Feel in one’s bones/water

Origin of: Feel in one’s bones/water

Feel in one’s bones/water

Whether one feels something in one’s bones or one’s water they both mean the same thing i.e. that one has an intuition about something. The bones version is much older and dates from the 1600s; the water version is much more modern from the mid-20th century and stems from the fact that the human body is sixty to seventy percent water and therefore one is more likely to feel something in one’s water than in one’s bones.