Make mine coffee and pizza.

Dear Word Detective: “Sam’s parking fine payments keep the city in beer and skittles.” In my hearing, this expression has always referred to a payment, usually onerous or unfair, for a second party’s benefit. Can you tell me from whence it comes and why? — Janet.

That’s an interesting question. But before we begin, I should warn you that there are people out there, who someday you may have the misfortune of encountering, who will castigate you for using the phrase “from whence.” They will point out that “whence” all by itself means “from where,” and insist that “from whence” must therefore mean “from from where,” which, if they were correct, would be awkward and redundant. But they are not correct, and “whence” and “from whence” are equally proper.

Whee.

Onward. The example you provided of “beer and skittles” certainly does reek of unjust enrichment, as the lawyers say, but I think you may be carrying a bit too much of that context into judging the connotation of “beer and skittles.” It is entirely possible to enjoy “beer and skittles” without bilking anyone. It used to be possible, for instance, for a factory worker to look forward, after a life of toil, to a retirement of carefree enjoyment of “beer and skittles.”

As an idiom common in English since at least the early 19th century, “beer and skittles” means “unalloyed enjoyment and relaxation,” what we might also call “living on easy street.” Unfortunately, such a state of bliss is uncommon, and it shows in the history of the phrase. The first recorded use of “beer and skittles” in print is in Charles Dickens’ “Pickwick Papers” in 1837, where it is used straightforwardly to describe a comfortable state (“It’s a reg’lar holiday to them — all porter and skittles”) (“Porter” is short for “porter’s ale,” a strong dark beer.)

But the remaining citations for “beer and skittles” listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, and the vast majority of examples to be found today, employ the phrase as a symbol of precisely what life is not “about” (“‘Teach him life can’t be all beer and skittles,’ said Robert Gardner maliciously,” Agatha Christie, 1931). The phrase “life isn’t all beer and skittles,” often deployed as a stern admonition to wayward youth, is considered a tattered cliche today but remains nonetheless enormously popular, probably because life stubbornly refuses to get any easier.

One interesting aspect of “beer and skittles” is that the phrase is often used, especially in the US, by people who haven’t the faintest idea what a “skittle” is. There is, of course, a brand of candy called Skittles, but the “skittles” in “beer and skittles” is a game often played in pubs in Britain, a kind of tabletop bowling in which the pins are called “skittles.” The word “skittle” itself dates back to the 17th century and is of uncertain origin, but appears to have Scandinavian roots.

In the Gardens of Myopia.

Dear Word Detective: Over the years I have used the phrase “I told him how the cow ate the cabbage!” which I picked up somewhere. Now an Aussie friend wants to know what it means. I know what I mean when I say it, but wonder what its origin is. — Jo Nicholas.

that ain't right.

That’s a good question, and one that has, fortunately, a definite answer. That’s not always the case when it comes to folk sayings, some of which turn out to be so obscure that the origin may never be known. I remember hunting for the origin of (or even a coherent explanation of) the 19th century phrase “to stick one’s spoon in the wall” (meaning “to die”) a few years ago. I never found it, and that phrase has been rattling around in the back of my mind ever since.

“To tell someone how the cow ate the cabbage” means to tell the person the unvarnished truth, even if the person would rather not hear it. It can also mean to state one’s opinion forcefully or to “tell someone off” (“The mechanic had been jerking me around for weeks, promising that every new repair would fix the problem, so I finally told him how the cow ate the cabbage and drove home”).

“How the cow ate the cabbage” is a folk saying of the southern US, most often heard in Texas and Arkansas, and probably dates back to at least the 1940s. It comes from the punchline to a joke that would, in that period, have been considered at least slightly “off-color.” Here goes:

A circus had arrived in a small town, and one morning one of the elephants managed to escape. The fugitive pachyderm made its way to the backyard garden of an elderly (and very near-sighted) woman, where it began hungrily uprooting her cabbages with its trunk and eating them. Alarmed by the apparition in her garden, the woman called the police, saying, “Sheriff, there’s a big cow in my garden pulling up my cabbages with its tail!” “What’s the cow doing with them?” he asked, to which the woman replied, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you!”

Hey, I never said the joke was actually funny. In any case, the nicely alliterative “to tell someone how the cow ate the cabbage” quickly came to be a Southern catchphrase meaning “to tell someone a truth they don’t want to hear” (which, of course, is exactly what the woman in the joke refuses to do). In the “tell someone off” sense it also carries the rude implication of telling someone where they can stow the matter or object of contention.

Incidentally, in the 19th and early 20th century, the only place where residents of small towns in the US were likely to see a real live elephant was in just the kind of small traveling circus found in this joke, where the elephant was the big attraction. So prevalent was this small-town pachyderm-mania that by about 1835 “to see the elephant” had become a catchphrase meaning “to experience all that there is to see.” A darker sense arose a few years later, in which “to have seen the elephant” was used to mean “to be worldly, no longer innocent, to have learned a hard lesson.” By the time of the Civil War, “to see the elephant” had come to mean specifically “to experience combat for the first time” and thus to have learned the brutal truth about war.