Читать книгу Bees Knees and Barmy Armies - Origins of the Words and Phrases we Use Every Day - Harry Oliver - Страница 24

People dying or becoming ill or incapacitated one after the other in quick succession are often said to be ‘dropping like flies’. The origin of the phrase is unknown, although it is easy to imagine that whoever coined it may have been thinking of the extreme brevity of the fly’s life when drawing the comparison. It has been suggested that the expression is linked to the fairy tale The Brave Little Tailor, by the Brothers Grimm, in which a boy kills several flies with ease and makes a belt out of them, but the phrase doesn’t appear in the story.