Concise Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

Phrases with a story form a key part of the book, and the stories may come from a variety of sources. When we talk about killing the golden goose we are reaching back to one of Aesop's fables, in which a man killed the goose which laid a single golden egg each day, in the belief that he would find a number of such eggs inside it, and instead through greed lost his source of wealth. Birds of a feather, people with similar tastes and interests, are named from the proverb "birds of a feather flock together." Chicken Little, a name for an alarmist, comes from a traditional nursery story: the story of the animals who repeatedly warned the king that "the sky is falling down." Bunny boiler, an expression for a woman who takes revenge after having been spurned by her lover, is an allusion to the actions of the vengeful character in the film Fatal Attraction. The film world, again, has given us up to eleven, an informal expression meaning "up to maximum volume". This refers to a scene in the film This is Spinal Tap (1984), featuring a supposedly louder amplifier with control knobs having 11 rather than 10 as the top setting.

Many entries link the ancient and modern worlds. Gaia, in Greek mythology the Earth personified as a goddess, is also the name in James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis for the earth viewed as a vast self-regulating organism. Thetis, in Greek mythology the sea-nymph who was the mother of Achilles, gave her name to the submarine lost in Liverpool Bay, 1 June 1939, on her first dive –a tragedy recalled by many when the Kursk was lost in the Barents Sea in August 2000. The name of the biblical Eve is also found in African Eve hypothesis, the hypothesis (based on the study of mitochondrial DNA) that modern humans have common female ancestor who lived in Africa around 200,000 years ago.

Allusions may be classical or biblical (as in Cassandra or Job), or refer to an iconic figure from popular culture (Indiana Jones or Buffy the Vampire-Slayer). Some figurative uses have a long life. The term Iron Chancellor, originally coined in the 19th century for Otto von Bismarck, has more recently been applied to the current British Chancellor Gordon Brown. The idea of iron as having an immovable strength is reflected in other and more recent phrases: for example, iron triangle to designate a group of three power bases providing each other with mutual support, such as in America, the Pentagon, the defence industry, and Congress. The stock of figurative and allusive usage in the language today is a rich one, and is constantly replenished.

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