Whenever Charles Miner suspected an ulterior motive, he would say quietly ‘That man has an axe to grind!’
When someone has a hidden, ulterior motive for what he does, we say ‘he has an axe to grind’. The origin of this saying appears to be an essay in the Luzerne Federalist, a Pennsylvania newspaper, for September 7th, 1810. The author, Charles Miner, edited the paper with his brother Asher; later, Charles became an anti-slavery campaigner and a Congressman.
Benjamin Franklin recalls the disciplines he put himself through on the way to becoming one of America’s literary giants.
Ben Franklin’s father, to head him off from going to sea, apprenticed him at twelve to his elder brother James, a printer in Boston, Massachusetts. Eager to improve his command of prose writing, Ben entered into an informal writing competition with another boy from his neighbourhood, John Collins, on the subject of women’s education; but this only made him acutely aware of his shortcomings.