This essay illuminates adaptable and multimodal ways of teaching with etymology and idiomatic origin stories in the composition classroom. I model my pedagogical approach with a topic central to my rhetorical research--pigeons in histories of human communication--and the rich etymologically-linked concepts of homing in, pigeonholing, and dovetailing. While orienting my exploration around this model, I invite instructors to travel with these ideas, to migrate and adapt these approaches to the thematic and topical foci in their own teaching and research.