It’s a very weird thing to say, but if we lose our voice with a cold and sound a bit croaky, we sometimes describe it by saying, ‘I have a frog in my throat.’

Where can such a silly saying come from?

Many centuries ago, medicine was a lot more basic than it is today, and some of the ‘CURES’ people tried were VERY bizarre!

And so if, back in the Middle Ages, a person had a sore throat, the doctor would sometimes put a LIVE FROG head first into his patient’s mouth! The idea was that the frog would spit out a substance that would then draw out the infection from the poor patient’s mouth!

According to some, there was another superstition around at the time that drinking water sometimes contained frogspawn — that’s frogs’ eggs surrounded by transparent jelly — eurgh! People believed that frogs would grow inside the body, and make you hoarse or gag when they tried to jump out of your throat.

Either way, I may never use that expression again. In fact, I’ve turned the colour of a frog just thinking about it!

P.S. Poor frogs, they didn’t have a very happy life in those days (see ‘How to be a geek!’, for another example).