42 Idiom Origins - mental_floss on YouTube (Ep. 29)

John Green, 9.44 minutes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW5FDhsHkUg

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http://languagearts.pppst.com/idioms.html

Definition: an expression that means something other than the literal meaning of its individual words

Examples:

http://www.idiomsite.com/

do you live under a rock?
hold your horses
between a rock and a hard place
it costs an arm and a leg
the pen is stronger than the sword
it takes two to tangle
rise and shine
you're pulling my leg
two edge sword
belly up to the bar
lead a horse to water
tilting at windmills
you have to be the rock the river can not wash away
you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still just a pig

turtles all the way down

The phrase comes from an anecdote told in the opening to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time.

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever", said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

The phrase is used to describe any system that appears to have dependencies that never end. For example, imagine accountability in a (hypothetical) police department. The citizens are policed by police, the police are policed by internal affairs, which might lead to the formation of an "internal internal affairs" to police internal affairs. Someone might describe this system of policing as "turtles all the way down", meaning that the system of policing never ends.

Playing games" happens when someone's actions don't reflect their true intentions. Two examples:

Frequently, a man will ignore or insult a woman in whom he is romantically interested. Clearly, he does not wish to ignore her; he wishes to give her his full attention. However, he is acting on the well-established premise that a woman will be romantically uninterested in a man who gives her attention for nothing. This is the "nice guys finish last" phenomenon.
Lawyers and businesspeople play games in negotiations all the time. This is reflected in negotiating principles like "Don't make the first offer" or "Lowball it in the beginning". Rarely will someone say "I'm willing to pay $500 for this service" and truly mean it. Even if that person did truly mean it, the other party is unlikely to believe it. This becomes self-reinforcing.