News flash: the English language has never been a pure language. It is the current result of hundreds and hundreds of years of linguistic mishmash; like other languages it draws from a lot of sources and barely even resembles its earlier forms. Needless to say, time travel would not go well for you and me, even if we traveled back to England just several hundreds of years ago. With that in mind, try and understand that words and phrases, even ones that were incorporated into more modern forms of English, can quickly lose their meaning. Below is a list of idioms and other phrases and their real meaning. You won't believe it when you read it.