Many foreigners coming to Britain are often left scratching their heads at some of our strange turns of phrase - but even Britons themselves sometimes find themselves baffled.
Now linguistics experts have revealed a list of the 30 most obscure phrases in the English language and their origins.
Franz Andres Morrissey (Lecturer in Linguistics and Creative Writing, University of Bern) and Jürg Strässler (emeritus Lecturer in Linguistics, University of Zurich) spent a month examining the English language for its most bizarre phrases.
The full list, commissioned by Privilege insurance, contains sayings from Britain's army and navy history, the Bible and even Cockney rhyming slang...
Some of the sayings are fairly well-known and widely used in everyday conversation.
But what about some of the more unusual ones?
Try our quiz and see if you can translate some of the more bizarre sayings and a few others we've thrown in for good measure...