Q.
If someone calls you ‘out of the blue,’ it is unexpected, a complete surprise. Where does the ‘out of the blue’ phrase originate?

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A.

An ‘out of the blue moment’ today could be positive or negative – it’s an emotionally neutral phrase.

Its 19^th century origins – ‘A bolt from the blue’ – are more negative. In Ebenezer Cobham Brewer’s 1870 Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, we read:

‘A sudden and wholly unexpected catastrophe or event occurred, like a “thunderbolt” from the blue sky, or flash of lightning without warning and wholly unexpected.’

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Ebenezer offers an example from page 240 of the 1891 ‘Nineteenth Century’:

‘On Monday, December 22^nd (1890), there fell a bolt from the blue. The morning papers announced that the men were out on strike.’

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