The provervial phrase "the straw that broke the camels back". What is its history?
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The idiom the straw that broke the camel's back is from a proverb about loading up a camel beyond its capacity to move. This is a reference to any process by which cataclysmic failure (a broken back) is achieved by a seemingly inconsequential addition (a single straw). This also gives rise to the phrase "the last straw", used when something is deemed to be the last in a line of unacceptable occurrences.
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1)  Old Major warns, "Your resolution must never falter.  No argument must lead you astray.  Never listen when they tell you that Man and the animals have a common interest....we must not come to resemble him...No animal must ever live in a house or sleep in a bed, or wear clothes, or drink alcohol, or smoke tobacco, or touch money, or engage in trade." \n\n\n2)  Orwell narrates, "Nobody stole, nobody grumbled over his rations, the quarreling and biting and jealousy which had been normal features of life in the old days had almost disappeared." \n\n\n3)  Squealer consoles the animals, saying, "Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure.   On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility.  No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal.  He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves.    But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"  The classic hypocrisy seen here is too hard to miss.  \n\n\n4)  Orwell explains, "Once again the animals were conscious of a vague uneasiness.  Never to have any dealings with human beings, never to engage in trade, never to make use of money— had not these been among the earliest resolutions passed at the first triumphant Meeting when Jones was expelled?”  \n\n\n5)  As Napoleon was deceiving the neighboring farmers he was also tricking his own animals.  The scapegoat was again Snowball.  "Whenever anything went wrong it became usual to attribute it to Snowball."  In fact many of the claims begin to sound ridiculous to the objective mind.  Of course, Squealer's mission is to keep everything subjective in the minds of the animals. \n\n\n6)  So Napoleon, with the help of his dogs, slaughters anyone who is said to be disloyal.     "...the tale of confessions and executions went on, until there was a pile of corpses lying before Napoleon's feet and the air was heavy with the smell of blood, which had been unknown there since the expulsion of Jones."  To top it off, Napoleon outlaws Beasts of England, which had served as one of the only remaining ties between Animal Farm and old Major.  \n\n\n7)  But when Muriel reads the writing on the barn wall to Clover, interestingly, the words are, "No animal shall kill any other animal without cause." \n\n\n8)  But to justify this little episode, arrangements to amend the rules are made.  "No animal shall drink alcohol to excess."  \n\n\n9)  Orwell states, "Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer— except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs."  \n\n\n10)  The 7 Commandments are abridged for the last time, simply reading, "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others."\n\nThese can all be related to the metaphors that the book embrases
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'tie on one'\n\n"From "The Wordsworth Book of Euphemism" by Judith S. Neaman and Carole G. Silver (Wordsworth Reference, New York, 1983, 1990) -- "Tie one on, to - To get drunk. (Eric) Partridge suggests that this expression is derived from 'hang one on' (ca. 1935), which originated in the United States and was later adopted in Canada. It is clear that a 'hangover' -- more politely, 'the morning after' -- is the miserable memento of having 'hung' or 'tied one on.' We are uncertain as to why drinking is described as tieing, hanging or belting...""\n\n'belly up to the bar'\n\n" "belly up! belly up to the bar, boys!" Drinks on the house, boys!: Canadian: 20th century. Cf. the US underworld, mostly pickpockets', catch phrase "belly up?," Have a drink!--c. 1930-50. Prompted by the English-speaking world's toast "bottoms up!""\n\nor:\n\n"belly up to: To approach something straight on, to move straight ahead; fig., to push one's belly toward or up to something. 1953: ". . . For a fellow to belly up to a bar and buy a round of drinks. . . ." "
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Quote:\nNever say a humorous thing to a man who does not possess humour. He will always use it in evidence against you. \n\nAuthor: Beerbohm, Herbert, Sir
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I think it's "Ad hominem". \n\nThis link will give you more info: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ad-hominem.html
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told them to switch  camels
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The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations lists "March comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb" as a proverb dating from at least as far back as the early 17th century.  Most proverbs are anonymous.
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It is not a poem. It is originally from the novel by Charles Dickens,  A Tale of Two Cities.  It is the opening sentence to the novel.  The actual quote is: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.   It is one of the most famous lines in all of literature and quoted very often.  I believe the sentence concerns the French Revolution.
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a saying is like 'you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink' and contradiction is when you say one thing, and mean another. That sort of thing.
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This is what I found: "It sounds as if this expression for surviving or overcoming nearly insuperable obstacles ought to have a nautical origin, doesn’t it? But there’s no evidence to support that.\n\nIt appears in print around the beginning of the twentieth century. The first example I’ve found is from 1901, but there is a substantial set in the books and newspapers later in that decade, showing that it had by then become widely known. The first form that appears is hell and high water; the form you give, which is now standard, comes along several decades later, together with through hell and high water and variations.\n\nThe setting of many of the earliest examples strongly point to cattle ranching as the origin, in particular the driving of cattle to railheads in the mid West in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In 1939 Paul Wellman published a book with the title Trampling Herd: the Story of the Cattle Range in America in which he wrote: “ ‘In spite of hell and high water’ is a legacy of the cattle trail when the cowboys drove their horn-spiked masses of longhorns through high water at every river and continuous hell between.”\n\nAn article about an old-time cattleman that appeared in the Washington Post in November 1905 supports this: “He prospered in those palmy days until he became the largest cattle owner in the territory and felt able to take his regular blowout in St Louis, until 1884, when, between the alien land law, drought and rustlers, the “hell and high water of the cattlemen,” he ... walked out of the Kansas City stock yards a few hundred thousand dollars worse off and no cattle worth putting an iron on, much less pulling grass by hand to feed.”"
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It's Tempest in a Teacup and it came from Shakespeare, I think.  It means something that's been blown out of proportion.
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It often implies that you have made a serious mistake, but more strictly it indicates that something you have done (or some turn of events) has left you looking extremely embarrassed or foolish.\nIt feels like one of those expressions that have been around for ever, but the evidence suggest that it’s an American expression from the middle of last century (its first known appearance was in an American television series about 1951). It’s possible, though, that it is somewhat older, though I haven’t been able to find it in my large collection of out-of-copyright e-texts, which suggests it is more recent than the 1920s.\nI know of two possibilities for where it came from. My assumption to start with was that it was a comment on a minor social gaffe at a meal, when poor manners or sloppy eating left egg around your mouth. The late John Ciardi, however, suggested an origin in the lower and more rowdy kind of theatrical performance, in which an incompetent actor would have been pelted with eggs and forced off the stage.\nAfter I wrote the first version of this piece, subscriber Cal Clifford put a possible new perspective on he expression by mentioning egg-sucking dogs: “Occasionally, a trusted, working farm dog would develop the bad habit of taking eggs from nests and eating them, turning himself from asset into liability.” I found several examples of the term, including this from Glengarry School Days by Ralph Connor, dated 1902: “His chief business was the doing away with dogs of ill-repute in the country; vicious dogs, sheep-killing dogs, egg-sucking dogs, were committed to Alan’s dread custody, and often he would be seen leading off his wretched victims to his den in the woods, whence they never returned.” And in Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp, by Annie Roe Carr (of about 1919): “He’s a miserable, fox-faced scoundrel, and I’ve no more use for him than I have for an egg-sucking dog.” So it is just possible that the expression might be a figurative extension from that of a dog found with egg around its muzzle, mute evidence of depravity.
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The full phrase is "Hair of the dog that bit you". It is most often referred to when talking about the use of alcohol as a hangover-cure.
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As the old Arabic aphorism goes, "Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel."
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"The firstborn of his herd, majesty is his. His horns are the horns of the wild ox. With them he shall push the peoples all of them, even the ends of the earth: They are the ten thousands of Ephraim. They are the thousands of Manasseh."\n\n\nI don't see the word UNICORN in this passage.   Looking real hard for something, huh?
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Cartoonist Thomas Nast came up with both symbols in Harper's Weekly in 1874.\n\nThe donkey was clothed in a lion skin and scared away the animals at the zoo. The elephant was labeled Republican party.\n\nTwo years later, Nast drew the elephant trampling Samuel Tilden (the democratic candidate that year)
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The word "piggyback," as in, "Honey, it's my turn to get a piggyback tonight," derives from the terms "pickpack," "pickback," and even "pick-a-pack," all used in the 17th century to indicate the act of hoisting something onto someone's back for carrying. According to the Random House Word of the Day, most etymologists assume "pick" is a variant of the verb "to pitch," meaning "to throw." "Pack" refers to items meant for carrying.\n\nBut how did the piggy grunt its way into the mix? Did giant domesticated hogs, back in the day, do the work of packhorses? No, what we have here, apparently, is a failure to communicate: a textbook case of folk etymology, in which a word is modified to something more common or easily understood when the original term has become obsolete, and thus devoid of meaning. Some examples of folk etymology at work, according to Wikipedia, are the evolving of the words "shamefast" into "shamefaced," "buttonhole into "buttonhold," and "sweetard" into "sweatheart." (But there's no truth to the rumor that Ask Yahoo! used to be called "Axe Yahoos," back in the dot-com downturn days.)