This is an IHeart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories,

and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your stories,

send them to our American Stories.com. They're some of our favorites.

Up next, we continue with our recurring series about the curious origins of everyday sayings,

the stories behind them. Here to join us again is Andrew Thompson as he continues to share another slice

from his ultimate guide to understanding these mini mysteries, these many stories of our precious

English language.

A nest egg is savings that are set aside for lady use which a person tries to add to.

And that phrase has been used

from as early as the 14th century in England. In those days before commercial factory chicken

farming, chickens would lay their eggs in nests in a coop. As a means of giving the chickens hope

and encouraging them to lay more eggs, farmers used to place a porcelon or china egg in the nest

or the coop area.

The dummy egg was known as a nest egg and did often induce the chickens to be more productive.

The expression then came to mean someone's financial savings by the late 1600s.

In the nick of time means without a second to, and it began in England in the Middle Ages.

At that time during team games, there'd be a tally man to keep score.

He would carry a tally stick, and each time a team scored, he would carve a small nick or notch or groove into the stick.

If the winning nick was added just before the end of the match, it was known as the

nick in time. The expression later became known as in the nick of time. 19 to the dozen means

to be going at a very fast pace and it originated in the Cornish copper and tin mines in the 18th

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