make (one’s) bones
v.— «Business, for Puzo’s characters, is almost everything. Vito Corleone “made his bones” (first killing) in cold blood for dollars.» —“Persuasive Picture of Crime’s World” by Geoffrey Wolff Washington Post-Times Herald Mar. 8, 1969. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
The words tough, through, and dough all end in O-U-G-H. So why don’t they rhyme? A lively new book addresses the many quirks of English by explaining the history of words and phrases. And: have you ever been in a situation where a group makes...
This citation was previously misattributed to the New York Times but was corrected on July 5, 2017. Thanks to Merrill Perlman for the correction.