Raspberry
One of the words which clearly seem to fall into two parts, two morphemes, but where it is difficult to decide what one of them is. In this case, berry does not pose any difficulty, but what is rasp? Today probably nothing, but in the past, in 16th century England, rasp was actually the name of the fruit.
Reading Like Ealing, Worthing, Hastings and many other place names, Reading contains an –ing. It means ‘the people of’. )Bragg, Melvin: The Adventure of English. The Biography of a Language. London: Sceptre, 2004: 6)
Read the riot act
If you declare really forcefully that something must stop, you read the riot act: “When he arrived late again, the teacher read him the riot act.” The idiom goes back to a historical act, the Riot Act of 1715, decreed in the reign of George I. The act made it unlawful for groups of people to disturb the public peace. If there was a crowd of people who did not behave properly, the magistrate was to read them a proclamation telling them to disperse. Those who failed to obey could be sentenced to imprisonment or hard labour. (Flavell & Flavell 3 2000: 154)
Red Tape
Excessive bureaucracy and form-filling is known as “red tape”. This phrase originates in the former practice of tying papers and documents together with red tape. Example: “The new rules should help cut the red tape for farmers. (Flavell & Flavell 3 2000: 152)
Repairing
In Standard English, the /r/ of repair is not pronounced, but the /r/ of repairing is. This is the same process as that of linking /r/ although it is not usually called this. (Davis 2004: 110)
Ring true
Why does something that seems conceivable ring true? Or, for that matter, why does something ring false? Originally, it was the coins that rang true or false. The real ones were made of pure metal and had a sonorous ring. They rang true. The fakes were alloys and made a dull sound. They rang false. (Flavell & Flavell 3 2005: 291)
River Thames
In British English, the word river is placed before the name of the river: the River Thames, the River Avon. In American English, it is the other way round: the Mississippi River, the Hudson River. (cf. Trudgill/Hannah 4 2002: 73)
Rule the roost
There are two explanations for the origin of this idiom, an obvious one and a less obvious one. The obvious one has the cock as the central figure of the expression. It is the cock who dominates the hens of a cop. He rules the roost. The less obvious one is taking roost as an alternative spelling of roast. Then the idiom would refer to the man of the house who cuts the roast. There is a passage in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, which makes reference to Suffolk as “the man that rules the roast”. In both cases, it is the male who rules the roost. I wonder why. (Flavell & Flavell 3 2000: 161)
Run the gauntlet
In “throw down the gauntlet”, ‘challenge’, and “take up the gauntlet”, ‘accept a challenge’, the gauntlet is a glove, the mailed glove worn by medieval knights. This is not the case in “run the gauntlet”, ‘suffer criticism or abuse’. Here, the origin is in the Swedish words for ‘run’ and ‘lane’, and this indicates the meaning of the idiom, which has its origin in the fearful military practice in which the offender, stripped to the waist, was forced to run between two lines of soldiers who beat him with ropes or clubs. (Flavell & Flavell 3 2000: 91-2)