Good morning everyone! English language idiom of the week: Hit the books – If you’re a student in an English speaking environment you’re probably going to be hearing this phrase a lot. Before you imagine students running into their campus library and punching, kicking and wrestling apart the complete works of Shakespeare, we would just like to say that hit the books actually means to study. There there, you can still punch books in your spare time if you want, we won’t judge you. Interest fact: In this phrase, hit means to start or to begin. Although no one knows the origin of the idiom “hit the books”, it seems to be related to early idioms such as “hit the trail,” which cowboys used when starting out on a journey. It’s clear that this saying is a fairly contemporary one, probably from the mid-20th century.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 11:00:00 +0000