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| | Busting Chops, Old Fogeys, Pedigree, Scapegrace, Busman's Holiday, Specious and Spurious, and two lovely, if somewhat ... |
 | | You might ask your uncle if he happens to know the origin of "malarkey," meaning "nonsense." Actually, to be fair, he has a foot in the door to the real origin of "pedigree," as there is indeed a "foot" involved. |
 | | Well, when genealogists draw a chart to illustrate a family tree, offspring are shown as descending from their parents by means of forked lines which look like, you guessed it, the spindly foot of a crane. |
 | | Over the years, "pedigree," which was a way of showing ancestry, came to be a synonym for ancestry itself. |
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