A good deal of so-called slang is classic. "Escape with the skin of my
teeth" is from Job. "He is a brick" is from Plutarch. That historian tells
of a king of Sparta who boasted that his army was the only wall of the
city, "and every man is a brick." We call a fair and honest man "a square
man," but the Greeks describe the same person as _tetragonos_--"a
four-cornered man."
"Every dog has its day" is commonly attributed to Shakespeare, in
_Hamlet's_ speech, "The cat will mew and dog will have his day." But forty
years before "Hamlet" Heywood wrote, "But, as every man saith, a dog hath
his daie."