Oysters and Bones

A post on Bluesky got me thinking about the origin of the word “oyster”, which I shall bore you with shortly, but the post asks an interesting question about the well-known phrase “The World’s Mine Oyster”. This comes from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and is spoken to Falstaff by Pistol, a swaggering soldier, in the line: Why, then the world’s mine oyster, Which I with sword will open. The meaning it has there is that Pistol thinks he can get whatever he wants by force of arms. In more modern usage, however, it is taken to mean that the speaker has everything on a plate. In modern usage it sometimes appears as “the world is your oyster” which means something like “take your pick”. At some point, it is claimed in the 20th Century, this meaning of this phrase changed. There’s a podcast about this here. How, where and why this happened I don’t know, and I don’t know who does. My usual source for information about things like this is the wonderful Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase…