Do You Understand?

This isn’t a game, and your eternal future hangs in the balance. The Bible says, if you live for Christ now, you’ll live in heaven forever. Think about it.

We have some seemingly nonsensical phrases in our language. Have you thought about it?

Do you understand what it means to “pony up?” How about, “Let’s ostracize him.” Have you refused to buy something because it will “cost you an arm and a leg?” And, by the way, watch out so you don’t go back to “square one.”

You say you know what those phases mean, but do you? Perhaps you know how they are used and you know what the speaker is getting at, but do you know what they mean? One man said, “What you think something means isn’t important to me. If I understand the gist of the phrase, that’s good enough.”

I didn’t fuss with him. It takes time to study and figure out the meaning or the history of something, and that man didn’t want to take the time, so I didn’t bother him with historical trivia.

But I’m not that way. I want to know about life.

So, where did the phrase “pony up” originate?

The Dictionary of American Slang says it is from slang use of Latin legem pone to mean “money” because this was the title of the Psalm for March 25, a Quarter Day and the first payday of the year. Latin pone (pronounced pona) is the imperative of Latin ponere meaning to put, or to place something. Therefore, when we pony-up, we pay a bill, return what we borrowed, settle an account, or receive our pay.

What does it mean to cost an arm and a leg?

Portrait painters, possibly starting in the 1400s, charged a lot of money for full-body paintings, but if the client wanted a portrait that included only his face and shoulders, the painter gave the customer an economical price. Prices went up with each larger picture size and with more of the person pictured. But the price was the highest if arms and legs were included in the picture. I think that was the origin of the phrase, “It will cost an arm and a leg.”

Have you ever been ostracized?

In the 1580s, the legal method by which men who were considered dangerous to the people or embarrassing to the Athenian state, was exclusion from society. They were banished for 10 years by public vote. The voting was done by writing or scratching the name on an ostrakon, which was a potshard. The word morphed into Latin as ostrakizein, into French as ostracisme, and into English as ostracize. A similar practice in Syracuse, Greece (with banishment for five years) was done by writing names on olive leaves and was called petalismos.

How many times have you gone back to square one?

This game is played on a board that looks like a grid. Players start the game on square one, and the goal is to be the first to reach the last square. Progress is made by rolling dice and advancing the number of spaces shown on the dice. Some spaces on the board have pictures of snakes on them. If a player lands on one of these snakes, he or she is sent back to square one.

Are you tired of being told to think outside the box?

The first time I heard of it was in a problem-solving class. We were given a sheet of paper with nine dots — three rows with three dots in each row. We were instructed to connect or link the nine dots using no more than four straight lines without lifting the pen or pencil from the paper, and without retracing a line. Most people couldn’t figure it out because they thought the “box,” or the “square” presented by the dots, was the boundary for the lines. However, the only way to complete the task was to extend a few of the lines beyond the end of the dots, or outside the box. So the phrase encourages people to think creatively in solving problems.

However, there are many other things folks don’t understand. Four of them are: not all problems can be solved, life doesn’t end with death, we’ll be banished for eternity from the presence of our loving God unless we turn to Jesus Christ, and Jesus paid the highest price possible for our entrance into heaven — His human life.

This isn’t a game, and your eternal future hangs in the balance. The Bible says, if you live for Christ now, you’ll live in heaven forever. Think about it.