Grammar Girl here. A few weeks ago I got a delightful book in the mail, the American heritage

dictionary of idioms. I love flipping through books like this and find them handy to have

around when I hear an odd expression and want to know what it means. Today I'll tell you

stories about a few interesting idioms and where they come from. The first example that caught my

eye was the idiom the whole ball of wax. It's a classic idiom because its meaning has nothing to do

with what it literally means. Today it has nothing to do with balls or wax. People who are learning

English have a horrible time with idioms because idioms aren't logical. You have to just memorize

their meanings. The whole ball of wax means everything or all the parts. Here's an example from a

recent news story on an auto racing site. John Force was talking about a motor and he said,

quote, it has its own blocks, heads, manifolds, the whole ball of wax. We won a lot of championships

with that motor in the car. By whole ball of wax he means all the parts. That motor has its own

everything. So why do we talk about wax balls when we mean everything? Well according to the American

Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, it may come from quote, a 17th century practice of dividing land

between airs by covering scraps of paper representing portions of land with wax, rolling each

into a ball and drawing the balls from a hat. How cool is that? Other phrases listed under

whole in the dictionary have less exciting origin stories but are still kind of interesting.

The author thinks we say the whole enchilada because all the ingredients in an enchilada are wrapped

inside one tortilla. The whole kit and caboodle is interesting because it's doubly redundant.

First, kit and caboodle mean the same thing, a group or collection. But then the dictionary says

that caboodle is a corruption of kit and budle because budle also means a collection.

Finally, you may have heard the idiom the whole shabang. A shabang is a crude hut. The Oxford English

Dictionary says it's North American slang and I've never heard it used outside that set phrase the

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