To have a frog in your throat

Example: “Sorry, give me a second; I have a frog in my throat this morning.”

Origin: The story often attached to this phrase — that medieval physicians treated sore throats by placing a live frog in the patient's mouth — has no support behind it, and the phrase is far too recent for it in any case. It is American and nineteenth-century, and the comparison needs no history to explain it: a hoarse voice genuinely does produce a low, cracked, intermittent croak, and laryngeal irritation produces a sensation of something lodged in the throat that will not clear. What did help spread the expression was commerce. A throat lozenge marketed in the United States in the 1890s was sold under the name Frog in Your Throat, and the advertising put the phrase in front of a national audience at exactly the moment it was becoming fixed in ordinary speech.