Line in the sand. Rosemary Thomas wrote, “Every Texan knows the story of Colonel William Barret Travis at the Alamo and the little band of defenders besieged by overwhelming forces, of how Travis spelled out the grim choices left them and, drawing a line in the sand with his sword, challenged them to step across the line and stay with him and face certain death. Even though that speech may be apocryphal, it’s cherished.”

“I have to admit to liking an expression such as a line in the sand,” Mark Alcamo commented, “because we not only all know what it means cliché-wise, but because it has such an intrinsically ironic sense — a line in the sand is probably only surpassed by a line in water for its naturally transient nature.”

Fiona MacArthur wrote, “A relatively recent variation is the addition of red. I've heard ‘drew/crossed the red line’ often on Euronews in the recent past. The colour red seems to me inconsistent with the sand image of the earlier idiom. So I wonder where the colour idea might have come from?” I suspect it derives from the red line on a meter that shows the maximum safe level of operation. To red line something is to push an engine to its limits, to go as fast as possible, which is from aviation and motoring jargon of the 1950s. It has become conflated and muddled with the existing draw a line.

Peely-wally. Chris Quinn and many others pointed out that a wally dug is a pottery dog, not a vase. “They are for some reason extremely popular in Scotland. They’re usually found in pairs in front of the fireplace or on the mantel.” Jill Williams added that “a wally close is a close (an entrance hallway to a block of tenement flats) with tiled walls, a sign of a superior property to one which had merely painted walls. Wallies was a familiar term for false teeth, presumably because they used to be made of porcelain.”

“On the subject of peely-wally,” Colin Melville wrote, “my Glaswegian father occasionally took me along with him to play golf when his usual partner couldn’t make it. Since I seldom played, he tried to help me improve my rather weak game. He told me that the fact that the ball went anywhere but where I wanted it to go was due to my peely-wally grip on the club, by which he meant weak.”