Show notes

The board is locked. Across Season 6, Mario and Twenty appraised fourteen everyday phrases on power, speed and preference and in the finale they count every one of them down from worst to best, hand out three season awards, and seed the whole field into a tournament bracket. Coach Trav and Fave are on the panel to fight about the results. Only one phrase got a D all season: "on the back burner," ranked 14th. Mario and Twenty defend the grade; Trav argues the back burner is exactly where real life gets put. Four of the fourteen turned out not to mean what they appear to mean. "Call a spade a spade" began with Philip of Macedonia calling a trough a trough in 348 BCE, and the spade in question was a shovel head, not a card suit. "Bigger fish to fry" and "put all your eggs in one basket" were both invented by translators of Don Quixote — the original Spanish has no fish and no eggs. And "train of thought" predates the locomotive entirely; the train comes from a Latin root meaning to pull. Also in this episode: a nick really was an hour, cut into a government tally stick — and when Parliament burned six centuries of those sticks, it burned down the Palace of Westminster with them. Pliny the Elder claimed Cicero saw a copy of Homer's Iliad written small enough to fit inside a nutshell, which is where "in a nutshell" comes from. "Wet my beak" started as a fair Sicilian custom of paying a field guard the grain that fits in a bird's beak, and only became extortion after the phrase crossed to New York. And there was never a whistle baked into a tavern cup — that one is a myth. The season closes with "call a spade a spade" at number one and "talk is cheap" at number two, both holding first-round byes, and a bracket that cannot put "wet my whistle" against "wet my beak" until the championship. Appraise The Phrase returns in March 2027 with the GOAT Phrase Tournament, live. With Coach Trav of Mental Peace Performance, host of The Mental Health Playbook, and Fave. appraisethephrase.com/shop appraisethephrase.com/ATPcommunity Appraise The Phrase unveils the origin, confirms the meaning, and assesses the value of the expressions you use every day. An Underdog Podcasts production,