* off the wall : ridiculous
  Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has described the Commission's action as "off the wall".
  • $64,000 question
    I hearld "It's a $64,000 question" twice today, that's funny expression for "It's a really good question". I wondered why they say it instead of $million question. Here is the origin.
    : : can anyone tell me the origin of the sixty-four-thousand dollar question?
    Answer 1:
    : There was a radio quiz program in the 1940s that became quite popular. Questions got more difficult, and the value of a right answer kept doubling 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and (ooh!) the $64 question. The phrase $64 Question gained some currency. A television version in the 1950's upped the ante a thousand fold, which is why most people today remember the phrase as you do. The tv show was caught up in the Quiz Show Scandals of the time (see the movie "Quiz Show" for background) and the whole genre was out of fashion until recently revived by the current craze.
    Answer 2:
    On the radio quiz program "Take It or Leave It," which premiered in 1941 and was emceed by Bob Hawk, topics were chosen by contestants from the studio audience and questions on these topics answered by each contestant on seven levels. The easiest questions was worth two dollars and the questions progressed in difficulty until the ultimate $ 64 question was reached. The popularity of the show added to the language the expression the $ 64 question, "any question difficult to answer," and inspired a slew of similar quiz shows. A decade later came television's "$ 64,000 Question" with its plateaus instead of levels, its isolation booth, and its scandals involving prominent contestants who cheated in cahoots with the producers. Then, after a long hiatus, there was the $ 128,000 Question," but despite these programs with their inflated prizes, $ 64 question retains its place in the national vocabulary.
  • MORE THAN ONE WAY TO SKIN A CAT
    From Mike Reilly: "Anything interesting in the origin of There's more than one way to skin a cat?"

    Answer 1:
    To a lexicographer, all phrases are interesting, it's just that some of them are more interesting than others ... There are several versions of this saying. Charles Kingsley used the older British form in Westward Ho! in 1855: "there are more ways of killing a cat than choking it with cream", meaning that there are good ways of doing something, and then there are foolish ways, one of the latter being to give a cat cream in the hope of killing it. Mark Twain used your version in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in 1889: "she was wise, subtle, and knew more than one way to skin a cat", that is, more than one way to get what she wanted. The latter version seems to have nothing to do with the American English term to skin a cat, which is to perform a type of gymnastic exercise.
    World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion, 1996-. All rights reserved. Page created 20 February 1999
    Answer 2:

    I don’t have a definitive answer but here’s some information. Does anyone else have a take on this? Does the expression come from the little-boy exercise, or vice versa?

    SKIN THE CAT – According to Charles Earle Funk in "A Hog on Ice" (Harper & Row, New York, 1948) the expression "to skin the cat" refers to a boy’s gymnastic trick: "In America, as any country boy knows, this means to hang by the hands from a branch or bar, draw the legs up through the arms and over the branch, and pull oneself up into a sitting position. As we must abide by the record, we cannot say positively that the name for this violent small-boy exercise is more than a century old, but it is highly likely that Ben Franklin or earlier American lads had the same name for it. No one got around to putting it into print until about 1845. One can’t be sure why the operation was called ‘skinning the cat,’ but maybe some mother, seeing it for the first time, saw in it some resemblance to the physical operation of removing the pelt from a cat, first from the forelegs and down over the body." Mr. Funk doesn’t say WHY anyone would actually skin a cat, but anyway.

    "Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings" by Gregory Y. Titelman (Random House, New York, 1996) lists the expression "more than one way to skin a cat" but doesn’t really address the origin. Mr. Titelman does say it dates back to the 1678: "MORE THAN ONE WAY TO SKIN A CAT --There are many ways to do something. The proverb appeared in John Ray’s collection of English proverbs in 1678, and is first attested in the United States in ‘John Smith’s Letters’ (1839). ‘There are more ways to kill a cat besides choking him to death’ is a variant of the saying. The words ‘with butter’ or ‘on cream’ may replace the words ‘to death’ in the latter version…"

    Tough on cats!!