About the Author

Tobyn Ashwell has always been the person at the party who says, "Funny you should say that!" After years of clearing rooms with unsolicited etymology, he decided to write it all down instead.

His obsession with word origins began, as most obsessions do, with an argument nobody asked for — specifically, a heated pub quiz dispute about whether "rule of thumb" really had anything to do with wife-beating. (It doesn't. He won the argument. He lost the friends.) What started as one question became fifty, and what became fifty questions eventually became this book — a process that took considerably longer than he'd like to admit, largely because every phrase he researched led to three more that needed investigating.

When not chasing down the origins of everyday phrases, Tobyn can be found haunting secondhand bookshops, losing at pub quizzes despite knowing far too much about etymology, and explaining to his long-suffering partner why the restaurant bill constitutes "highway robbery" — which, it turns out, is a phrase with a surprisingly literal history.

He shares his home with two cats who are, at time of writing, still in the bag.