No no-brainers allowed: Typical American

Ever wondered what is exactly meant by 'back-seat driver' or 'double-whammy'? Or what to do when somebody wants you NOT to 'gild the lily'? 

So let's cut to the chase and visit 160 Phrases Coined in the USA, which provide a top-notch guide to plethora of useful phrases that would hardly come in handy outside the USA. But it is their origin that would probably dazzle you most. After all, what you see is what you get. 

Try your hand at some of the trickiest ones:

1. Acid test

2. Bats in the belfry

3. Bunny boiler

4. Heebie-jeebies

Solutions:

1. A sure test, giving an incontestable result.

2. Crazy, eccentric (So, in 1920s they preferred to say 'Are you bats?' instead of 'Are you nuts?' and call someone 'batty' instead of 'dotty')

3. An obsessive and dangerous female, in pursuit of a lover who has spurned her. (Fatal Attraction rings a bell?)

4. A feeling of anxiety, apprehension or illness.

A Hairy Situation: Towhead

While reading Duma Key by Stephen King, I came across a quirky-looking word 'towhead'. I was curious not only to work out the meaning but also to learn about the etymology as 'head' and 'tow' are quite hard to combine even in metaphorical way. On the Washington Post website there is a pretty convincing explanation why blond-haired people are referred to as 'towheads':

 In colonial times, families grew their own flax to make into fabric for clothing. Transforming the flax into thread was a complicated, involved process with many time-consuming steps. After the flax was harvested, it was soaked in water for several days to soften it so the inner fibers could be removed from the stalk. To separate the long, thin fibers from the shorter, coarser ones, the flax was pulled through a bed of nails or combed in a process called 'towing'. The shorter fibers that were extricated were of a lesser quality and were called 'tow'. This led to the term 'towheads' to describe people, particularly children, whose hair resembled these strands.

MerriamWebster.com  dates 'tow' to the 14th century and states that its origin is "Middle English, from Old English tow-spinning." However, Urbandictionary.com states that the meaning of 'tow' comes from Middle Low German 'touw' (which means "flax, hemp fiber"). This probably went back to the prehistoric Germanic base *tow-, *taw 'make', 'prepare' (source also of English tool), in the sense "make yarn from wool; spin".