thing [OE] Just about anything can be called a thing, but in Old English it first meant ‘a meeting, an assembly’ or ‘a court, a council’. The word developed through ‘a matter brought before a court’ and ‘a concern, an affair’ to its more general modern senses. To be all things to all men probably goes back to a biblical verse in the First Epistle to the Corinthians: ‘I am made all things to all men.’ ‘The Cornish or West Country Litany’, a traditional prayer runs: ‘From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties / And things that go bump in the night, / Good Lord, deliver us!’ This has given things that go bump in the night [E20th]. After a certain age everyone can be struck by the gloomy thought that things ain’t what they used to be. The phrase originated as the title of a song by Ted Persons in 1941. The idiom do one’s (own) thing is recorded from the mid 19th century, but it did not become widespread until the 1960s in hippie culture; have a thing with (somebody) dates from this same decade. Among other things dates back to Chaucer, and first thing to Shakespeare; one thing leads to another is mid 18th century, and … of all things is a few years later. Just one of those things, memorable from a 1935 Cole Porter song, is recorded a dozen years before the song, while is that (even) a thing? is early 21st century.