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

Fool’s paradise - state of illusory happiness

Origin - Medieval Christian theologians considered the problem of the souls of the mentally deficient, who could not be held responsible for their actions during their lives.

It was decided that after death they could not be punished in purgatory, yet they were not fit for heaven, so they were destined for a special limbo or Paradise of Fools. The term has been metaphorical since the 15th Century and has long since lost whatever theological sense it had.

Footloose and fancy free - free from care and responsibility

Origin - Footloose describes someone who, without responsibilities to restrain him, can wander wherever he wishes. If that person is also fancy free, he has a free heart, having no sweetheart to tie him down. The word fancy originally meant ‘fantasy’ or ‘imagination’ before coming to mean ‘whim’ and finally ‘love’.

Foot the bill - pay the bill

Origin - Footing was the act of adding up figures in a list and placing a total at the foot of the column. It was polite to ask a customer to foot the bill (check the arithmetic) as a euphemism for ‘pay the bill’. In time, the euphemistic sense dropped away.

Fork out/up - pay, contribute (money)

Origin - In slang, from the late 17th Century, the ‘forks’ were the forefinger and middle finger and the verb ‘to fork’ was to pickpocket, especially by inserting the two ‘forks’ into a victim’s pocket. In Standard English, a fork is, among other things, a bifurcation, v-shape or division into two branches, and it is easy to see why this came to be applied to the first two fingers of the hand. To fork out (now colloquial) developed naturally from the basic idea of fingering money and bringing it out of a pocket.

Forlorn hope - faint hope

Origin - On the face of it, this is a curious expression because ‘forlorn’ does not normally mean ‘faint’; it means ‘miserable, lonely or sad’. The explanation is that a forlorn hope was originally a body of troops chosen to spearhead an attack.

The rather odd name was an adaptation of the Dutch ‘verloren hoop’ (literally, ‘lost troop’), a term that implied that the soldiers selected for this troop had faint hope of success. The English version meant the same, which is why a term that originally had nothing to do with forlornness or hope now means what it does.

Forty winks - a short nap

Origin - Forty used to be not only a precise number but also an indefinite term for a large number. There are frequent biblical references to ‘forty days’ that mean no more than ‘for a long time’, and because of this frequency the number 40 came to have an almost sacrosanct quality. It is probably this sense, jocularly applied, that lies behind ‘forty winks’, a wink itself being a short spell of sleep.