barrel [ME] This word goes back to Latin barillus ‘small cask’. Before refrigerators made domestic life easier, the barrel used for storage was a more familiar object. Various phrases refer back to those earlier days. To have someone over a barrel is to have them in a helpless position, at one’s mercy. The image may be of people rescued from drowning laid face down over a barrel to help the water drain out of their lungs. If you scrape the barrel (or the bottom of the barrel) you are reduced to using things or people of the poorest quality because there is nothing else available. Neither of these is recorded until the early 20th century.