Where words and phrases come from is a fascinating subject, full of folklore and historical lessons (continuing phrases beginning with F)

Ferret (out) - search persistently (and find).

Origin: A ferret is a variety of polecat able to enter confined spaces. It was formerly much used for destroying rats and driving rabbits from their burrows so that they could be snared. This practice is not much found these days, but the verb continues in use with its figurative sense.

Fiddle while Rome burns - occupy oneself with something unimportant while a crisis remains unattended to.

Origin: The great fire of Rome (64 AD) gave the Emperor Nero (37-68 AD) and his city-planners an unparalleled opportunity to rebuild. Included in the plans were a fabulous villa and pleasure park for Nero, the Golden House (64-68 AD), which gave rise to rumours that Nero had started the fire himself in order to clear the site and had moreover celebrated it with music. It is true that he had artistic pretensions and was certainly capable both of initiating the catastrophe and of being insensitive to the suffering it caused, but if the story is true, he would have played a lyre (forerunner of the modern violin), not a fiddle.

Field-day - period of excitement, success and freedom from restraint

Origin: The original was - a day on which troops, after much training and practice, were drawn up for review and exercise in battlefield tactics and manoeuvres, watched by high-ranking officers, in what was intended to be a brilliant and noisy display with plenty of dashing movement.

Fifth column - traitors; people within a country or organisation who secretly work against it

Origin: The expression was first used in 1936 in a radio broadcast by the fascist General Mola during the Spanish Civil War. While besieging Madrid with an army of four columns of troops he claimed that he also had a 'fifth column' ( in the shape of the citizens of the city) ready to rise up in his support.

Fight like Kilkenny cats - fight to the end, with no holds barred

Origin: From the Norman period until 1843, the Irish town of Kilkenny was divided into Englishtown and Irishtown, with much strife between the two.

One theory harks back to a legendary battle between a thousand cats from Kilkenny and a thousand cats from other parts of Ireland. In the night-long battle all the Kilkenny cats survived victorious, while all the others perished.

Another more popular theory dates from about 1800, when Kilkenny was occupied by a group of mercenaries in British government service, some of whom, bored and with nothing better to do, tied two cats to a clothes line by their tails and sat back to enjoy the feline fight.

The soldiers had no time to release the cats when an officer approached to investigate the noise, so they cut the animals free by severing their tails.

The officer was told that the cats had fought so fiercely that only their tails remained.