Obvious Facts People Didn’t Realize Were True Until Much Later in Life

Sometimes, a phrase or idiom becomes popular, and then, as time goes by and the language changes, that phrase stays the same—like a mosquito frozen in amber. And these weird grammatical forms or old meanings of a given word stick around for centuries, but only in that particular phrase.

“Right of way” is one of these phrases. It dates back to the 1700s, and if you see written, you can usually puzzle out what it means. But it’s a weird sort of old-fashioned phrase that we wouldn’t come up with if we were trying to come up with a term these days.