I do remember hearing the expression as being like "every one and his mother". I did not know the origin though, so thank you.

I have never been very good with languages - 4 years of Latin, 3 years of Spanish - and sad to say not very adept with Pig Latin either.

When I was learning Russian, we were taught that a large portion of Russian is idiomatic and cannot be translated literally. For example, дождь идёт translates literally as "rain takes a walk," but really means "It is raining." This makes learning Russian even that much more difficult than English, not to mention the complex grammar in Russian with multiple declensions and cases for nouns and adjectives (even more than in Latin) and multiple ways of conjugating verbs, not counting all the irregular verbs. We were also taught that most Russians do not speak proper Russian - mainly because it is too difficult. English is much simpler and easier, and still native English speakers often do not speak proper English. It's too bad that Latin is not taught as much in schools as it used to be.

I wonder if that's related to dancing a jig...if that was considered a 'trick' move or not.