Eating my hat!

No-one would want to literally eat their hat so this expression is only used when someone is very sure about something. One of the earliest appearances of this phrase was in Charles Dickens' ‘The Pickwick Papers’ in 1837: ‘If I knew as little of life as that, I'd eat my hat and swallow the buckle whole’.

Bloomsbury International School for English, London

Readers will be aware that this is an expression describing a hypothetical act of penance that one promises to take when wrong! For me, that involved a past campaign against the so-called ‘veneerologists’, a group of dentists who cut teeth mercilessly purely for reasons of aesthetics. Although I remain totally opposed to the destruction of tooth substance in the absence of disease, I am now aware that the placement of a minimal-preparation veneer does not have such a deleterious effect on the life of a tooth as preparing a tooth for placement of a crown, for the reasons described below. It is especially relevant to one of the articles included in this issue, that being the one by Albino and colleagues from Brazil (page 22) describing the use of ceramic veneers on discoloured incisor teeth.