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Why do we do something
by hook or by crook?
Here's an expression with a certain air of determination to it. It even
sounds like you will somehow find a way of accomplishing a task, whatever you have to do to get it done.
But nothing in the sound of hook and crook even hints that they refer to the gathering of firewood. In the Middle Ages, peasants dared not cut down the trees on the Lord's estate to gather fuel for their hearth. But traditionally they were allowed to take whatever wood they could cut from the branches using a hook, a pole with a curved blade at the end, or a shepherd's crook, the long staff with the curved end. Over the centuries, ironically, this expression that originated in doing something only under specified conditions came to mean doing anything in any way you could.
Lafayette was a major general in the United States at the age of 19. Lafayette's whole name takes up an entire line on a page: Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette.
"The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it."
Harry Emerson Fosdick
