paint the town red

Example: “After their final exams, the students went out to paint the town red.”

Origin: There is a real incident behind the usual story. In 1837 the Marquis of Waterford and a group of friends, drunk after a hunt, ran riot through Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire and literally applied red paint to doors, a toll bar, and a swan statue; the town has never entirely stopped mentioning it. The difficulty is chronological: the phrase itself is first attested in American English decades later, in the 1880s, which is a long silence for a supposedly direct descent, and etymologists generally treat the connection as unproven. The alternative is that the expression was built independently from obvious materials — red as the color of blood, fire, and disorder — and that the Melton Mowbray story was attached afterward because it fit so well.