This is an IHeart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories.

The English language is filled with curious, intriguing, and bizarre phrases.

Here, with the recurring series, his hair of the dog author Andrew Thompson,

as he shares another slice from his ultimate guide to understanding these baffling,

many mysteries of the English language.

Apple of your eye is an expression referring to someone who you cherish above all else.

Like a grandmother might say that my grandson is the apple of my eye.

It's an expression that dates back centuries.

And it's from, in old English, the pupil of the eye was known as the apple because of its round shape.

And sight was regarded as the most essential sense.

So when damaged, it was a terrible incident.

It was used figuratively by King Alfred in 885

and by Shakespeare in a mid-Summer Night's Dream in 1605.

But the reference is actually from the Bible,

a segment of which reads, he him about he instructed him he kept him as the apple of his eye as bald as a badger is an expression

to mean that someone's bald has no hair on their head and it's one that I've always

found their origins of this one interesting because a lot of people think that a badger's head being white,

giving it the impression of baldness is where the expression comes from,

but it actually is a contraction of the expression as bald as a badger's bum.

Because at the time, male shaving brushes were made with badger's hair

plucked from the rear of the badger.

...