Houses had thatched roofs–thick straw, piled high, with no wood underneath.
It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the dogs, cats and other small animals, mice, rats, and bugs lived in the roof.
During a large rainstorm, it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof–hence the saying
The Pinkerton Detective Agency came up with a creative logo for the company.
It was a picture of an eye with the logo ‘We Never Sleep’ underneath it. It was from this logo that the term, ‘private eye’ came to mean private investigators.
‘Posse’ started out as a technical term in law, part of the term ‘posse comitatus,’ which in Medieval Latin meant ‘power of the county.’
As such, it referred to a group of citizens summoned by a sheriff to preserve the public peace as allowed for by law. ‘Preserving the public peace’ so often meant hunting down a supposed criminal that ‘posse’ eventually came to mean any group organized to make a search or embark on a mission.
In even broader use it can refer to any group, period. Sometimes nowadays that group is a gang or a rock band but it can as easily be any bunch of politicians, models, architects, tourists, children, or what have you, acting in concert.
It actually came from a phrase used by the East India Trading Company, which, of course, was based in London.
When it booked passengers round-trip to India, the more affluent passengers would request a cabin on the side of the ship least exposed to the Atlantic Ocean gales.
Hence, they were given cabins ‘port outbound, starboard homebound.’ It eventually was abbreviated to posh.
You might expect that the original pork barrels were barrels for storing pork — and you’re right. In the early 19th century, that’s exactly what ‘pork barrel’ meant.
But, the term was also used figuratively to mean ‘a supply of money’ or ‘one’s livelihood’ (a farmer, after all, could readily turn pork into cash).
When 20th-century legislators doled out appropriations that benefited their home districts, someone apparently made an association between the profit a farmer got from a barrel of pork and the benefits derived from certain state and federal projects. By 1909, ‘pork barrel’ was being used as a noun naming such government appropriations, and today the term is often used attributively in constructions such as ‘pork barrel politics’ or ‘pork barrel project.’