From A Hog on Ice by Charles Funk:

small fry

We use this humorously when speaking of young children. Our ancestors for the past four hundred years have done the same, so the humor is somewhat antique. But the joke is on us, because even in the remote day when we borrowed "fry" from the Norse, it meant the children of a man's family. That meaning died out, however, and the present humorous usage is rather a reference to the numerous progeny (or "fry") of salmon. And even now it implies a considerable number of small children.

Hobson's choice

The choice of taking what is offered or having nothing at all. Thomas Hobson, who died in 1630 at the ripe age of eighty-five or eighty-six, was a carrier, with his stables in Cambridge and his route running to London, sixty miles away. He was popular among the students of the university, for he drove his own stage over the long route, becoming well known to his passengers, and also because he was entrusted with the privilege of carrying the university mail. Not all the students kept riding horses, and Hobson had extra horses in his stables which could be hired "by them, thus becoming, it is said, the first in England to have conducted such a business. But Hobson, according to an article by Steele in the Spectator a hundred years later, had observed that the young men rode too hard, so, rather than risk the ruin of his best horses, which were most in demand, he made an unvarying rule that no horse be taken except in its proper turn-that, or none at all. "Every customer," said Steele, "was alike well served according to his chance, and every horse ridden with the same justice."

Hobson's death was said to have been the result of idleness forced upon him while the black plague was raging in London. He had the distinction, however, of being the only person to have been honored by an epitaph written by John Milton, or, in fact, by two such epitaphs. Either is too long to be quoted in full, but the second, filled with puns upon his occupation and the cause of his death may be quoted in part:

Merely to drive the time away he sickened, Fainted, and died, nor would with ale be quickened.

"Nay," quoth he, on his swooning bed outstretched, "If I mayn't carry, sure I'll ne'er be fetched,

But vow, though the cross doctors all stood hearers,

For one carrier put down to make six bearers."

Ease was his chief disease; and to judge right,

He died for heaviness that his cart went light;

His leisure told him that his time was come,

And lack of load made his life burdensome,

That even to his last breath (there be some that say't),

As he were pressed to death, he cried, "More weight."

(This reminds me of that Salem Witch Trials book I read recently. One fellow, Giles Corey, refused to give testimony at the 1692 Witch Trials. He would neither confess nor deny the charges brought upon him. So, in order to obtain a statement, he was taken outside, a board placed across his body, and heavy stones piled on top. It is said that his only words before he was crushed to death were; "More weight!" – Wes)

to beat about the bush

So far as I know, batfowling was never an American sport. Perhaps game has always been too plentiful. But we have to go way back to this ancient practice in the fifteenth century for the origin of this expression. Batfowling was nothing more than the hunting of birds at night, the hunter armed with a light with which to dazzle the sleepy birds, and a bat with which to kill them. (The next day they formed his repast, ba-ked in a pye!) Or, in some instances, the hunter would use a net for trapping the birds, hiring a boy or someone else, armed with a bat, to stir up the birds asleep in a bush. The birds, attracted by the light, would fly toward it and become entangled in the net. When there were more birds in a flock than could roost on a single bush, the batfowlers usually beat the bushes adjacent to the one on which the main flock was asleep, thus literally beating about the bush to reach their main objective. So when today Junior says, "Daddy, are you going to use the car tonight?" we recognize that, like the batfowlers of old, he is "beating about the bush," approaching indirectly the subject he has in mind.