

Cats’ amazing ability to land on their feet from almost any fall is called a “righting reflex.” Other animals have it, but cats’ combination of a particularly flexible spine and no functional collarbone make their righting reflex particularly effective.

Among the nations named for individuals:

Sunday

Bolivia was named for Simon Bolivar, who helped many South American countries gain independence from Spanish rule in the 1800s.

Monday

The Philippines were named for King Phillip II of Spain after being claimed for Spain by Ferdinand Magellan in 1521.

Tuesday

Saudi Arabia was named for the ruling Al Saud royal family, with Arabia just meaning “land of the Arabs.”

Wednesday

Colombia is named after Christopher Columbus.

Thursday

El Salvador, or “the savior” was named for Jesus by Spaniards in the 1500s.

Friday

Swaziland is named for the great king Mswazi II, for whom his proud countrymen called themselves Swazis, or people of Mswazi.

Saturday

“Israel” is the named Jacob got after wrestling with an angel in the Bible, and is the nation’s namesake.

Sunday

That garment covering your legs is named for a creepy old man common in European theater a few centuries back. Crafty, greedy “Pantalone,” whose failed schemes often led to his humiliation, was a stock character in plays from the 16th-18th centuries. Early on, he typically wore breeches and red stockings, but later wore long trousers. When similarly-styled trousers caught on outside the theater, they were called “Pantaloons” in England, which eventually got shortened to just “pants, ” which is part of “underpants” and “panties.”

Monday

With far less instrumentation, early pilots had to rely much more on their own senses more to fly. Their rear end had some of the most direct contact with the plane, from which they could feel engine vibration, angle, and other input. This is why flying intuitively with little or no input from instruments and radios came to be known as “flying by the seat of your pants.”

Tuesday

The association with the person who “wears the pants in the family” (or trousers of you’re British) being the family decision-maker it is simply based on the fact that only men historically wore pants and also traditionally had that role.

Wednesday

Saying “denim jeans” invokes the names of two cities which are part of the garment’s origin story. The strong fabric originally made in de Nimes, France, was called “Serge de Nimes,” but Genoa, Italy, also played a role in the development of the garment, and has used the term “bleu de Genes” (blue material from Genoa) for the fabric which has clad their fisherman for five centuries now.

Thursday

The first known usage of the term “fancy pants” was not to describe a pretentious person, but just actual fancy pants. The term first appeared in a Bangor, Maine newspaper advertisement in the 1840s for pants made of Cassimere, or wollen twill fabric. About 90 years later, the term began to have its current connotation.

Friday

Women wearing pants in public was not a widely accepted fashion until the late-mid 20th century. From “bloomers” to “harem pants,” many designers introduced the two-legged garment for women before that, but it didn’t really catch on until the 1960s and ’70s.

Saturday

The innovation which made jeans so successful after their patenting in 1873 was the reinforcing metal rivets placed at stress points such as the corners of pockets. Jacob Davis, a tailor and later business partner of Levi Strauss, had this idea when tasked with creating a highly durable pair of pants for a local laborer. The jeans were a hit with Western miners and other laborers during the California Gold Rush, who needed durable clothing for their work.

Sunday

Many ancient cultures ascribed the heart essential functions beyond just blood pumping. The ancient Egyptians’ word for heart also meant mind, understanding, or intelligence, and the physical heart was weighed for virtue in the afterlife. They believed the brain, by contrast, only functioned to produce mucous. Ancient Chinese also believed the mind and intellect lived in the heart, and ancient Greeks and Romans connected the heart to the strongest emotions, including love. These histories give some clue as to why we still associate the heart with such sentiments in our language.

Monday

Medieval knights wore colored ribbons on their sleeves to indicate which lady they fancied and fought for, a practice referenced by Shakespeare when he coined the phrase “to wear your heart on your sleeve.”

Tuesday

Although the word “attack” suggests an unwelcome onslaught, heart attacks are caused by a deficiency of blood to the heart muscle itself. In a given year, the rate of heart attacks typically peaks on Christmas Eve.

Wednesday

The term “from the bottom of my heart” has been used in English since the 16th century, but first came from Virgil’s Aeneid, and appears related to the Greek notion that the most honest and sincere emotions were in the bottom of the heart.

Thursday

The term “eat your heart out” is quite old, having rough equivalents in Yiddish (“Es dir cys s’harts”), Latin (“cor ne edito”), and even appearing often in Homer’s Iliad. However, the older uses are less like the modern “envy me” and more about worrying oneself greatly.

Friday

Your actual beating heart looks much more like an upside-down pear than that shape seen everywhere on Valentine’s Day. One intriguing theory is that the bi-lobed shape came to be associated with love because that was the shape of the seed of the psilphium, a now-extinct plant prized by the Romans as a medical panacea and contraceptive. Alternatively, the shape may have started with the ancient writings of Galen and Aristotle describing the heart as having “three chambers with a small dent in the middle.” Scholars have also argued the origin comes from the shape of ivy or water-lily leaves, human breasts, buttocks, and other body parts.

Saturday

The heartbeat sound is actually the sound of the heart valves opening and closing as blood enters and exits.