A Word in Your Shell-Like

6,000 Curious & Everyday Phrases Explained

Nigel Rees

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

Introduction

Abbreviations

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

‘Thou art a retailer of phrases, and dost deal in remnants of remnants’

William Congreve, The Way of the World (1700)

‘False English, bad pronunciation, old sayings and common proverbs; which are so many proofs of having kept bad and low company’

4th Earl of Chesterfield, Advice to his Son on Men and Manners (1775)

‘Sir, it [an earthquake] will be much exaggerated in popular talk; for, in the first place, the common people do not accurately adapt their thoughts to the objects; nor, secondly, do they accurately adapt their words to their thoughts: they do not mean to lie; but, taking no pains to be exact, they give you very false accounts. A great part of their language is proverbial, If anything rocks at all, they say it rocks like a cradle; and in this way they go on’

Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) – for 14 September 1777

‘Blank cheques of intellectual bankruptcy’

A definition of catchphrases attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–94)

‘What do I mean by a phrase? A clutch of words that gives you a clutch at the heart’

Robert Frost, interviewed in the Saturday Evening Post (16 November 1960)

Introduction

A Word in Your Shell-like is an extensive examination of more than 6,000 phrases, detailing their origins, dates, meanings and use. But what is a ‘phrase’? Although it is technically possible for a phrase to consist of one word, I have mostly limited myself to clusters of two or more words and left analysis of single words to the etymologists and lexicographers. Within this definition of a phrase, however, fall idiomatic expressions, proverbial sayings, stock and format phrases, catchphrases, clichés, journalese, headline fodder, slogans, advertising lines, as well as titles of books and entertainments which either quote a specific source or themselves create a form of words. There is also a number of ‘short quotations’ – phrases derived from famous sayings that may be said to have a life of their own.

As to my choice of phrases for inclusion, I have simply concentrated on those about which there is something interesting to say with regard to their origins and use. I have not always restricted myself to phrases that have caught on in an enduring fashion – which might be the criterion for inclusion in a more formal dictionary – but I also look at phrases that may have had only a brief flowering. This is because to record them here may help to explain an allusion that might puzzle the reader of a novel or other work. In addition, even a briefly popular phrase can help to evoke a period and thus should be examined as part of the social history of the language.

These are the main types of phrase that I have explored in this book:

Catchphrase: simply a phrase that has ‘caught on’ with the public and is, or has been, in frequent use. It might have originated with a particular person – like CALL ME MADAM – or it might not be traceable to a particular source – like BACK TO THE DRAWING-BOARD!

Cliché: a worn or hackneyed phrase. There are some who would say that the clichés of journalism are used in such a way that they amount to a special language – journalese – which does not deserve to be condemned. I disagree.

Euphemisms: phrases used when you are trying to be gentle – or, in modern guise – when you are trying to be politically correct. The word ‘loophemism’ coined by Frank Deakin of Wilmslow in 1995 describes the largest number of such phrases in this book, having to do with going to the lavatory: (GO AND) SEE A MAN ABOUT A DOG.

Nannyisms: usually of a cautionary nature, these sayings may have been handed down by actual nannies or by grown-ups of a nannyish tendency: BACK IN THE KNIFE-BOX, LITTLE MISS SHARP.

Format phrase: a basic phrase or sentence structure capable of infinite variation by the insertion of new words – like ONE SMALL STEP FOR—, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR—where the sentence structure can be adapted to suit the speaker’s purpose.

Idiom: a picturesque expression that is used to convey a metaphorical meaning different from its literal one – or, as The Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English puts it, that has a meaning ‘not deducible from those of the separate words’. For example, if I say someone is a SQUARE PEG IN A ROUND HOLE it is obvious he or she cannot literally be such a thing. My hearers will know exactly what I mean, although I have not told them directly. Like the term ‘catchphrase’, ‘idiom’ could be applied to most of the phrases in this book, but I have tried to restrict its use to those that conform to the above definition.

Quotation, short: a number of phrases that are parts of quotations – e.g. WINTER OF DISCONTENT – are also included, especially when they have been used as the titles of popular books or films. Equally, when original phrases chosen as titles have become part of popular speech, they also are covered.

Saying, brief: this is what is sometimes called ‘a well-known phrase or saying’ (as in ‘re-arrange these words into a well-known phrase or saying’) but, unlike a formal ‘quotation’, is probably not attributable to a precise source, be it speaker, book or show. Proverbial expressions most commonly fall into this category.

Slogan: a phrase designed to promote a product, idea or cause – or which has this effect. However, at times I have employed it rather loosely to cover any phrase that is used in advertising – in headlines, footnotes, but not necessarily in a selling line that names the product. BODY ODOUR (or BO) could hardly be described as a slogan in itself, but as an advertising line it did help to promote a product.

Stock phrase: a regularly used phrase that can’t be said to have ‘caught on’ like a full-blooded catchphrase – for example, a celebrity’s verbal mannerism (CAN WE TALK?), by which he or she is known but which can’t be said to have ‘caught on’ with the public as a proper catchphrase should. It also refers to phrases which get regularly trotted out but which, again, cannot be said to have passed into the language generally.

A word about dating: Eric Partridge was always ‘game’ (as someone once felicitously put it) to try to pinpoint when a phrase came into use, though many of his stabs at it were no more than guesses. Using the citations that I have accumulated, I have tried to be a little more precise in this area. When I say that a phrase was ‘Current in 1975’, I mean that I simply have a record of its use then – not that I think it was first used in that year. It may also have been current long after that date. When I say that a phrase was ‘Quoted in 1981’, I mean precisely that – not that it was originated in that year. It might have been coined long before. On the whole I have not indulged in speculation about when a phrase might have entered the language but have simply recorded hard and fast examples of its use.

In case you find my interpretation of alphabetical order puzzling, the phrases are listed in what is known as ‘letter by letter’ order – that is to say, in alphabetical order of letters within the whole phrase exactly as it is written. Thus, for example, nicest things come in smallest parcels appears before nice work if you can get it! and move the goalposts before Mr.

Cross-references to other entries are made in SMALL CAPITALS.

Abbreviations

Apperson: G. L. Apperson, English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, 1929

Bartlett: Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (15th edn), 1980, (16th edn), 1992, (17th edn), 2002

Benham: Benham’s Book of Quotations, 1907, 1948, 1960

Bible: The Authorized Version, 1611 (except where stated otherwise)

Brewer: Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, (2nd edn), 1894, (3rd edn), 1923, (13th edn), 1975, (14th edn), 1989

Burnam: Tom Burnam, The Dictionary of Misinformation, 1975; More Misinformation, 1980

Casson/Grenfell: Sir Hugh Casson & Joyce Grenfell, Nanny Says (ed. Diana, Lady Avebury), 1982

CODP: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, 1982

DOAS: Wentworth & Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang, 1960 (1975 revision and 1987 edition, ed. Robert L. Chapman)

DNB: The Dictionary of National Biography

Flexner: Stuart Berg Flexner, I Hear America Talking, 1976; Listening to America, 1982

Grose: Francis Grose, Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1785–1823

Mencken: H. L. Mencken’s Dictionary of Quotations, 1942

Morris: William and Mary Morris, Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, 1977

ODP: The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (3rd edn), 1970

ODQ: The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (2nd edn), 1953, (3rd edn), 1979, (4th edn), 1992, (5th edn), 1999

OED2: The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed,) 1989, (CD-ROM version 3.0), 2002

Partridge/Catch Phrases: Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Catch Phrases (2nd edn, edited by Paul Beale), 1985

Partridge/Slang: Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (8th edn, edited by Paul Beale), 1984

Safire: William Safire, Safire’s Political Dictionary, 1978

Shakespeare: The Arden Shakespeare (2nd series)

Slanguage: Brigid McConville & John Shearlaw, The Slanguage of Sex, 1984

Street Talk: Street Talk: The Language of Coronation Street, eds Jeffrey Miller & Graham Nown, 1986

A

abandon hope all ye who enter here! Ironic but good-humoured welcoming phrase – a popular mistranslation of the words written over the entrance to Hell in Dante’s Divina Commedia (circa 1320). ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here!’ would be a more accurate translation of the Italian, ‘lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate!’

—abhors a vacuum PHRASES A format based on the maxim ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’ that François Rabelais quotes in its original Latin form, ‘natura abhorret vacuum’, in his Gargantua (1535). Galileo (1564–1642) asserted that it was the reason mercury rises in a barometer. An early appearance in English is, ‘The Effatum, That Nature abhors a Vacuum’, from Robert Boyle, A Free Enquiry Into the Vulgarly Receiv’d Notion of Nature (1685). ‘Nature abhors a straight line’ was a saying of the English garden landscaper Capability Brown (1715–83). Clare Boothe Luce, the American writer and socialite (1903– 87), is supposed to have said, ‘Nature abhors a virgin’, but this may just be a version of the line in her play The Women (1936): ‘I’m what nature abhors – an old maid. A frozen asset.’ ‘Nature abhors a vacuum and what appears ultimately to concern the Reagan Administration most of all is the possibility that President Mitterrand’s France will gradually abandon its traditional military protection of central Africa and the Sahara’ – Financial Times (12 August 1983); ‘I quickly developed a pear-shaped figure that testified to my indolent lifestyle. I became the archetypal also-ran that PE masters could barely bring themselves to talk to without risk of life-threatening apoplexy: they abhorred my idleness as Nature abhors a vacuum’ – The Guardian (24 June 1986).

abide with me See CHANGE AND DECAY.

above and beyond (the call of duty) Phrase expressing an outstanding level of service, used in tributes and such like. OED2 has several ‘above and beyonds’ but not this precise one. Above and Beyond was the title of an American TV series of military stories (circa 1996).

Abraham’s bosom Where the dead sleep contentedly. From Luke 16:23: ‘And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom.’ The phrase alludes to Abraham, first of the Hebrew patriarchs. Compare ARTHUR’S BOSOM.

absit omen See GESUNDHEIT.

absolutely, Mister Gallagher! / positively, Mister Shean! Phrases of agreement; roundabout ways of saying ‘yes’, taken from the American vaudevillians (Ed) Gallagher and (Al) Shean whose act flourished in the early part of the 20th century. The exchange was included in a popular song ‘Mr Gallagher and Mister Shean’ (1922) though, in that song, the order of words was ‘positively, Mister Gallagher / absolutely, Mr Shean’. Each syllable of the adverbs is emphasized – e.g. ‘pos-it-ive-ly’, ‘ab-so-lute-ly’.

accidents will occur in the best-regulated families A catchphrase used lightly to cover any domestic upset. The basic proverbial expression, ‘Accidents will happen’ was known by the 1760s; this full version by the 1810s. Best known in the form delivered by Mr Micawber in Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, Chap. 28 (1850): ‘“Copperfield,” said Mr. Micawber, “accidents will occur in the best-regulated families; and in families not regulated by…the influence of Woman, in the lofty character of Wife, they may be expected with confidence, and must be borne with philosophy”.’ Dickens had earlier used the saying in Pickwick Papers (1836–7) and Dombey and Son (1844–6).

(an) accident waiting to happen Hindsight phrase, frequently used in the wake of a disaster. This is the survivors’ and experts’ way of pointing to what, to them, seems the foreseeable and inevitable result of lax safety standards that will now probably be corrected only as a result of the tragedy. Much used in relation to the late 1980s spate of disasters in the UK (Bradford City football ground fire, Zeebrugge ferry overturning, Piper Alpha oil-rig explosion, Kings Cross Tube fire, Hillsborough football stadium crowd deaths). Used as the title of a 1989 book on the subject by Judith Cook. ‘Ignorance and neglect cost 51 lives [in the Marchioness boat disaster]…“You don’t need the benefit of hindsight to say this was an accident waiting to happen,” he said’ – Today (16 August 1991).

according to Cocker By strict calculation, exactly. Edward Cocker (1631–75) was an arithmetician who is believed to have written down the rules of arithmetic in a popular guide.

according to Hoyle Exactly; correctly; according to the recognized rules; according to the highest authority. The phrase comes from the name of the, at one time, standard authority on the game of whist (and other card games). Edmond Hoyle was the author of A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist (1742). ‘If everything goes according to Hoyle, I’ll go into semiretirement there’ – Melody Maker (21 August 1971).

(an) ace in the hole A hidden advantage or secret source of power. An American phrase used as the title of a Cole Porter song in the show Let’s Face It (1941), of a Billy Wilder film (US 1951) and of an Annie Proulx novel, That Old Ace In the Hole (2002). It came originally from the game of stud poker. A ‘hole’ card is one that is not revealed until the betting has taken place. If it is an ace, so much the better. DOAS dates the use of the expression, in a poker context, to the 1920s, OED2 to 1915. In British English, the nearest equivalent would be to talk of having an ace up one’s sleeve. ‘In the long haul…AM’s ace in the hole may be the $213 million net operating loss carryforward it still has left from its 1981–2 losses’ – The New York Times (6 May 1984).

(an) Achilles’ heel The vulnerable point of any person or thing. Referring to Achilles, the foremost warrior in the Trojan war, who sulked in his tent, was hero of the Iliad and was vulnerable only at the heel (in allusion to the story of the dipping of Achilles’ heel in the river Styx). ‘Divorce is the Achilles’ heel of marriage’ – Bernard Shaw, letter (2 July 1897). It was cited as a ‘dying metaphor’ by George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’ in Horizon (April 1946). ‘If Oppenheimer has an “Achilles” heel, it is his overriding loyalty to his friends’ – Arthur Holly Compton, Atomic Quest (1956); ‘It is the refusal to condemn which is the Achilles heel of contemporary Christian psychology’ – Catholic Herald (28 January 1972).

(an) acid test A crucial test. Originally an ‘acid test’ involved the use of aqua fortis to test for gold. Cited as a ‘lump of verbal refuse’ by George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’ in Horizon (April 1946). ‘The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will’ – President Woodrow Wilson, quoted in The Times (9 January 1918); ‘The acid test of any political decision is, “What is the alternative?“’ – Lord Trend, quoted in The Observer (21 December 1975); ‘Let’s get South Africa working. For we must together and without delay begin to build a better life for all South Africans. This is going to be the acid test of the government of national unity’ – Nelson Mandela, quoted in Financial Times (3 May 1994); ‘If the same weight is not given to the improvement of human capital as to market share, profit and other organisational priorities, small wonder the human resources function is often viewed as unrelated to the “real” goals of the company. The acid test here is: do the job descriptions of all staff (board of directors, executive, administration) include meaningful percentages of weights and time spent in subordinate development with examples of what this means in practice?’ – Financial Times (6 May 1994).

(an) action man A person who is given more to action than to thought, named after a boy’s doll that could be dressed in various military-type costumes with appropriate accoutrements. Prior to his marriage in 1981, Charles, Prince of Wales, was noted for his enthusiastic sporting activities in many fields. Coupled with his active service in the Royal Navy, such expenditure of energy caused him to be accorded this nickname. A report of a General Medical Council disciplinary inquiry in The Independent (29 March 1990) stated: ‘He told the hearing: “Mr Bewick is an Action Man, not a philosopher. Action Man’s advantage is that at the drop of a hat, he can go anywhere and do anything”.’

action this day Instruction phrase, for office use. ‘ACTION THIS DAY’, ‘REPORT IN THREE DAYS’ and ‘REPORT PROGRESS IN ONE WEEK’ were printed tags that Winston Churchill started using in February 1940 to glue on to memos at the Admiralty. Subtitled ‘Working with Churchill’, the book Action This Day (1968) is a collection of the reminiscences of those who had been closely associated with Churchill during the Second World War. ‘She [Margaret Thatcher] had the draft of that circular on her desk that night. She said “Action this day” and she got it. We didn’t stop to argue’ – Hugo Young, One of Us, Chap. 6 (1989).

(an) actor laddie An actor with the booming voice and declamatory manner of the Victorian and Edwardian stage. The expression presumably derives from the habit of adding the somewhat patronizing endearment ‘laddie’ when talking to junior members of their companies. The playwright Ronald Harwood singled out Frank G. Carillo as an example of the breed, from the early 1900s: ‘[He] intoned rather than talked, in a deep, trembling voice ideally suited to melodrama and he used it with equal fortissimo both on and off the stage.’ Sir Donald Wolfit, himself somewhat prone to this manner, described Carillo as one of the few actors he had actually heard use the word ‘laddie’.

actress See AS THE BISHOP.

act your age (also be your age)! Grow up, behave in a manner more befitting your years. Probably from the US and in use by the 1920s. An elaboration heard in the UK (1985) – act your age, not your shoe size (normal shoe sizes in the UK are in the range 4–12).

Adam’s rib The film Adam’s Rib (US 1949) is about husband and wife lawyers opposing each other in court and stars Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. It is also the title of a 1923 Cecil B. de Mille film about marriage, with biblical flashbacks. The phrase alludes to Genesis 2:21–2, which states that God made woman from one of Adam’s ribs. Compare SPARE RIB.

adjust See DO NOT.

(an) admirable Crichton A resourceful servant. Also applied – broadly – to anyone of intellectual accomplishment. The Admirable Crichton has been the title of a novel by Harrison Ainsworth (1837) and of J. M. Barrie’s play (1902; films UK 1918, 1957), the latter about a butler who succours his shipwrecked aristocratic employer on a desert island. The term had originally been applied to James Crichton (1560–85), Scottish traveller and scholar, by Sir Thomas Urquhart in The Jewel (1652).

adopt, adapt, improve Motto of the National Association of Round Tables of Great Britain and Ireland, from 1927 onwards. The Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) had said in a speech at the British Industries Fair in Birmingham (1927): ‘The young business and professional men of this country must get together round the table, adopt methods that have proved sound in the past, adapt them to the changing needs of the times and, whenever possible, improve them.’ The Round Table movement is a social and charitable organization for young professional and business men under the age of forty (after which age Rotary takes over).

adrift See CAST ADRIFT.

advance Australia Motto of the Commonwealth of Australia when the states united in 1901. In the 1970s and 1980s, as republicanism grew, it acquired the force of a slogan and was used in various campaigns to promote national pride (sometimes as ‘Let’s Advance Australia’). In 1984, ‘Advance Australia Fair’, slightly adapted, superseded ‘God Save the Queen’ as the country’s national anthem. This song, by Peter Dodds McCormick, had first been performed in Sydney in 1878, though the alliterative slogan ‘Advance Australia’ apparently existed earlier when Michael Massey Robinson wrote in the Sydney Gazette (1 February 1826): ‘“Advance Then, Australia”, / Be this thy proud gala /…And thy watch-word be “Freedom, For Ever!”’

advise and consent The title of Allen Drury’s novel about Washington politics Advise and Consent (1959; film US 1962) (not ‘advice’) is taken from US Senate Rule 38: ‘The final question on every nomination shall be, “Will the Senate advise and consent to this nomination?”’ In the US Constitution (Art. II, Sect. 2), dealing with the Senate’s powers as a check on the President’s appointive and treaty-making powers, the phrase includes the noun rather than the verb, ‘Advice and consent’. Originally, George Washington as President went in person to the Senate Chamber (22 August 1789) to receive ‘advice and consent’ about treaty provisions with the Creek Indians. Vice-President Adams used the words, ‘Do you advise and consent?’ Subsequent administrations have sent written requests.

(the) affluent society Label applied to Western society in the mid-20th century. John Kenneth Galbraith’s book The Affluent Society (1958) is about the effect of high living standards on economic theories that had been created to deal with scarcity and poverty. The resulting ‘private affluence and public squalor’ stemmed from an imbalance between private and public sector output. For example, there might be more cars and TV sets but not enough police to prevent them from being stolen. The Revd Dr Martin Luther King Jnr, in a 1963 letter from gaol, used the phrase thus: ‘When you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smouldering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society…then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.’ The notion was not new to the mid-20th century. Tacitus, in his Annals (circa AD 115) noted that ‘many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable’ and Cato the Younger (95–46 BC), when denouncing the contemporary state of Rome said: ‘Habemus publice egestatem, privatim opulentiam [public want, private wealth].’ The punning tag of the effluent society, a commonplace by the 1980s, had appeared in Stan Gooch’s poem ‘Never So Good’ in 1964, and indeed before that.

after I’ve shampooed my hair, I can’t do a thing with it (or I washed my hair last night – and now…)! Commonplace excuse for one’s less than good appearance and a domestic conversational cliché. In Are You a Bromide? (1907), the American writer Gelett Burgess castigated people who spoke in what he called ‘Bromidioms’, like this one. The second part is sometimes given as a chorused response as though anticipating the cliché involved.

after the Lord Mayor’s show comes the shit-cart A reference to the anti-climactic appearance of a dust-cart and operative to clean up the horse manure that is left behind after the Lord Mayor’s annual show (really a procession) in the City of London. Partridge/Catch Phrases suggests that it is a late 19th century Cockney observation and one that could be applied to other from-the-sublime-to-the-ridiculous situations.

after you, Claude! / no, after you, Cecil! Catchphrase exchange spoken by Horace Percival and Jack Train playing two over-polite handymen, Cecil and Claude, in the BBC radio show ITMA (1939–49). It still survives in pockets as an admirable way of overcoming social awkwardness in such matters as deciding who should go first through a door. In the early 1900s, the American cartoonist Fred Opper created a pair of excessively polite Frenchmen called Alphonse and Gaston who had the similar exchange: ‘You first, my dear Alphonse’ – ‘No, no, you first, my dear Gaston.’

afternoon men Drunkards (‘afternoon’, presumably because they have imbibed a liquid lunch). ‘As if they had heard that enchanted horn of Astolpho, that English duke in Ariosto, which never sounded but all his auditors were mad, and for fear ready to make away [with] themselves…They are a company of giddy-heads, afternoon men.’ This is the final part of the quotation given by Anthony Powell as the epigraph to his novel Afternoon Men (1931). He gives the source as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The only other use found of the term ‘afternoon men’ is from the same work. In the introductory ‘Democritus to the Reader’, Burton has: ‘Beroaldus will have drunkards, afternoon men, and such as more than ordinarily delight in drink, to be mad.’

age See ACT YOUR.

age before beauty! A phrase used (like AFTER YOU…) when inviting another person to go through a door before you. In the famous story, Clare Boothe Luce said it to Dorothy Parker, ushering her ahead. Parker assented, saying, ‘Pearls before swine.’ Mrs Luce described this account as completely apocryphal in answer to a question from John Keats, Parker’s biographer, for his book You Might as Well Live (1970). The saying presumably originated when people first started worrying about the etiquette of going through doors. It does not occur in Jonathan Swift’s Polite Conversation (1738), as one might have expected. A variant reported from New Zealand (1987) is dirt before the broom, though Partridge/Catch Phrases has this as the response to ‘Age before beauty’ (which it describes as a ‘mock courtesy’). Other versions are dust before the broom (recorded in Dublin, 1948) and the dog follows its master. Whichever phrase is used, it usually precipitates a response. An exchange between two boozy buffoons at a pub door in Posy Simmonds’s cartoon strip in The Guardian (19 May 1985) included these phrases: ‘“Certainly! Dogs follow their master!” “Dirt before the broom!” “Shepherd before sheep!” “Shit before shovel!”’ Another phrase to offer in reply is: grace before meat!

(the) age of anxiety Label for the mid-20th century. It was the title of a long poem by W. H. Auden, written 1944–6 – an expression of loneliness in the midcentury. It was the inspiration of Leonard Bernstein’s second symphony (1947–9), which became known as ‘The Age of Anxiety’, and was used as the score for a ballet (US 1950), also with the title.

(the) age of Aquarius The astrological age, lasting two thousand years, which was said to be beginning in the 1960s (following the Piscean Age). ‘This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,’ sang the cast of the ‘American tribal love-rock musical’ Hair (1968), in what was to become something of a hippy anthem. This new age held forth the promise of more liberal values, world freedom and brotherhood, as well as promoting general optimism.

(the) age of innocence The Age of Innocence was the title of a novel published in 1920 by the American writer Edith Wharton. In it, she looked back on the New York of her youth and told the story of a love affair frustrated by the morals of the time. Presumably, the description ‘age of innocence’ is ironically applied to this earlier period.

(an) age of kings An Age of Kings was the title of a fifteen-part fortnightly BBC TV serialization of Shakespeare’s history plays from Richard II to Richard III, transmitted live in 1960. The phrase does not appear to have been used before. TV parodist Alan Melville came up with a version entitled ‘An Eternity of Kings’.

(the) age of miracles is past As with (the) age of chivalry is past, this proverb is now used more often in the ironic negative, i.e. when saying ‘the age of miracles is not past’ or ‘the age of chivalry is not dead’ out of feigned gratitude for a stroke of good fortune or an unexpected courtesy. In its original positive form, ‘miracles’ was current by 1602. ‘The age of chivalry is gone’ occurs in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In about 1900, Oscar Wilde wrote in a letter: ‘[Frank Harris] keeps Bosie in order: clearly the age of miracles is not over.’ In Ira Gershwin’s lyric for the song ‘A Foggy Day (in London Town)’ (1937) are the lines: ‘I viewed the morning with alarm. / The British Museum had lost its charm. / How long, I wondered, could this thing last? / But the age of miracles hadn’t passed.’

(the) age of reason Label for the 18th century as a period when philosophy was a predominant force in Europe – hence also the name age of enlightenment. The Age of Reason was the title of Thomas Paine’s book (1793), an attack on Christianity and the Bible. English-born Paine went to America and encouraged the fight for independence.

(the) age of uncertainty Label for the second half of the 20th century. The Age of Uncertainty was the title given by J.K. Galbraith to his 1976 TV series (and accompanying book) on ‘the rise and crisis in industrial society seen in the light of economic factors’. It contrasted the great certainties in economic thought of the 19th century with the uncertainties of the second half of the 20th.

à go-go PHRASES Meaning, ‘in abundance’, ‘no end of’. Known by 1965. Possibly derived from ‘Whisky à go-go’ – a name given to night clubs all over France since the 1960s. Curiously, these take the name from the French title of the film Whisky Galore (UK 1948) – source Philip Kemp, Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick (1991). ‘This is really nothing but Leninism à go-go!’ – The New York Times (24 September 1966).

—agonistes PHRASES The title of John Milton’s poem Samson Agonistes (1671) refers to the biblical Samson coupled with the Greek word for ‘champion/combatant’. T. S. Eliot used the format for his own poetic drama Sweeney Agonistes (1932), where the proletarian hero is called Sweeney.

(an) agonizing reappraisal A process of reconsideration in politics, possibly before a decision is taken to make a U-turn. The reassessment of position has usually been forced on the reappraiser. The modern use stems from a speech that John Foster Dulles, US Secretary of State, made to the National Press Club, Washington DC, in December 1953: ‘When I was in Paris last week, I said that…the United States would have to undertake an agonizing reappraisal of basic foreign policy in relation to Europe.’ Further examples: ‘As in response to new directions from an agonising reappraisal in MCC’s room at lunch, the scoring spurted as Cowdrey twice swung Benaud to the leg fence’ – Star (9 December 1958); ‘The nation’s rogue elephants rampage, shattering complacency and compelling many to an agonizing reappraisal’ – Kenneth Gregory, The First Cuckoo (1978); ‘He forecast a period of agonizing reappraisal for Nato. The flexible response strategy was now clearly untenable for many reasons, so a new approach would be essential’ – The Times (27 June 1987).

(the) agony and the ecstasy Phrase for the supposed turmoil of artistic expression – a colourful coinage, now used only in mockery. The Agony and the Ecstasy is the title of a novel (1961; film US 1965) by Irving Stone, about Michelangelo and the painting of the Sistine Chapel. Compare what the novelist William Faulkner said in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature (10 December 1950): ‘[Whatever was] worth the agony and the sweat [was worth writing about].’

(an) agony aunt One who answers questions about personal problems posed by readers of a newspaper or magazine. Hence the term agony column, originally applied to what would now be called a ‘personal column’ in newspapers, containing messages for missing relatives (by the 1860s). From the 1930s onwards, the name has been given to the space in which ‘advice’ journalism appears. Neither phrase was in wide use until the 1970s, and neither is much used outside Britain. Sob sister is a similar term for one who allows readers to weep on his or her shoulder. Although the name may be of American invention, such an adviser has long been known in British women’s magazines, the subjects formerly being household management, etiquette and bringing up the family. Such columnists proliferated after the Second World War and some achieved eminence for sympathetic advice and information. See also MISS LONELYHEARTS.

aha, me proud beauty (I’ve got you where I want you)! A phrase suggestive of 19th-century melodramas or, at least, parodies of their style. Dryden has the phrase ‘proud beauty’ in Oedipus (1679).

ahh, Bisto! Advertising line for Bisto gravy browning, which has been promoted with this cry in the UK since 1919. The name ‘Bisto’ is a hidden slogan, too. When the Cerebos company first put it on the market in 1910, the product did not have a name. According to legend, the initial letters of the proposed slogan ‘Browns, Seasons, Thickens In One’ were rearranged to produce ‘BISTO’. The Bisto Kids, drawn by Will Owen, first appeared in 1919, sniffing a wisp of gravy aroma and murmuring, ‘Ahh Bisto!’ This is a phrase much played on in political cartoon captions over the years – ‘Ah, Blitzo!’; ‘Ah, Bizerta!’; ‘Ah, Crippso!’; ‘Ah! Winston!’; ‘Ah! Coupon free!’, and so on.

ah,Woodbine – a great little cigarette! A slogan current in 1957. Norman Hackforth – the Mystery Voice from BBC radio’s Twenty Questions – spoke the line memorably in TV ads.

—Aid PHRASES In the mid-1980s, it became fashionable to give names with the suffix ‘—aid’ to charitable fundraising events. This stemmed from the first such event – the recording of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, performed in 1984 by an ad hoc group of pop singers and musicians called Band Aid, in punning allusion to the Band-Aid brand of medical dressing. This record, successfully drawing attention to those suffering in the Ethiopian civil war and famine, prepared the way for the notable foundation of the Live Aid rock concert of July 1985. Similar, though in some cases much smaller-scale, events followed, including Sport Aid (sponsored athletes), Mandarin Aid (civil servants), School Aid (children), Fashion Aid, Academy Aid (painters), Sheep Aid (agricultural events in Yorkshire) and Deaf Aid (no, only joking).

ain’t it a shame, eh? ain’t it a shame? Catchphrase spoken by Carleton Hobbs as a nameless man who told banal tales (‘I waited for hours in the fish queue…and a man took my plaice’), in the BBC radio show ITMA (1939–49). He always prefaced and concluded his remarks with, ‘Ain’t it a shame?’

ain’t it grand to be bloomin’ well dead? Title line of a song (1932) by Leslie Sarony, the British entertainer and writer (1897–1985).

aisle See GO UP THE.

Ajax defying the lightning Phrase for a particular artistic pose in 19th-century sculpture or painting. From Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Chap. 18 (1853): ‘Well!’ said Mr Boythorn…I am looked upon about here, as a second Ajax defying the lightning. Ha ha ha ha!’ From Oscar Wilde’s New York lecture ‘The English Renaissance of Art’ (9 January 1882): ‘The English [artists’] models form a class entirely by themselves. They are not so picturesque as the Italian, nor so clever as the French, and they have absolutely no tradition, so to speak, of their order. Now and then some old veteran knocks at the studio door, and proposes to sit as Ajax defying the lightning, or as King Lear upon the blasted heath.’ The Ajax referred to in this is not the warrior of the siege of Troy but Ajax the Lesser who was at the siege nevertheless and raped Priam’s daughter Cassandra after dragging her from a statue of Athena. This so annoyed the goddess that she shipwrecked Ajax on his way home. He clung to a rock, defied the goddess, not to mention the lightning, and was eventually washed off and drowned by Neptune. So, how and when did the allusion turn into a phrase? In the description of Ajax’s death in Homer’s Odyssey, the lightning incident is not mentioned. So is it from a later re-telling? Virgil’s Aeneid (Bk 1, line 42-) does show him being dealt with by Zeus’s bolts. Earlier, the matter was mentioned, though less specifically, by Euripides in his Trojan Women and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Bk 14; translated by Dryden, Pope and others). There are a number of representations in art of Ajax the Lesser going about his rapes and so on, but the search is still on for the lightning-defying pose. Was there a particular painting or a sculpture of the event that so fixed the defiant image that it was readily evoked thereafter?

alarums and excursions (sometimes alarms…) Confused noise and activity after the varying use of the phrase in the stage directions of Shakespeare’s history plays, notably Henry VI, Part 3 and Richard III, especially during battle scenes. ‘Alarum’ is a form of ‘alarm’ (meaning a call to arms) and an ‘excursion’ is a sally against the enemy. Now used about any sort of confused situation. ‘I was a happy child, skipping through the fifties, a time of calm and convention for the middle classes, with parents thankful for routine and certainty after the alarms and excursions of war’ – Kate Adie, The Kindness of Strangers, Chap. 2 (2002).

(The) Albany Whether this is a phrase or not rests on one’s response to a supposed solecism: is it correct to use the ‘The’ or not to use the ‘The’ when talking about Albany, a grand apartment block in Piccadilly, London? Oscar Wilde uses the full phrase ‘The Albany’ no fewer than three times in The Importance of Earnest (1895). He also used it earlier in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chap. 3 (1890). The earliest use so far found of the ‘the’ being apparently correct usage is in the title of a novel by Marmion Savage, The Bachelor of the Albany (1848). Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington, Chap. 43 (1864), has: ‘Plantagenet Palliser…felt, as he sat in his chambers in the Albany, that something else was wanting to his happiness.’ Charles Dickens describes the character ‘Fascination’ Fledgeby as living there in Our Mutual Friend, Pt 2, Chap. 5 (1865): ‘He lived in chambers in the Albany, did Fledgeby, and maintained a spruce appearance’. A resident’s letterhead dating from 1888 is shown in Harry Furniss, Paradise in Piccadilly: the Story of Albany, but the title of that book (published in 1925) is – so far – the earliest example found of the ‘the’ being deliberately excluded. Later, Terence Rattigan (who lived in the chambers for a while) gave this description of the setting for Act 1 of his play While the Sun Shines (1943): ‘The sitting-room of Lord Harpenden’s chambers in Albany, London.’ So what was it that happened between 1898 and 1925 to give rise to the change? Indeed, what is one to make of the whole question? Perhaps H. Montgomery Hyde has the simplest explanation in The Annotated Oscar Wilde (1982): ‘The Albany refers to the exclusive apartments off Piccadilly, very popular with bachelors, that had been converted in the early nineteenth century from the Duke of York and Albany’s large private house. About the turn of the century it became the custom to allude to it as “Albany” instead of “the” Albany, probably because the latter sounded like a club or pub.’

Alexander weeping for want of worlds to conquer The allusion is, undoubtedly, to Plutarch’s wonderful vignette of Alexander the Great to be found in ‘Of the Tranquillity of the Mind’: ‘So reason makes all sorts of life easy, and every change pleasant. Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there was an infinite number of worlds, and his friends asking him if any accident had befallen him, he returns this answer: Do not you think it is a matter worthy of lamentation, that, when there is such a vast multitude of them, we have not yet conquered one? But Crates with only his scrip and tattered cloak laughed out his life jocosely, as if he had been always at a festival.’ So it was not so much that Alexander wept because he had run out of worlds to conquer but because he felt that he had not even managed to conquer this one.

(an) Alice-blue gown The colour of the garment, a light-greenish blue, takes its name from a particular Alice – daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt. The song ‘Alice-blue Gown’ was written for her by Joseph McCarthy and Harry Tierney in 1900, when she was sixteen, though apparently it was not published until 1919. In the late 1930s, there was another (British) song, called ‘The Girl in the Aliceblue Gown’.

Alice in Wonderland Quoted from almost as extensively as Shakespeare and the Bible, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1872), both by Lewis Carroll, are alluded to for their particular characters and incidents and as a whole, to denote a mad, fantastic world. From Chips: the Diaries of Sir Henry Channon, entry for 30 July 1940 (1967): ‘The big FO debate began with an absurd Alice in Wonderland wrangle about procedure which lasted from 3.45 until 5.30…in war time! it was ludicrous in the extreme.’

(is) alive and well and living in—This format phrase probably began in a perfectly natural way – ‘What’s happened to old so-and-so?’ ‘Oh, he’s still alive and well and living in Godalming’ etc. In the preface to His Last Bow (1917), Conan Doyle wrote: ‘The Friends of Mr Sherlock Holmes will be glad to learn that he is still alive and well…’ The extended form was given a tremendous fillip when the Belgian-born songwriter and singer Jacques Brel (1929–78) became the subject of an off-Broadway musical show entitled Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris (1968–72). Quite why M. Brel should have merited this WHERE ARE THEY NOW? treatment is not too apparent, but the format caught on. The Listener (3 October 1968), quoting the Daily Mail, stated: ‘The Goon Show is not dead. It is alive and well, living in Yorkshire and operating under the name of BBC Radio Leeds.’ The format had earlier probably been used in religious sloganeering, possibly prompted by Time Magazine’s famous cover (circa 1966), ‘IS GOD DEAD?’ The New Statesman (26 August 1966) quoted a graffito, ‘God is alive and living in Argentina’. This suggests that the formula might have been used originally in connection with Nazi war criminals who had escaped prosecution and lived unharmed in South America. Other graffiti have included: ‘God is not Dead – but Alive and Well and working on a Much Less Ambitious Project’ – quoted in The Guardian (27 November 1975); ‘Jesus Christ is alive and well and signing copies of the Bible at Foyles’ (quoted in 1980). In a letter to The Independent Magazine (13 March 1993), M. H. I. Wright wrote: ‘When I was a medical student and young house physician 50 years ago, we had to write very detailed case-sheets on every patient admitted. Under the heading “Family History”, we detailed each member of his family – for example, “Father, died of heart diseases in 1935; Mother, alive and well and living in London.” One pedantic consultant insisted we drop the word “alive” because, as he said, how could the relative be “dead and well”?’ On the other hand, a US film in 1975 was burdened with the title Sheila Devine Is Dead and Living in New York. ‘The last English eccentric is alive and well and living comfortably in Oakland’ – Time Magazine (5 September 1977); ‘The golden age detective story is alive and well’ – review in The Times of Ruth Rendell’s Put On By Cunning (1981); ‘Socialism is alive and well and living in Moscow’ –headline in The Independent (25 June 1990).

all aboard the Skylark See ANY MORE FOR THE SKYLARK.

all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others A fictional slogan from George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), his commentary on the totalitarian excesses of Communism. It had been anticipated: Hesketh Pearson recalled in his biography of the actor/manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1956) that Tree wished to insert one of his own epigrams in a play by Stephen Phillips called Nero, produced in 1906. It was: ‘All men are equal – except myself.’ In Noël Coward’s This Year of Grace (1928), there is this exchange – Pellet: ‘Men are all alike.’ Wendle: ‘Only some more than others.’ The saying alludes, of course, to Thomas Jefferson’s ‘All men are created equal and independent’, from the Preamble to the American Declaration of Independence (1776). It has, perhaps, the makings of a format phrase in that it is more likely to be used to refer to humans than to animals. Only the second half of the phrase need actually be spoken, the first half being understood: ‘You-Know-Who [Mrs Thatcher] is against the idea [televising parliament]. There aren’t card votes at Westminster, but some votes are more equal than others’ – The Guardian (15 February 1989).

all balls and bang me arse! Sheer nonsense. An intensifier of the basic all balls! British use, probably since the 1910s.

(I’m) all behind like the cow’s tail What people say when they are behind with their tasks. The expression ‘all behind like a cow’s tail’ has also been used to describe a person who is always last or is of a daydreaming disposition. ‘C. H. Rolph’ wrote in London Particulars (1980): ‘Grandma Hewitt [his grandmother] was a walking repository, rather than a dictionary, of clichés and catchphrases; and I have often wished she could have been known to Mr Eric Partridge during the compilation of his delectable dictionaries. Both she and I…could pre-date many of [his] attributions. Here are four examples…all of which were common currency in my Edwardian childhood: “Just what the doctor ordered”, “Are you kidding?”, “Cheats never prosper”, and “All behind like a cow’s tail”.’ There is also, of course, the expression ‘All behind like Barney’s bull’.

all bitter and twisted Said about someone who is psychologically mixed-up and shows it. Sometimes made light of in the form ‘all twitter and bisted’. Since the 1940s, at least.

all contributions gratefully received As with please give generously/all you can, this is a standard phrase from charitable appeals for money. But it is also used jokingly when accepting gifts of almost anything – another helping of food, even a sexual favour. Probably since the first half of the 20th century.

—, all day! A response to the question ‘What day is it?’ or ‘What’s the date?’ For example, ‘Tuesday/the 13th…all day!’ In use since the late 19th century.

(it’s) all done and dusted Meaning, ‘that task has been completed’. Heard in a Yorkshire hotel in 1996, but much older.

(it’s) all done with mirrors Used as a way of describing how anything has been accomplished when the method is not obvious. Originally, a way of explaining how conjuring tricks and stage illusions were performed when some, indeed, were done using mirrors – but without going into detail. Admiration, but also a suspicion of trickery, is implicit in the phrase. Noël Coward uses it in Private Lives (1930); They Do It With Mirrors is the title of an Agatha Christie thriller (1952). Compare SMOKE AND MIRRORS.

all dressed up and nowhere to go A phrase used to describe forlorn indecision comes (slightly altered) from a song popularized by the American comedian Raymond Hitchcock in The Beauty Shop (New York 1914) and Mr Manhattan (London 1915): ‘When you’re all dressed up and no place to go, / Life seems dreary, weary and slow.’ The words gained further emphasis when they were used by William Allen White to describe the Progressive Party following Theodore Roosevelt’s decision to retire from presidential competition in 1916. He said it was: ‘All dressed up with nowhere to go.’ The OED2 has the phrase starting life in a song by ‘G. Whiting’ (1912), ‘When You’re All Dressed Up and Have No Place to Go’. But Lowe’s Directory of Popular Music ascribes the song to Silvio Hein and Benjamin Burt.

all dressed up like a Christmas tree Gaudily attired – not a compliment. Since the late 19th century.

all dressed up like a pox-doctor’s clerk Flashily attired – not a compliment. Since the late 19th century. Presumably the implication is that a pox-doctor’s clerk would have plenty of money and that he would not spend it on tasteful clothing.

allegedly A single word slipped into libellous or slanderous statements to defuse them on the BBC TV topical quiz, Have I Got News For You (1990– ). Principally employed by the original host, Angus Deayton. The approach had much earlier been used by David Frost on BBC TV, That Was The Week That Was (1962–4).

alley See I WOULDN’T LIKE TO MEET.

all for one and one for all [tous pour un, un pour tous] The motto of the Three Musketeers in the novel Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844–5) by Alexandre Dumas. It had appeared earlier in Shakespeare’s Lucrece, lines 141–4 (1594), as: ‘The aim of all is but to nurse the life / With honour, wealth and ease, in waning age; / And in this aim there is much thwarting strife / That one for all, or all for one we gage [= pledge].’ Dumas apparently derived the motto from a form of words he recorded in an account of a journey to Switzerland (1833). In the Berne Parliament, the pledge given by representatives of the regions who formed the basis of the Swiss federation in AD 1291 is rendered as ‘Einer für alle, alle für einen.’ Compare ‘Each for all and all for each’ – Co-Operative Wholesale Society (UK, 20th century).

all fur coat and no knickers Given to show and having no modesty; poverty concealed in an effort to keep up appearances; elegant on the outside but sleazy underneath, when describing a certain type of woman. Encountered in a Welsh context (1988), it was also the title of play that toured the UK in the same year. A variant (1993), said to come from Lancashire (or, at least, from the North of England), is: ‘Red hat, no knickers’. A similar expression is all kid gloves and no drawers This last was given as an example of colourful Cockney bubble-pricking by the actor Kenneth Williams in Just Williams (1985). He said it was used in his youth (1930s) to denote the meretricious. ‘Silk stockings and no knickers’ is another version.

all gas and gaiters To do with the church, especially the higher clergy. All Gas and Gaiters was the title of a BBC TV comedy series about the clergy (1966–70). The title was taken from Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, Chap. 49 (1838–9): ‘All is gas and gaiters.’ Gaiters (leg coverings below the knee) have been traditionally associated with bishops. ‘Gas’ presumably hints at their accustomed volubility.

all gong and no dinner All talk and no action. What you would say of a loud-mouthed person, somewhat short on achievement. Current by the mid-20th century. Partridge/Slang has a citation from BBC Radio’s The Archers in 1981. Michael Grosvenor Myer, Cambridgeshire (1999), produced a Texan variant: ‘All hat and no cattle.’

all good things must come to an end A proverbial expression meaning ‘pleasure cannot go on for ever’. Spoken at the completion of absolutely any activity that is enjoyable (but usually said with a touch of piety). CODP points out that the addition of the word ‘good’ to this proverb is a recent development. ‘To all things must be an end’ can be traced back to the 15th century. There is a version from 1440, and, as ‘Everything has an end’, the idea appears in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (1385). The Book of Common Prayer version of Psalm 119:96 is: ‘I see that all things come to an end.’

all hands above the bedclothes, girls See HANDS OFF COCKS.

all hands on deck! Everybody help. Obviously of naval origin – but now used in any emergency, serious or slight, domestic or otherwise. Since the 19th century?

all hell broke loose Pandemonium broke out. This descriptive phrase probably derives its popularity from its use in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Bk 4, line 917 (1667), when the Archangel Gabriel speaks to Satan: ‘Wherefore with thee / Came not all hell broke loose.’ But Milton had been anticipated in this by the author of a Puritan pamphlet, Hell Broke Loose: or, a Catalogue of Many of the Spreading Errors, Heresies and Blasphemies of These Times, for Which We are to be Humbled (1646). Also, in Robert Greene’s play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (circa 1589), the character Miles has the line: ‘Master, master, master up! Hell’s broken loose.’ And, as ‘I thinke, hell breake louse’, it occurs in a play called Misogonus (1577). As an idiomatic phrase it was certainly well established by 1738 when Jonathan Swift compiled his Polite Conversation. There is ‘A great Noise below’ and Lady Smart exclaims: ‘Hey, what a clattering is there; one would think Hell was broke loose’.

all human life is there Advertising line used to promote the News of the World newspaper (circa 1958) and taken from Henry James, ‘Madonna of the Future’ (1879): ‘Cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats – all human life is there.’ In 1981, Maurice Smelt, the advertising copywriter, commented: ‘“All human life is there” was my idea, but I don’t, of course, pretend that they were my words. I simply lifted them from The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. I didn’t bother to tell the client that they were from Henry James, suspecting that, after the “Henry James – who he?” stage, he would come up with tiresome arguments about being too high-hat for his readership. I did check whether we were clear on copyright, which we were by a year or two…I do recall its use as baseline in a tiny little campaign trailing a series that earned the News of the World a much-publicized but toothless rebuke from the Press Council. The headline of that campaign was: “‘I’ve been a naughty girl,’ says Diana Dors”. The meiosis worked, as the News of the World knew it would. They ran an extra million copies of the first issue of the series.’

all I know is what I read in the papers I’m just an ordinary guy. From a saying much used by Will Rogers, the American cowboy comedian of the 1920s. For example, from The Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to His President (1927): ‘Dear Mr Coolidge: Well all I know is just what I read in the papers.’

(it’s) all in a lifetime (or all in one’s lifetime). ‘That’s life, IT’S ALL PART OF LIFE’S RICH PAGEANT’ – reflective, philosophical phrase, implying resignation to whatever happens or has happened. Mostly American use? Since 1849. P. G. Wodehouse concludes a letter (23 July 1923) in which he describes how he was knocked down by a car: ‘But, my gosh! doesn’t it just show that we are here today and gone tomorrow!…Oh, well, it’s all in a lifetime!’ Hence, the title of Walter Allen’s novel All In a Lifetime (1959).

(it’s) all in the family A saying with the implication that there’s no need to be over-punctilious or stand on ceremony, or fuss too much about obligations, because nobody outside the family is affected and those who are in the family will understand. For example, ‘it’s okay for me to borrow money or clothing from my sister without asking her first…because it’s all in the family.’ Compare, ‘We are all friends here!’ All In the Family was the title of the American TV version (1971–83) of the BBC’s sitcom Till Death Us Do Part. The respective main characters were Archie Bunker and Alf Garnett, racists and bigots both. The phrase had a double meaning as the show’s title: that Archie’s rants would be mortifying if overheard by anyone outside the family and that such wildly different types of people find themselves related to each other. There is not a trace of the phrase in the OED2. However, there is an 1874 citation, ‘all outside the family, tribe or nation were usually held as enemies’, which may hint at the possible existence of an opposite construction. The phrase occurs in Chap. 25 of James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers (1823): ‘David says, in the Psalms – no, it was Solomon, but it was all in the family – Solomon said, there was a time for all things; and, in my humble opinion, a fishing party is not the moment for discussing important subjects.’ Then there is Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 21 (1851) in which Elijah is trying to warn Ishmael and Queequeg against the Pequod and its captain: ‘“Morning to ye! morning to ye!” he rejoined, again moving off. “Oh! I was going to warn ye against – but never mind, never mind – it’s all one, all in the family too; – sharp frost this morning, ain’t it?”’ From Robert Louis Stevenson, Catriona, Chap. 9 (1893): ‘It was old Lovat that managed the Lady Grange affair; if young Lovat is to handle yours, it’ll be all in the family.’ From Bret Harte, A Ward of Colonel Starbottle’s (1903): ‘“Don’t mind us, Colonel,” said Judge Beeswinger, “it’s all in the family here, you know! And – now I look at the girl – hang it all! she does favor you, old man. Ha! ha!”’ From Jack London, The Sea-Wolf, Chap. 32 (1904): ‘All hands went over the side, and there I was, marooned on my own vessel. It was Death’s turn, and it’s all in the family anyway.’ All these citations – even the Stevenson – confirm a likely American origin for the phrase. It is hardly known elsewhere.

all jam and Jerusalem A popular misconception of the local Women’s Institute groups in the UK is that their members are solely concerned with making jam, flower arranging and singing the Blake/Parry anthem ‘Jerusalem’. This encapsulation is said to date from the 1920s. Simon Goodenough’s history of the movement was called Jam and Jerusalem (1977).

all joints on the table shall/will be carved Table manners instruction, i.e. elbows off the table. Casson/Grenfell (1982) has it – as well as, ‘No uncooked joints on the table, please.’

all mouth and trousers Describing a type of man who is ‘all talk’ rather than sexually active or successful (compare the earlier ‘all prick and breeches’). Since the mid-20th century? Slanguage describes it now as ‘an insulting (non-sexual) catch phrase’. From BBC radio’s Round the Horne (15 May 1966): ‘There he goes, his kilt swinging in the breeze – all mouth music and no trousers.’

all my eye and Betty Martin Meaning, ‘nonsense’. OED2 finds a letter written in 1781 by one ‘S. Crispe’ stating: ‘Physic, to old, crazy Frames like ours, is all my eye and Betty Martin – (a sea phrase that Admiral Jemm frequently makes use of)’. Grose (1785) has ‘That’s my eye betty martin, an answer to any one that attempts to impose or humbug.’ The phrase is used in Punch (11 December 1841). Apperson has ‘Only your eye and Miss Elizabeth Martin’ in 1851. The shorter expressions ‘all my eye’ or ‘my eye’ predate this. As to how it originated, Brewer (1894) has the suggestion (from Joe Miller, 1739) that it was a British sailor’s garbled version of words heard in an Italian church: ‘O, mihi, beate Martine [Oh, grant me, blessed St Martin]’, but this sounds too ingenious and, besides, no prayer is known along those lines. Probably there was a Betty Martin of renown in the 18th century (Partridge/Catch Phrases finds mention of an actress with the name whose favourite expression is supposed to have been ‘My eye!’) and her name was co-opted for popular use. Some people use a ‘Peggy Martin’ version.

all of a doodah In a state of dithering excitement. Known by 1915. From P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, Chap. 14 (1954): ‘A glance was enough to show me that he [Uncle Tom] was all of a doodah.’

all of a tiswas Meaning, ‘confused, in a state’. Known by 1960. This might be from an elaboration of ‘tizz’ or ‘tizzy’ and there may be a hint of ‘dizziness’ trying to get in. But no one really knows. The acronym of ‘Today Is Saturday, Wear A Smile’ seems not to have anything to do with the meaning of the word and to have been imposed later. The acronym-slogan was the apparent reason for the title Tiswas being given to a children’s TV show (UK 1974–82), famous for its buckets-of-water-throwing and general air of mayhem. Broadcast on Saturday mornings, its atmosphere was certainly noisy and confused.

all one’s Christmasses have come at once When one has benefited from lots of luck or been snowed under with gifts. Since the second half of the 20th century?

(to say that) all one’s geese are swans Meaning, ‘to exaggerate or overestimate the worth of one’s children/pupils/anyone dear to one – and to see them in an especially rosy light.’ Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, ‘Democritus to the Reader’ (1621), has ‘All his Geese are swannes’. The actor David Garrick wrote to the Duke of Devonshire about a visit to Milan (1763) and the warmth of his reception by the Governor of Lombardy: ‘You would think, as You Us’d to say to me, that all my Geese were Swans…there was no Civility that I did not receive from him.’ Horace Walpole wrote of Sir Joshua Reynolds (in a letter of 1786): ‘All his own geese are swans, as the swans of others are geese.’

all our yesterdays From Macbeth’s speech in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, V.v.22 (1606): ‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, / To the last syllable of recorded time; / And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! / Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/ And then is heard no more: it is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.’ This speech has proved a rich source of title phrases. Tomorrow and Tomorrow was a film (US 1932); All Our Yesterdays was the title of Granada TV’s programme (1960–73) devoted to old newsreels and of the actor Edward G. Robinson’s memoirs (1974); The Way to Dusty Death was the title of a 1973 novel by Alastair Maclean; Brief Candles was the title of a collection of short stories (1930) by Aldous Huxley; Told By an Idiot was a 1923 novel by Rose Macaulay; ‘full of sound and fury’ is echoed in the title of William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and The Fury (1929).

all over bar the shouting Almost completely over, finished or decided, except for any talking and argument that will not alter the outcome. Said of a contest or event. Of sporting origin, with the shouting, say, the appeal against a referee’s decision in boxing. Known since 1842 (in the form ‘…but the shouting’). Groucho Marx says ‘All over but the shooting’ in The Cocoanuts (US 1929). A Cole Porter song (1937) has the title ‘It’s All Over But the Shouting’. ‘But if the Rhodesia affair is all over bar the shouting, can the same be said about South Africa?’ – Western Morning News (25 September 1976); ‘“He seems to be giving the impression the pay round is all over bar the shouting. He couldn’t be more wrong,” she said’ – The Times (15 May 1995).

all over by Christmas See BY CHRISTMAS.

all over the place like a mad woman’s underclothes In her book Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989), the writer Germaine Greer recalls that, when she was growing up in Australia in the 1940s, this was her mother’s phrase to describe an untidy room. In consequence, Greer used The Madwoman’s Underclothes as the title of a collection of her assorted writings (1986). Partridge/Slang does not find this precise expression but in discussing the phrase ‘all over the place like a mad woman’s shit’ points to the euphemistic variants cited by G.A. Wilkes in A Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms (1978): ‘…like a mad woman’s knitting…custard…lunch box.’ So, Australian it seems to be.

all passion spent ‘And calm of mind, all passion spent’ – line 1758 (the last line) of Milton’s dramatic poem Samson Agonistes (1671). Hence, All Passion Spent, the title of a novel (1931) by Vita Sackville-West (a study of ageing and independence in old age). ‘The story of it belongs to a later and final book still to be written: of our hero, ambition laid aside, all passion spent, learning to accept defeat, growing old gracefully’ – Arthur Bryant, Samuel Pepys: The Saviour of the Navy, Preface (1949 edn).

all piss and wind Empty, vacuous – of a man prone to bombast and no achievement, apparently derived from the earlier saying ‘All wind and piss like a barber’s cat’, known by 1800.

all publicity is good publicity A modern proverb dating from at least the 1960s, but probably as old as the public relations industry. Alternative forms include: there’s no such thing as bad publicity; there’s no such thing as over-exposure – only bad exposure; don’t read it – measure it; and I don’t care what the papers say about me as long as they spell my name right. The latter saying has been attributed to the American Tammany leader ‘Big Tim’ Sullivan. CODP includes it in the form ‘Any publicity is good publicity’ and finds no example before 1974. In Dominic Behan’s My Brother Brendan (1965), however, the Irish playwright is quoted as saying, ‘There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.’ James Agate in Ego 7 (for 19 February 1944) quotes Arnold Bennett as having said, ‘All praise is good,’ and adds: ‘I suppose the same could be said about publicity.’

all quiet on the Western Front A familiar phrase from military communiqués and newspaper reports on the Allied side in the First World War. Also taken up jocularly by men in the trenches to describe peaceful inactivity. It was used as the title of the English translation of the novel Im Westen nichts Neues [From the Western Front – Nothing to Report] (1929; film US 1930) by the German writer Erich Maria Remarque. The title is ironic – a whole generation was being destroyed while newspapers reported that there was ‘no news in the west’. Partridge/Catch Phrases hears in it echoes of ‘All quiet on the Shipka Pass’ – cartoons of the 1877–8 Russo-Turkish War that Partridge says had a vogue in 1915–6, though he never heard the allusion made himself. For no very good reason, Partridge rules out any connection with the American song ‘All Quiet Along the Potomac’. This, in turn, came from a poem called ‘The Picket Guard’ (1861) by Ethel Lynn Beers, a sarcastic commentary on General Brinton McClellan’s policy of delay at the start of the Civil War. The phrase (alluding to the Potomac River which runs through Washington DC) had been used in reports from McLellan’s Union headquarters and put in Northern newspaper headlines. All quiet along the Potomac continues to have some use as a portentous way of saying that nothing is happening.

all right for some! Meaning, ‘some people have all the luck!’ – a good-humoured expression of envy. ‘I’m just off to the West Indies for an all-expenses paid holiday’ – ‘All right for some!’ From the mid-20th century.

all roads lead to Rome Whatever route you follow (especially in thinking), you will reach a common objective. The earliest use of this proverb in English is in a treatise by Chaucer on the astrolabe (1391), in which he states, ‘Right as diverse paths leden diverse folk the righte way to Rome’. In Medieval Latin, this was expressed as: ‘mille vie ducunt hominem per secula Romam [a thousand roads lead man for ever towards Rome].’ This reflects the geographical fact that the Roman road system did indeed seem to radiate outwards from Rome.

all rowed fast, but none so fast as stroke A nonsensical compliment relating to effort. In Sandford of Merton, Chap. 12 (1903), Desmond Coke wrote: ‘His blade struck the water a full second before any other: the lad had started well. Nor did he flag as the race wore on: as the others tired, he seemed to grow more fresh, until at length, as the boats began to near the winning-post, his oar was dipping into the water nearly twice as often as any other.’ This is deemed to be the original of the modern proverbial saying – which is used, for example, in its ‘all rowed fast’ form in ‘The Challenge’ episode of the TV adaptation of The Forsyte Saga (1967). The ‘misquotation’ is sometimes thought to have been a deliberate distortion of something written earlier than Coke, by Ouida, ‘designed to demonstrate the lady’s ignorance of rowing, or indeed of any male activity’ – Peter Farrer in Oxford Today (Hilary, 1992). The Oxford Companion to English Literature (1985) refers to the ridicule Ouida suffered for ‘her inaccuracies in matters of men’s sports and occupations’, of which this might be one.

all’s fair in love, war and— The basic proverb here is ‘All is fair in love and war’, which CODP finds in the form ‘Love and war are all one’ by 1620 and as well established by the 19th century. But nowadays the extended form – to include almost anything that the speaker might wish, most frequently politics – is more common. In 1982, Leonard Miall concluded a BBC radio talk (‘Byways in a Broadcasting Career’) with: ‘I suppose that all’s fair in love, war and party politicals [i.e. broadcasts].’ Michael Foot MP was quoted in 1986 as having said, ‘I had better recall before someone else does, that I said on one occasion that all was fair in love, war and parliamentary procedure.’ ‘The Shadow Chancellor, Mr John Smith…said he did not expect to receive any special favours from his political opponents. “All is fair in love, war and parliamentary politics,” he added’ – The Guardian (23 January 1989).

all-singing, all-dancing The worlds of computing and finance have both taken to using a phrase whose origins are pure Hollywood. For once, it is possible to be very precise about the source of a piece of popular phraseology. First, the computing use. From a report in The Guardian (3 October 1984) about a new police computer called ‘Holmes’: ‘Sir Lawrence Byford is proud that Britain got there first. Holmes, he claims, is unique. “It should provide our detectives with unrivalled facilities when dealing with crimes such as homicides and serious sexual offences…it’s the all-singing all-dancing act.” The only thing it can’t do, it seems, is play the violin.’ And from a special report on computers in the same paper (24 June 1985): ‘I’m knocking these present notes together on the word-processor incorporated into Jazz, the all-singing, all-dancing “integrated” package from the Lotus Development Corporation.’ Partridge/Catch Phrases dates the start of the computing use to about 1970. The phrase is used every bit as much when writing about financial ‘packages’. From a special report in The Times (8 November 1985): ‘The City’s financial institutions have been busily preparing themselves for the changes. Many of the large stockbroking firms have forged links with banks: conceding their independence but benefiting from the massive capital injection which many believe will be necessary to cope with the new look all-singing-and-dancing exchange.’ The meaning is reasonably clear. What you should anticipate getting in each sphere is a multipurpose something or other, with every possible feature, that may or may not ‘perform’ well. A dictionary of jargon (1984) goes so far as to give the general business meaning as ‘super-glamorised, gimmicky, flashy’, when referring to a version of any stock product. As such, the phrase has been used in many other fields as well – not least in show business. The source? In 1929, when sound came to the movies, the very first Hollywood musical, MGM’s Broadway Melody, was promoted with posters bearing the slogan: ‘The New Wonder of the Screen! / ALL TALKING / ALL SINGING / ALL DANCING / Dramatic Sensation.’ Oddly enough, in that same year, two rival studios both hit on the same selling pitch. Alice White in Broadway Babes (using Warners’ Vitaphone system) was ‘100% TALKING, SINGING, DANCING’. And Radio Picture’s Rio Rita (with Bebe Daniels) was billed as ‘ZIEGFELD’S FABULOUS ALL-TALKING, ALL-SINGING SUPER SCREEN SPECTACLE’. It was natural that the studios should wish to promote the most obvious aspect of the new sound cinema but it is curious that they should all have used much the same phrase.

all Sir Garnet Meaning ‘all correct’, this phrase alludes to Sir Garnet Wolseley (1833–1913), a soldier noted for his organizational powers, who led several successful military expeditions 1852–5 and helped improve the lot of the Other Ranks. The expression was known by 1894. Wolseley is also celebrated as ‘The Modern Major-General’ in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance (1879). From the same source, Sir Garnet is the name of a boat in Coot Club, the novel (1934) by Arthur Ransome.

all sorts Street Talk (1986) defines this as ‘all sorts of people, things or activities. Often said pejoratively of people, as in, “You get all sorts in a neighbourhood like that”.’ The proverb ‘It takes all sorts to make a world’ was known by 1620. There may also be a modern allusion to Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts, the brand of confectionery that comes in many different colours and shapes.

all’s well that ends well The Reverend Francis Kilvert’s diary entry for 1 January 1878 noted: ‘The hind axle broke and they thought they would have to spend the night on the road…All’s well that ends well and they arrived safe and sound.’ Is the allusion to the title of Shakespeare’s play All’s Well That Ends Well (circa 1603) or to something else? In fact, it was a proverbial expression before Shakespeare used it. CODP finds ‘If the ende be wele, than is alle wele’ in 1381, and points to the earlier form ‘Wel is him that wel ende mai’. See also under WAR AND PEACE.

all systems go! In a state of readiness to begin an enterprise. From the US space programme of the 1960s.

all that heaven allows Peggy Fenwick’s script for the film with this title (US 1955) has widow Cary (Jayne Wyman) falling for her gardener, Ron (Rock Hudson), to the consternation of her class-conscious friends. Despite Wyman’s quoting a hefty chunk from Thoreau’s Walden, no hint is given as to where the title of the film comes from. In fact, it comes from the poem ‘Love and Life’ by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647–80). This was included in Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse (1900) – that great repository of quotations later to be used as film titles: ‘Then talk not of inconstancy, / False hearts, and broken vows; / If I by miracle can be / This live-long minute true to thee, / ‘Tis all that Heaven allows.’

all the news that’s fit to print This slogan was devised by Adolph S. Ochs when he bought The New York Times, and it has been used in every edition since – at first on the editorial page, on 25 October 1896, and from the following February on the front page near the masthead. It became the paper’s war cry in its 1890s’ battle against formidable competition in New York City from the World, the Herald and the Journal. At worst, it sounds like a slogan for the suppression of news. However, no newspaper prints everything. It has been parodied by Howard Dietz as ‘All the news that fits we print’.

all the President’s men Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward gave the title All the President’s Men to their first Watergate book (1974; film US 1976). It might seem to allude to the lines from the nursery rhyme ‘Humpty Dumpty’ (first recorded in 1803): ‘All the king’s horses / And all the king’s men, / Couldn’t put Humpty together again.’ There is also a Robert Penn Warren novel (1946; filmed US 1949), All the King’s Men, based on the life of the southern demagogue Huey ‘Kingfish’ Long. More directly, the Watergate book took its title from a saying of Henry Kissinger’s at the time of the 1970 Cambodia invasion: ‘We are all the President’s men and we must behave accordingly’ – quoted in Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger (1974).

all the world and his wife Meaning, ‘everybody’ – though the phrase is in decline now after the feminism of the 1970s. Christopher Anstey in The New Bath Guide (1766) has: ‘How he welcomes at once all the world and his wife, / And how civil to folk he ne’er saw in his life.’ Jonathan Swift included it in Polite Conversation (1738): ‘Who were the Company? – Why; there was all the World and his Wife.’ There is an equivalent French expression: ‘All the world and his father’. A letter from Lord Byron to Thomas Moore (29 February 1816) has: ‘I am at war with “all the world and his wife” or rather, “all the world and my wife” are at war with me.’ From F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Chap. 4 (1926): ‘On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages alongshore, the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby’s house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn.’

all the world loves a lover This modernish proverbial saying was used by James Agate in a speech on 17 December 1941 (reported in Ego 5, 1942). It would appear to be an adaptation of the established expression, ‘Everybody/all the world loves a lord’ (current by 1869) – not forgetting what the 1st Duke of Wellington apparently once said: ‘Soldiers dearly love a lord’. Almost a format saying: Stephen Leacock in Essays and Literary Studies (1916) has: ‘All the world loves a grafter – at least a genial and ingenious grafter – a Robin Hood who plunders an abbot to feed a beggar’; ‘All the world loves a dancer’ – the Fred Astaire character in the film Swing Time (US 1936).

all things bright and beautiful The popular hymn (1848) by Mrs Cecil Frances Alexander, of which this is the first line, is still notorious for its other famous lines about (THE) RICH MAN IN HIS CASTLE (THE POOR MAN AT HIS GATE. It also provided the author James Herriot with new titles for his collected volumes about life as a vet – books originally called It Shouldn’t Happen To a Vet, Let Sleeping Vets Lie, Vets Might Fly, etc. When these titles were coupled together in three omnibus editions especially for the US market (from 1972), Mrs Alexander’s hymn was plundered and they became All Things Bright and Beautiful, All Creatures Great and Small, and All Things Wise and Wonderful. The Lord God Made Them All was given to a further original volume.

all this and Heaven too As acknowledged in Rachel Fields’s novel with the title All This and Heaven Too (1939; film US 1940), Matthew Henry, the English Bible commentator (d. 1714), ascribed the saying to his minister father in his own Life of Mr Philip Henry (1698). Compare the film title All This and World War II (US 1976) and the classic Daily Express newspaper headline on Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation day (2 June 1953): ‘ALL THIS – AND EVEREST TOO’, announcing the conquest of the world’s highest mountain by a British-led expedition.

(an) all-time low Meaning, ‘to the lowest point on record’. Probably American in origin, by the early 20th century. Could the phrase have first referred to weather temperatures? Conversely, there is also (an) all-time high, but perhaps less frequently. ‘Brings cost of power to new all-time low’ – Saturday Evening Post (10 June 1933); ‘British prestige sunk to yet another all-time low’ is included in the parody of sportswriters’ clichés by David Frost and Peter Cook included in the book That Was The Week That Was (1963); ‘A new all-time low in political scurviness, hoodlumism’ – Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (1970); ‘Tory MP Phil Gallie was even prompted to predict the party could gain a seat, despite pundits’ claims of likely Tory losses and the party’s crushing all-time low of 13% in the polls’ – The Sunday Times (1 May 1994); ‘What is also significant about BP’s share rise to 386p last week is that it has brought the prospect of a serious assault on the all-time high of 418p much nearer the day’ – The Observer (1 May 1994).

all we want is the facts, ma’am (or just the facts, ma’am). From the American TV series Dragnet (1951–8, revived 1967–9). Sgt Joe Friday (played by Jack Webb) had a staccato style of questioning. These were probably the first big phrases to catch on in Britain after the start of commercial TV in 1955. The phrase ‘all we want is the facts’ was, however, already a cliché when importunate journalists were represented in theatrical sketches. In ‘Long-Distance Divorce’, a revue sketch from Nine Sharp (1938), Herbert Farjeon put the phrase in the mouth of a British reporter interviewing a Hollywood star.

all women look the same in the dark Contemptuous male view of women as sexual objects – sometimes, ‘they all the look the same in the dark’. An established view by the mid-20th century at least. The least politically correct phrase in this book. Compare the similar expression you don’t look at the mantelpiece when you’re poking the fire (an old joke revived by John Osborne in The Entertainer, 1957); Ovid’s more felicitous and diplomatic version in his Ars Amatoria (circa 2 BC); ‘The dark makes every woman beautiful’; and the English proverb (known by 1546), ‘All cats are grey in the dark’. Robert Herrick appeared to say much the same in ‘No Difference i’ th’ Dark’ (1648): ‘Night makes no difference ‘twixt the Priest and the Clerk; / Joan as my Lady is as good i’ th’ dark.’

(the) almighty dollar An early indication of the currency’s all-powerful role in American life. ‘The almighty dollar is the only object of worship’ – Philadelphia Public Ledger (2 December 1836). In fact, this possible first use of the term ‘almighty dollar’ had just been preceded by Washington Irving’s statement in Knickerbocker Magazine (12 November 1836): ‘The almighty dollar, that great object of universal devotion throughout our land.’ Mark Twain took up the theme in his Notebooks (1935): ‘We Americans worship the almighty dollar! Well, it is a worthier god than Hereditary Privilege.’ Earlier, Ben Jonson in his poem ‘Epistle to Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland’ from The Forest (1616) wrote of ‘almighty gold’.

almost a gentleman Bill matter (i.e. the descriptive line that appeared on posters) of the British music-hall comedian Billy Bennett (1887–1942). John Osborne took it as the title of his second volume of memoirs (1991). Compare Daisy Ashford, The Young Visiters, Chap. 1 (1919): ‘I am not quite a gentleman but you would hardly notice it but can’t be helped anyhow.’

along came a spider The title of a cop film (US 2001) starring Morgan Freeman is taken from the nursery rhyme ‘Little Miss Muffet’, known since 1805 and containing the lines (properly), ‘There came a big spider / Who sat down beside her / And frightened Miss Muffet away.’ ‘Along came a spider’ is the more usual American version, however. People like to think that Miss Muffet was Patience, the daughter of Dr Thomas Muffet, an entomologist who died in 1604. If he had been an arachnologist, that would have been even neater.

altered See CASE IS.

altered states Where drugs take you to. Altered States is the title of a novel (1979; film US 1980) by Paddy Chayevsky (screen credit as ‘Sidney Aaron’). This is a sci-fi thriller about genetic experimentation or, as one of the film guides puts it, about a ‘psychophysiologist who hallucinates himself back into primitive states of human evolution, in which guise he emerges to kill’. Might there be a connection with what Dr Albert Hofmann observed of his discovery, the psychedelic drug LSD? He noted in his diary for 1943: ‘An intense stimulation of the imagination and an altered state of awareness of the world.’

although I says it as shouldn’t Phrase of excuse before uttering an indiscretion. Since the 17th century.

always leave them wanting more Proverbial expression in the world of entertainment. From The Independent (8 May 1996): ‘Franz Welser-Möst will doubtless have seen the irony in stepping down as music director of the London Philharmonic with a Requiem…But there is an old theatrical adage that says “Always leave them wanting more”. And – surprise, surprise – I do believe he has.’

always merry and bright The British comedian Alfred Lester (1872–1925) is principally associated with this phrase, although it crops up in all sorts of other places. As ‘Peter Doody’, a lugubrious jockey in the Lionel Monckton/Howard Talbot/Arthur Wimperis musical comedy The Arcadians (1909), he had it as his motto in a song, ‘My Motter’. Punch quoted the phrase on 26 October 1910. Somerset Maugham in a letter to a friend (1915) wrote: ‘I am back on a fortnight’s leave, very merry and bright, but frantically busy – I wish it were all over.’ An edition of The Magnet from 1920 carried an ad for Merry and Bright – a comic paper. P. G. Wodehouse used the phrase in The Indiscretions of Archie (1921). Larry Grayson suggested that it was used as the billing for Billy Danvers (1884–1964), the British variety entertainer, and so it was, but he may also have used ‘Cheeky, Cheery and Chubby’.

always partridge See SEMPER PERDRIX.

always steer towards the gunfire Tackle matters head on. Originally from naval warfare. Or is it ‘head towards’?

always true to you in my fashion The song with this title by Cole Porter from Kiss Me Kate (1948) echoes, consciously or unconsciously, the line ‘I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion’ from the poem ‘Non Sum Qualis Eram’ (1896) by Ernest Dowson.

always verify your references In 1949 Winston Churchill gave an inaccurate account to the House of Commons of when he had first heard the words ‘unconditional surrender’ from President Roosevelt. Subsequently, in his The Second World War, Vol. 4 (1951), Churchill wrote: ‘It was only when I got home and searched my archives that I found the facts as they have been set out here. I am reminded of the professor who in his declining hours was asked by his devoted pupils for his final counsel. He replied, “Verify your quotations”.’ Well, not exactly a ‘professor’, and not exactly his dying words, and not ‘quotations’ either. Dr Martin Routh (1755–1854) was President of Magdalen College, Oxford, for sixty-three years. Of the many stories told about Routh, Churchill was groping towards the one where he was asked what precept could serve as a rule of life to an aspiring young man. Said Routh: ‘You will find it a very good practice always to verify your references, Sir!’ The story was first recorded in this form in July 1878, as Churchill and his amanuenses might themselves have verified. In 1847, Routh gave the advice to John Burgon, later a noted Dean of Chichester, who ascribed it to Routh in an article in the Quarterly Review (and subsequently in his Lives of Twelve Good Men, 1888 edn). Perhaps Churchill was recalling instead the Earl of Rosebery’s version, given in a speech on 23 November 1897: ‘Another confirmation of the advice given by one aged sage to somebody who sought his guidance in life, namely, “Always wind up your watch and verify your quotations”.’

amaze me! See ASTONISH ME.

amazing grace Most people are familiar with the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ from the great popular success it had when sung and recorded by Judy Collins in the early 1970s. The words of the hymn were written in the 17th century by John Newton (1725–1807), a reformed slavetrafficker. He (together with the poet William Cowper) wrote the Olney Hymnbook of 1779, and this is but one example from that work. The slightly complicated thing is that the tune to which ‘Amazing Grace’ now gets sung is a traditional tune – it is an old American one, though some say that it was an anonymous Scottish tune before this.

amber nectar Nectar was the (sweet) drink of the gods in classical mythology. ‘Amber fluid’ and ‘amber liquid’ are both Australianisms acknowledged by the Macquarie Dictionary (1981) for beer (particularly amber-coloured lager). Put all this together and you have the term ‘amber nectar’ used by Paul Hogan in 1980s’ TV commercials in Britain for Foster’s. Earlier examples: in 1713, the London and Country Brewer was referring to ‘the amber-coloured Malt’; ‘Barrel of amber’ and ‘amber fluid’ are terms used about beer in Chicago Gang Wars in Pictures, X Marks the Spot (1930); ‘Amber-coloured fluid’ was a term for cocktails used in the novels of the British-born writer E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866–1946).

Amen Corner (1) A place near St Paul’s Cathedral, London, where monks would conclude saying the Pater Noster as they processed on Corpus Christi Day. Hence the other place names: Paternoster Row, Ave Maria Lane, Creed Lane.

(2) (in US use by 1860) The name given to the part of a church or meeting house where people sat who used to assist the preacher by calling out the responses, especially ‘Amen’.

(3) The name of a British pop group of the late 1960s.

America can’t stand pat ‘To stand pat’, meaning ‘to keep a fixed position or belief, to stand fast’, may have originated in the game of poker, in which you can decline to exchange the cards you are dealt. A ‘pat hand’ is one that is exactly suited to your purpose. In the 1960 US presidential election, John F. Kennedy pointed to the old slogan ‘Stand pat with McKinley’ as an example of Republican reaction. Richard Nixon countered with ‘America can’t stand pat’ – until it was politely pointed out to him that he was married to a woman with that name.

American as apple pie The OED2 does not find this expression before 1977. However, Flexner (1976) adds that ‘the apple itself is even more American than apple pie and Americans have used the word often’. Confirming the position of the apple as central to American life, Flexner also adds: ‘Until the 20th century citrus boom, apples – raw, in cider, and cooked in many dishes – were the most popular and talked about fruit in America.’

American Caesar See BUTCHER.

(the) American dream An expression used to describe the ideals of democracy and standards of living that inspired the founding of the United States. Probably coined by J.T. Adams in The Epic of America (1931). Before that, in ‘America the Beautiful’ (1893), Katharine Lee Bates had written of a ‘patriot dream that sees beyond the years’. The American Dream is the title of a play (1961) by Edward Albee, and An American Dream (1965) is a novel by Norman Mailer.

American Gothic Title of a painting (1930) by Grant Wood (1892–1942) that shows an American farm couple posing stiffly in front of their Gothic house. The man in overalls carries a pitchfork. The equally dour woman wears an apron. It has been asserted that she is supposed to be his daughter rather than wife. Whatever the case, the artist used his own sister and his dentist as models. Wood’s treatment of them has been described as ‘half epic, half ironic’. Hence, American Gothic – the title of a horror movie (US 1988).

American pie American Pie was the title of a rites-of-passage film (US 1999) that follows the famous song ‘American Pie’ (1971), written and performed by Don McLean. This was a tribute to Buddy Holly and full of allusions to 1960s’ America. It has been claimed that ‘American Pie’ was the name of the aircraft in which Holly was flying when he died but this has been specifically denied by Don McLean. Presumably, if any particular pie was being evoked it was apple pie. See also under JACOB’S JOIN.

amid the glare of television lights See UNDER THE GLARE.

am I not a man and a brother? Accompanying a picture of a kneeling Negro slave in chains, this slogan appeared on a pottery cameo made by Josiah Wedgwood in about 1790. Subsequently, it was frequently reproduced during the fight against slavery and adopted by the Anti-Slavery Society. It also appears in Chap. 6 of Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies (1863).

am I right, or am I right? An expression brooking no debate. From American show biz, one suspects. In P. G. Wodehouse & Guy Bolton, Bring On the Girls, Chap. 9 (1954) there is: ‘“It’s no good for a revue, Flo [Ziegfeld]. It needs a situation back of it. It needs a guy named Bill and the girl who loves him.” He turned to Plum [Wodehouse]. “Am I right or am I right?”’ It is also in the script of the films Gypsy (US 1962) and Shampoo (US 1975). Compare: ‘Am I wet, or am I wet?’ from Henry Reed, A Very Great Man Indeed (1953) and what Mae West asks in I’m No Angel (1933): ‘Is that elegant, or is that elegant?’ It builds of course on the more usual expression ‘am I wrong or am I right?’ The format endures: ‘Is that funny or is that funny?’ – from the BBC radio show Round the Horne (10 April 1966); ‘[Of a dog] is he great or is he great?’ – Thames TV, Rock Follies (2 March 1976); ‘Is that a great theme or is that a great theme?’ – same show (9 March 1976).

amor vincit omnia [love conquers all] One of the best-known proverbial expressions of all. It is from Virgil’s Eclogues, No. 10, line 69. Chaucer’s Prioress had it on her brooch, as mentioned in ‘The General Prologue’ to The Canterbury Tales.

(—don’t) amount to a hill of beans Meaning, ‘—don’t amount to anything.’ One of the most remembered lines from the film Casablanca (US 1942) is the one in which Rick (Humphrey Bogart) says: ‘Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.’ An earlier use of the ‘hill of beans’ phrase – ‘Ancestors are a poor excuse for not amounting to a hill of beans’ – is quoted in Wolfgang Mieder, Talk Less and Say More: Vermont Proverbs (1986) and OED2 has an 1863 (US) citation of this same version. A parallel expression has ‘row of beans’. From P. G. Wodehouse, Psmith Journalist, Chap. 9 (1915): ‘Look at Everybody’s Magazine. They didn’t amount to a row of beans till Lawson started his “Frenzied Finance” articles.’

Amplex See EVEN YOUR BEST.

amusing, awful and artificial This is reputedly King James II’s description of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, using three words whose meanings have since changed. He meant that it was ‘pleasing, awe-inspiring, and skilfully achieved.’ The earliest citation found is in Simeon Potter’s Our Language (1976). But in William Kent’s An Encyclopedia of London (1937), it is rather Charles II who in 1675 approved a new design for St Paul’s because it was ‘very artificial, proper and useful.’ As all monarchs from King James I to Queen Anne seem to have had the remark ascribed to them, perhaps a true source for this phrase will never be found.

(the) anatomy of—A title format, of which the first notable use is The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton. That book used the word ‘anatomy’ in an appropriate manner, its subject being a medical condition (anatome is the Greek word for dissection). The modern vogue for ‘anatomies’ of this and that began with the film Anatomy of a Murder (US 1959) and was followed by Anthony Sampson’s book Anatomy of Britain, first published in 1962 and revised a number of times since.

ancestral vices/voices Ancestral Vices is the title of a novel (1980) by Tom Sharpe; Ancestral Voices is the title of the first volume of diaries (1975) by the architectural historian James Lees-Milne (1908–97). Both allude to the poem ‘Kubla Khan’ (1798) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which contains the lines: ‘…Five miles meandering with a mazy motion / Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, / Then reach’d the caverns measureless to man, / And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: / And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far / Ancestral voices prophesying war! / The shadow of the dome of pleasure / Floated midway on the waves; / Where was heard the mingled measure / From the fountain and the caves. / It was a miracle of rare device, / A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!’ The poem as a whole has been ransacked for all subsequent titles of Lees-Milne’s published diaries: Prophesying Peace (1977), Caves of Ice (1983), Midway on the Waves (1985), A Mingled Measure (1994), Ancient As the Hills (1997), Through Wood and Dale (1998), Deep Romantic Chasm (2000), Holy Dread (2001), Beneath a Waning Moon (2003). Compare STATELY PLEASURE DOME.

and all because the lady loves Milk Tray Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates have been promoted with this line since 1968. On British TV, the line was the pay-off to action adverts showing feats of James Bond-style daring that climaxed with the presentation of a box of the chocolates to a suitably alluring female.

—and all that ‘And all that sort of thing.’ Apparently the phrase was in the language before Sellar and Yeatman used it in the title of their cod volume of English history, 1066 And All That (1930). See also GOODBYE TO ALL THAT.

and all that jazz ‘And all that stuff, the rest, etcetera’ – often with the dismissive suggestion ‘and all that nonsense, rubbish’. American in origin, popular since 1959. From Gore Vidal, Myra Breckinridge, Chap. 6 (1968): ‘He [was] so pleased to have me “on the team” and me so happy to be able to do work in Hollywood, California, a life’s dream come true and – as they used to say in the early Sixties – all that jazz.’ All That Jazz was the title of a film (US 1979) about the life and death of a choreographer.

and a special goodnight to you Before becoming a disc jockey on British radio, David Hamilton (b. 1939) was an announcer with a number of independent television companies, including Tyne Tees, ABC and Thames. In the days when TV schedules ended round about midnight, his romantic sign-off became so distinctive that he even made a record with the title – ‘A Special Goodnight to You’ (circa 1967). At about the same time, the sign-off was also used by Barry Aldiss (‘B. A.’) on Radio Luxembourg and subsequently by several other broadcasters.

and awa-a-aay we go! On the Jackie Gleason Show on US television (1952–70), the rotund comic hosted variety acts and would always use this phrase to lead into the first sketch. He had a special pose to accompany it – head turned to face left, one leg raised ready to shoot off in the same direction. Gleason’s other stock (perhaps catch) phrases were how sweet it is!; baby, you’re the greatest!; one of these days…one of these days…; and pow! right in the kisser! He also popularized the word ‘labonza’ for posterior, as in ‘a kick in the labonza’. In The Life of Riley (1949–50), Gleason’s phrase after some stroke of fate was what a revoltin’ development this is!, though this appears to have been taken over by William Bendix, who followed him in the part.

and Death shall have no dominion The title of the notable poem (1936) on immortality by Dylan Thomas is a straightforward allusion to Romans 6:9: ‘Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more: death hath no more dominion over him.’

and finally…Introduction to the final light or amusing story on Independent Television News’s News at Ten bulletin (in the UK) and chiefly noticed when Reginald Bosanquet was newscasting in the 1970s. This kind of ‘tailpiece’ had first been established by ITN in the 1950s. A book called And Finally (edited by Martyn Lewis) collected some of these tailpieces and was published in 1984.

and how! An intensifying phrase of agreement, almost certainly of American origin from, probably, the 1920s. ‘“I should say she was pretty,” said a loud and cheery voice just behind him…“Pneumatic too. And how!”’ – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Chap. 4 (1932).

and I don’t mean maybe! An intensifier to show that the speaker has just issued a command, not simply expressed a wish. Mencken lists it as an ‘American saying circa 1920’. The second line of the song ‘Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’ (circa 1922) is: ‘…No, sir, don’t mean maybe’. OED2 has it by 1926, and it is in James Joyce, Anna Livia Plurabelle (1928).

and I’m like, hello? An expression of mock incredulity, popularized in the mid-1990s by the American TV show Friends. ‘Did you see that vicar the other day who made all the kiddies cry by telling them that Father Christmas couldn’t possibly exist – I mean, I was like, hello, why don’t you tell us about your boss, then, and how he manages?’ – The Independent (17 December 2002).

and in a packed programme tonight…A worn-out TV presentation phrase gently mocked by Ronnie Barker at the start of each edition of the BBC TV comedy show The Two Ronnies (1971–88). Compare his similar mocking of the dual presenters’ IT’S GOODNIGHT FROM ME…

and I quote Rather portentous indication of a quoted remark coming up – as though putting spoken quotation marks around whatever it is the speaker is about to say. The Complete Naff Guide (1983) lists it under ‘Naff Expressions’. Fritz Spiegl commented in MediaSpeak (1989): ‘On TV, “and I quote” may be replaced by the now fashionable, quaint “I quote” gesture: both hands raised aloft, first and second fingers sticking up like rabbit’s ears and brought down once or twice to meet the thumb.’ These finger-waggling ‘air quotes’ were known by 1977.

and I wish I was dead See NOW THERE’S A BEAUT.

and justice for all This phrase comes from the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag (put into its final form by Francis Bellamy in 1892, though further amended in the 1920s and 50s): ‘I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’ The idea of ‘justice for all’ is, however, one that goes back to the Greeks. It also gave rise to the remark by Lord Justice Sir James Mathew (d. 1908): ‘In England, justice is open to all, like the Ritz Hotel.’ And Justice for All was the title of a film (1979) about the US legal system. See also ONE NATION UNDER GOD.

and no heavy lifting Phrase used in a jokey description of the demands made – or not made – by a job, usually in politics. In an interview with Hunter Davies in The Independent (18 January 1994), Diane Abbott, the British Labour politician, said: ‘Being an MP is a good job, the sort of job all working-class parents want for their children – clean, indoors and no heavy lifting. What could be nicer?’ Much the same claim had earlier been made by Senator Robert Dole about the US vice-presidency (ABC TV broadcast, 24 July 1988): ‘It is inside work with no heavy lifting.’ And then J. K. Galbraith, Name-Dropping, Chap. 8 (1999), had: ‘[John F.] Kennedy also knew how to identify himself with…the larger electorate. At the end of his 1960 campaign, he addressed a vast crowd in the old Boston Garden… He asked himself, as though from the floor, why he was running for president. In reply, he listed some issues, all relevant to his audience, that needed attention; then he ended by saying that the presidency was a wellpaid job with no heavy lifting. The largely working-class gathering responded with appreciation, affection and joy. He was one of them.’

---, and no mistake! An intensifying phrase of affirmation, dating from the 1810s.

and now a word from our sponsor One of the various ways of getting into a commercial break, taken from American radio and television and much employed in British parodies of same in the 1950s and 60s – though never used in earnest in the UK (for the simple reason that sponsored TV of any type was not permitted until much later).

and now for something completely different…Catchphrase from BBC TV, Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–74) and used as the title of the comedy team’s first cinema feature in 1971. Like most graduate comedy shows of the 1960s and 70s, Monty Python rather frowned upon the use of catchphrases as something belonging to another type of show business. Usually delivered by John Cleese as a dinner-jacketed BBC announcer, seated before a microphone on a desk in some unlikely setting, the phrase had hitherto been a slightly arch ‘link’ much loved by magazine programme presenters. These people were thus deprived of a very useful phrase. After all, there is not much else you can say to get from an interview with the Prime Minister to an item about beerdrinking budgerigars. The children’s BBC TV series Blue Peter is sometimes said to have provoked the Python use of the phrase. It was first delivered by Eric Idle in the second edition of Python (12 October 1969), though it had also featured in some of the same team’s earlier series, At Last the 1948 Show, on ITV (1967), where it was uttered by ‘the lovely Aimi Macdonald’ in her introductions.

and now, her nibs, Miss Georgia Gibbs! The standard introduction to the singer of that name on the US radio show The Camel Caravan (1943–7).

and pigs might fly (or a pig may fly). An expression of the unlikelihood or impossibility of something actually taking place. Thomas Fuller, the proverb collector, had ‘That is as likely as to see an hog fly’ in 1732 though, earlier, The Spectator (2 April 1711) was bemoaning absurd inn signs including ‘flying Pigs’, which would seem to refer to this saying. From Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chap. 9 (1865): ‘“I’ve a right to think,” said Alice…“Just about as much right,” said the Duchess, “as pigs have to fly”.’

and so forth ‘And similarly, and then onwards’ – now mostly used after breaking off a list or quotation. This is a very old phrase indeed. Aelfric was writing ‘And swa forþ’ circa AD 1000 (see YE OLDE TEA SHOPPE). A would-be humorous elaboration of it, dating from the mid-20th century, is and so forth and so fifth!

and so it goes Mildly irritated or amused and philosophical phrase used when presented with yet another example of the way things are in the world. A catchphrase in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). So It Goes was the title of a British TV pop show devoted mainly to punk (by 1976). ‘And so it goes: hassle, hassle, hassle, one horrible death after another, and yet the put-upon lad’s soul is a butterfly that transmutes (on the spiritual sphere, you understand) into an Airfix Spitfire. By MTV standards, Hirst could be the next Francis Ford Coppola’ – The Observer (25 February 1996); ‘Sausages are brilliant all-rounders, everyone knows that. Fried up for breakfast, sandwiched between two slices of bread at lunch, grilled with mustard and mash for supper, cold on sticks at children’s parties, hot on sticks with a spicy dip at grown-up dos, and so it goes’ – The Sunday Times (25 February 1996).

and so to bed Samuel Pepys’s famous signing-off line in his diary entries appears first on 15 January 1660. However, on that particular occasion, they are not quite his last words. He writes: ‘I went to supper, and after that to make an end of this week’s notes in this book, and so to bed.’ Then he adds: ‘It being a cold day and a great snow, my physic did not work so well as it should have done’. And So To Bed was the title of a play (1926) by J. B. Fagan, which was then turned into a musical by Vivian Ellis (1951).

and so we say farewell…The travelogues made by James A. Fitzpatrick (1902–80) were a supporting feature of cinema programmes from 1925 onwards. With the advent of sound, the commentaries to ‘Fitzpatrick Traveltalks’ became noted for their closing words: ‘And it’s from this paradise of the Canadian Rockies that we reluctantly say farewell to Beautiful Banff…/ And as the midnight sun lingers on the skyline of the city, we most reluctantly say farewell to Stockholm, Venice of the North…/ With its picturesque impressions indelibly fixed in our memory, it is time to conclude our visit and reluctantly say farewell to Hong Kong, the hub of the Orient…’ Frank Muir and Denis Norden’s notable parody of the genre – ‘Bal-ham – Gateway to the South’ – first written for radio circa 1948 and later performed on a record album by Peter Sellers (1958) accordingly contained the words, ‘And so we say farewell to this historic borough…’

and still they come…Phrase for the remorseless oncoming of those you (probably) don’t like. From John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem ‘The King’s Missive’ (1881): ‘The pestilent Quakers are in my path! / Some we have scourged, and banished some, / Some hanged, more doomed, and still they come.’ The chorus from ‘The Astronomer’ in Jeff Wayne’s musical album The War of the Worlds (1978) is: ‘The chances of anything coming from Mars / Are a million to one, but still, they come…’ The title of a book by Elliott Barkan is And Still They Come: Immigrants and American Society, 1920 to the 1990s (1998). One is also reminded of Lewis Carroll’s lines about the oysters in ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’: ‘And thick and fast they came at last, / And more, and more, and more.’ Then there is this from Shakespeare, Macbeth, V.v.1 (1606): ‘Hang out our banners on the outward walls; / The cry is still, “They come!”’ ‘One million. And still they came’ – headline over peace march report in The Observer (16 February 2003).

and that ain’t hay! Meaning, ‘And that’s not to be sniffed at/that isn’t negligible’ – often with reference to money. The title of the 1943 Abbott and Costello film that is said to have popularized this (almost exclusively US) exclamation was It Ain’t Hay. But in the same year Mickey Rooney exclaimed ‘And that ain’t hay!’ as he went into the big ‘I Got Rhythm’ number (choreographed by Busby Berkeley) in the film Girl Crazy (the scene being set, appropriately, in an agricultural college).

and that, my dears, is how I came to marry your grandfather As though at the end of a long and rambling reminiscence by an old woman. Also used by the American humorist Robert Benchley (1889–1945) – possibly in capsule criticism of the play Abie’s Irish Rose – and so quoted by Diana Rigg in No Turn Unstoned (1982).

and that’s official Journalistic formula used when conveying, say, the findings of some newly published report. The aim, presumably, is to dignify the fact(s) so presented but also to do it in a not too daunting manner. A cliché condemned by Keith Waterhouse in Daily Mirror Style (1981). ‘Yes, the Prime Minister’s condition is “satisfactory” – and that’s official!’ – Private Eye (1962); ‘In America, there are no bad people, only people who think badly of themselves. And that’s official. California has a state commission to promote self-esteem, there is a National Council for Self-Esteem with its own bulletin…’ – Independent on Sunday (8 May 1994).

and that’s the way it is The authoritative but avuncular TV anchorman Walter Cronkite (b. 1916) retired from anchoring the CBS TV Evening News after nineteen years – for most of which he had concluded with these words. On the final occasion, he said: ‘And that’s the way it is, Friday March 6, 1981. Goodnight.’

and the band played on…Things went on as usual, no notice was taken. A phrase from a song, ‘The Band Played On’, written by John F. Palmer in 1895. A non-fiction book by Randy Shilts about the first years of AIDS was called And the Band Played On and filmed (US 1993). This title presumably alludes to the earlier play by Mart Crowley, The Boys in the Band, also about male homosexuals (filmed US 1970).

and the best of luck! Ironic encouragement. Frankie Howerd, the British comedian (?1917–92), claimed in his autobiography, On the Way I Lost It (1976), to have given this phrase to the language: ‘It came about when I introduced into radio Variety Bandbox [late 1940s] those appallingly badly sung mock operas starring…Madame Vera Roper (soprano)…Vera would pause for breath before a high C and as she mustered herself for this musical Everest I would mutter, “And the best of luck!” Later it became, “And the best of British luck!” The phrase is so common now that I frequently surprise people when I tell them it was my catchphrase on Variety Bandbox.’ Partridge/Catch Phrases suggests, however, that the ‘British luck’ version had already been a Second World War army phrase meaning the exact opposite of what it appeared to say and compares it with a line from a First World War song: ‘Over the top with the best of luck / Parley-voo’.

and the next object is ---In the radio panel game Twenty Questions, broadcast by the BBC from 1947 to 1976, a mystery voice – most memorably Norman Hackforth’s – would inform listeners in advance about the object the panellists would then try to identify by asking no more than twenty questions. Hackforth would intone in his deep, fruity voice: ‘And the next object is “The odour in the larder” [or some such poser].’

and the next Tonight will be tomorrow night…The stock concluding phrase of the original BBC TV early evening magazine Tonight (1957–65). Cliff Michelmore, who used to say ‘And the next Tonight will be tomorrow night…good night!’, commented (1979): ‘The combined brains of Alasdair Milne, Donald Baverstock, myself and three others were employed to come up with the phrase. There were at least ten others tried and permed. At least we cared…!’

and thereby hangs a tale As a storytelling device, this is still very much in use to indicate that some tasty titbit is about to be revealed. It occurs a number of times in Shakespeare. In As You Like It, II.vii.28 (1598) Jaques, reporting the words of a motley fool (Touchstone), says: ‘And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, / And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot: / And thereby hangs a tale.’ Other examples occur in The Merry Wives of Windsor (I.iv.143) and The Taming of the Shrew (IV.i.50). In Othello (III.i.8), the Clown says, ‘O, thereby hangs a tail,’ emphasizing the innuendo that may or may not be present in the other examples.

and there’s more where that came from Catchphrase from the BBC radio Goon Show (1951–60). This was sometimes said by Major Denis Bloodnok (Peter Sellers) and occasionally by Wallace Greenslade (a BBC staff announcer who, like his senior colleague, John Snagge, was allowed to let his hair down on the show). An example occurs in ‘The Call of the West’ (20 January 1959). The origins of the phrase probably lie in some music-hall comedian’s patter, uttered after a particular joke had gone well. Charles Dickens in Chapter 11 of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–4) shows that the phrase was established in other contexts first: ‘Mr Jonas filled the young ladies’ glasses, calling on them not to spare it, as they might be certain there was plenty more where that came from.’ Jimmy Cricket, a British comedian, was exclaiming simply, ‘And there’s more!’ by 1986.

and they all lived happily ever after The traditional ending to ‘fairy’ tales is not quite so frequently used as ONCE UPON A TIME, but it is present (more or less) in five of The Classic Fairy Tales gathered in their earliest known English forms by Iona and Peter Opie (1974). ‘Jack and the Giants’ (circa 1760) ends: ‘He and his Lady lived the Residue of their Days in great Joy and Happiness.’ ‘Jack and the Bean-Stalk’ (1807) ends: ‘His mother and he lived together a great many years, and continued always to be very happy.’ A translation of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ by the brothers Grimm (1823) ends: ‘Snowdrop and the prince lived and reigned happily over that land many many years.’ A translation of ‘The Frog-Prince’ ends: ‘They arrived safely, and lived happily a great many years. A Scottish version of ‘Cinderella’ (collected 1878) has: ‘They lived happily all their days.’ The concluding words of Winston Churchill’s My Early Life (1930) are: ‘…September 1908, when I married and lived happily ever afterwards.’

and this is what you do See MORNING ALL.

and this is where the story really starts…Catchphrase from BBC radio’s The Goon Show (1951–60), usually uttered by the announcer/narrator, Wallace Greenslade, and especially in ‘Dishonoured – Again’ (26 January 1959).

and this too shall pass away Chuck Berry spoke the words of a ‘song’ called ‘Pass Away’ (1979) that told of a Persian king who had had carved the words ‘Even this shall pass away’. George Harrison had earlier called his first (mostly solo) record album ‘All Things Must Pass’ (1970). These musicians were by no means the first people to be drawn to this saying. As Abraham Lincoln explained in an address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (1859): ‘An Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him with the words, “And this, too, shall pass away”. How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!’ But who was the oriental monarch? Benham (1948) says the phrase was an inscription on a ring – ‘according to an oriental tale’ – and the phrase was given by Solomon to a Sultan who ‘desired that the words should be appropriate at all time’. In 1860, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in The Marble Faun of the ‘greatest mortal consolation, which we derive from the transitoriness of all things – from the right of saying, in every conjuncture, “This, too, will pass away”.’

and when did you last see your father? There can be few paintings where the title is as important as (and as well known as) the actual picture. This one was even turned into a tableau at Madame Tussaud’s where it remained until 1989. It was in 1878 that William Frederick Yeames RA first exhibited his painting with this title at the Royal Academy; the original is now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. The title of the painting has become a kind of joke catchphrase, sometimes used nudgingly and often allusively – as in the title of Christopher Hampton’s 1964 play When Did You Last See My Mother? and the 1986 farce by Ray Galton and John Antrobus, When Did You Last See Your…Trousers? Tom Lubbock writing in the Independent on Sunday (8 November 1992) commented on the fact that the title tends to be remembered wrongly: ‘But the And matters. It turns the title from an abrupt demand into a slyly casual inquiry…[But] the title will probably outlast the image, just as a form of words that rings some distant bell. On green cashpoint screens you now find the query “When did you last update your insurance?” I’m sure the forgotten Yeames is ultimately responsible.’

and with that, I return you to the studio! Catchphrase from the BBC radio show Beyond Our Ken (1958–64). Hugh Paddick played Cecil Snaith, a hush-voiced BBC outside broadcasts commentator. After some disaster in which he had figured, he would give this as the punchline, in a deadpan manner. The show’s host, Kenneth Horne, apparently suggested the line. In its straight form, many TV and radio news reporters use the phrase in live spots even today.

(the) Angel of Death A nickname bestowed in the Second World War upon Dr Joseph Mengele, the German concentration camp doctor who experimented on inmates – ‘for his power to pick who would live and die in Auschwitz by the wave of his hand’ (Time Magazine, 17 June 1985). ‘Angel of death’ as an expression for a bringer of ills is not a biblical phrase and does not appear to have arisen until the 18th century. Samuel Johnson used it in The Rambler in 1752.

angels dancing on the head of a pin Benham (1948) went into this thoroughly but did not provide an actual example of what it gives as a head phrase, namely, ‘A company of angels can dance on the point of a needle’. Nevertheless, it glosses the phrase thus: ‘Saying attrib. with variations to St Thomas Aquinas (circa 1227–74) [who] in Summae Theologiae devotes superabundant space to fanciful conjectures about the nature of angels…“Whether an angel can be in several places at once”…“Whether several angels can be in one place at the same time”…He expends much laboured argument on this and similar problems.’ Correspondents in The Times (20/21 November 1975) seemed to suggest that the attribution to Thomas Aquinas had been mistakenly made by Isaac Disraeli. Mention was made of the 14th-century tractate Swester Katrei – wrongly ascribed to Meister Eckhart – which contains this passage: ‘Doctors declare that in heaven a thousand angels can stand on the point of a needle.’ Mencken (1942) has ‘How many angels can dance upon the point of a needle?’ – ‘ascribed to various medieval theologians, c. 1400.’

angels one five In Royal Air Force jargon, ‘angels’ means height measured in units of a thousand feet; ‘one five’ stands for fifteen; so ‘20 MEs at Angels One Five’ means ‘Twenty Messerschmitts at 15,000 feet’. Angels One Five was the title of a film (UK 1952) about RAF fighter pilots during the Second World War.

Anglo-Saxon attitudes Typically English behaviour. The title of Angus Wilson’s novel (1956) about a historian investigating a possible archaeological forgery comes from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Chap. 7 (1872). Alice observes the Messenger ‘skipping up and down, and wriggling like an eel, as he came along’. When she expresses surprise, the King explains: ‘He’s an Anglo-Saxon Messenger – and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes.’ Harry Morgan Ayres in Carroll’s Alice (1936) suggests that the author may have been spoofing the Anglo-Saxon scholarship of his day. He also reproduces drawings of Anglo-Saxons in various costumes and attitudes from the Caedmon manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

(the) Angry Decade A decade label for the 1950s though it is not certain that this had any wide circulation beyond being the title of Kenneth Allsopp’s book – a cultural survey (1958). Obviously it derived from:

(an) angry young man Label for any writer in the mid-1950s who showed a social awareness and expressed dissatisfaction with conventional values and with the Establishment – John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and Colin Wilson among them. Leslie Paul, a social philosopher, had called his autobiography Angry Young Man in 1951, but the popular use of the phrase stems from Look Back in Anger, the 1956 play by John Osborne that featured an anti-hero called Jimmy Porter. The phrase did not occur in the play but was applied to the playwright by George Fearon in publicity material sent out by the Royal Court Theatre, London. Fearon later told The Daily Telegraph (2 October 1957): ‘I ventured to prophesy that [Osborne’s] generation would praise his play while mine would, in general, dislike it…“If this happens,” I told him, “you would become known as the Angry Young Man.” In fact, we decided then and there that henceforth he was to be known as that.’

anguish turned to joy (and vice versa) A journalistic cliché noticed as such by the 1970s: ‘A young mother’s anguish turns to joy…’ and so on. ‘Joy has turned to anguish for the parents of British student Colin Shingler aged 20, who was trapped in the Romano during the earthquake. Only hours after hearing that he had been rescued they were told that surgeons had to amputate his left hand’ – The Times (23 September 1985); ‘Meanwhile, that anguish had turned to joy among the 250 Brechin fans at Hamilton. The players took a salute and then it was Clyde’s turn to be acclaimed, with the championship trophy being paraded round the ground’ – The Herald (Glasgow) (17 May 1993).

animal, vegetable and mineral Not a quotation from anyone in particular, merely a way of describing three types of matter. And yet, why does the phrase trip off the tongue so? Edward Phillips, The New World of English Words (ed. Kersey) (1706) has: ‘Chymists…call the three Orders of Natural Bodies, viz. Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral, by the name of Kingdoms.’ But why not ‘animal, mineral, vegetable’? Or ‘vegetable, animal, mineral’? Perhaps because these variants are harder to say, although in W. S. Gilbert’s lyrics for The Pirates of Penzance (1879), Major-General Stanley does manage to sing: ‘But still in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral, / I am the very model of a modern Major-General.’ For BBC television viewers, the order was clearly stated in the title of the long-running archaeological quiz Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? (established by 1956) in which eminent university dons had to identify ancient artefacts just by looking at them. The trio of words was also evoked in the long-running radio series Twenty Questions. This originated on the Mutual Radio Network in the US in 1946, having been created by Fred Van De Venter and family – who transferred with the show to NBC TV, from 1949 to 1955. Twenty Questions ran on BBC radio from 1947 to 1976. Panellists simply had to guess the identity of a ‘mystery object’ by asking up to twenty questions. A fourth category – ‘abstract’ – was added later. In 1973–4, a version of this game made for BBC World Service was actually called Animal, Vegetable or Mineral. The key to the matter is that the original American show was admittedly based on the old parlour game of ‘Animal, Vegetable [and/or] Mineral’. This seems to have been known on both sides of the Atlantic in the 19th century. In Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph by Edgar Johnson, we find (1839–41): ‘Dickens was brilliant in routing everybody at “Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral”, although he himself failed to guess a vegetable object mentioned in “mythological history” and belonging to a queen, and was chagrined to have it identified as the tarts made by the Queen of Hearts.’ In the same book, in a chapter on the period 1858–65, we also read: ‘[Dickens] was swift and intuitive in “Twenty Questions”…On one occasion, he failed to guess “The powder in the Gunpowder Plot”, although he succeeded in reaching Guy Fawkes.’ Presumably, then, the game was known by both names, though Dickens also refers to a version of it as ‘Yes and No’ in A Christmas Carol (1843). ‘Twenty Questions’ is referred to as such in a letter from Hannah Moore as early as 1786. Yet another name for this sort of game (by 1883) appears to have been ‘Clumps’ or ‘Clubs’.

animals See ALL ANIMALS.

(the) Animated Meringue Nickname of (Dame) Barbara Cartland (1902–2000), British romantic novelist and health food champion, who employed a chalky style of make-up in addition to driving around in a pink and white Rolls-Royce. She was thus dubbed by Arthur Marshall who said that far from taking offence, Miss Cartland sent him a telegram of thanks. Compare: ‘At dinner that night it was Eleanor herself who mentioned the name of a certain statesman, who may be decently covered under the disguise of X. “X.,” said Arlington Stringham, “has the soul of a meringue”’ – Saki, The Chronicles of Clovis, ‘The Jesting of Arlington Stringham’ (1911).

annus mirabilis Phrase for a remarkable or auspicious year, in modern (as opposed to classical) Latin. Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis: the year of wonders was published in 1666, but the idea was known before this, viz. Mirabilis annus secundus; or, the Second year of prodigies: Being a true and impartial collection of many strange signes and apparitions, which have this last year been seen in the heavens, and in the earth, and in the waters (1662). In the Netherlands, 1566 used to be known (but not until the mid-19th century) as wonderjaar, because of its crucial role in the start of the Dutch revolt. The opposite term – annus horribilis – was popularized by Queen Elizabeth II in a speech in the City of London (24 November 1992) to mark her fortieth year on the British throne: ‘1992 is not a year I shall look back on with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an Annus Horribilis.’ She was reflecting her current mood: she had a cold, part of Windsor Castle had been burned down four days previously and the marriages of three of her children had collapsed or were collapsing. She states that she had the phrase from a correspondent. It seems more likely that it was inserted by the Queen’s private secretary and speechwriter, Sir Robert Fellowes, having been written in a Christmas card sent to Her Majesty by her former Principal Private Secretary, Sir Edward Ford.

another See HERE’S A FUNNY.

another country Julian Mitchell’s play Another Country (1981; film UK 1984) shows how the seeds of defection to Soviet Russia were sown in a group of boys at an English public school. The title comes not, as might be thought, from the celebrated line in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (circa 1592): ‘Fornication: but that was in another country; / And besides the wench is dead.’ Rather, as the playwright has confirmed, it is taken from the second verse of Sir Cecil Spring Rice’s patriotic ‘Last Poem’ (1918), which begins ‘I vow to thee, my country’ and continues ‘And there’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago – / Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know.’ In the original context, the ‘other country’ is Heaven, rather than the Soviet Union, of course. Another Country had earlier been used as the title of a novel (1962) by James Baldwin.

another day – another dollar! What one says to oneself at the conclusion of toil. Obviously of American origin but now as well known in the UK where there does not appear to be an equivalent expression using ‘pound’ instead of ‘dollar’. Partridge/Catch Phrases dates the phrase from the 1940s in the UK and from circa 1910 in the US.

another little drink wouldn’t do us any harm This boozer’s jocular justification for another snort is rather more than a catchphrase. Allusion is made to it in Edith Sitwell’s bizarre lyrics for ‘Scotch Rhapsody’ in Façade (1922): ‘There is a hotel at Ostend / Cold as the wind, without an end, / Haunted by ghostly poor relations…/ And “Another little drink wouldn’t do us any harm,” / Pierces through the sabbatical calm.’ The actual origin is in a song with the phrase as title, written by Clifford Grey to music by Nat D. Ayer and sung by George Robey in the show The Bing Boys Are Here (1916). It includes a reference to the well-known fact that Prime Minister Asquith was at times the worse for wear when on the Treasury Bench: ‘Mr Asquith says in a manner sweet and calm: / And another little drink wouldn’t do us any harm.’

(that’s) another meal the Germans won’t have Dismissive catchphrase on finishing a meal. ‘When my (French) wife arrived in this country some thirty years ago, she surprised me by remarking, after a particularly good meal, “Voilà, un autre repas que les Allemands n’auront pas.” This saying apparently derived from her mother, or indeed her grandmother, who suffered in the Occupation. To my astonishment, on a trip to Avignon ten years ago, after an exceptional banquet, a young French lad aged about 25, turned to my wife and made the same remark. It would seem that this has now become a French proverb’ – Raymond Harris (1995). Confirmation comes from The Sunday Times (23 March 1997): ‘Older Frenchmen admitted they sometimes still use the toast, when raising their glasses, of “This is one the Boches won’t get”.’ And from even further back: ‘On his first visit to Germany nearly forty years later, [Matisse] told one of his students that…he never forgot his mother repeating like a grace at meals: “Here’s another one the Germans won’t lay their hands on”. The phrase would become a familiar refrain throughout the region during the incursions of the next seventy-five years and more’ – Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse, Vol. 1 (1998), referring to the Prussians who passed through north-eastern France in the 1871 Franco-Prussian war.

another opening, another show! Show business exclamation – perhaps uttered ironically, like ON WITH THE MOTLEY! ‘Another Op’nin, Another Show’ is the title of a song sung by the members of a theatrical troupe in Cole Porter’s musical Kiss Me Kate (1948).

another page turned in the book of life Conversational reflection on someone’s death. One of the numerous clichés of bereavement, designed to keep the awfulness of death at bay by means of comfortingly trite remarks. A cliché by about 1960. However, the notion of life as a book whose pages turn can be invoked on other occasions as well. On 1 September 1872, the Reverend Francis Kilvert wrote in his diary: ‘Left Clyro for ever. A chapter of life closed and a leaf in the Book of Life turned over.’ In its original biblical sense, the said book is a record of those who will inherit eternal life (as in Philippians 4:3 and Revelation 20:12).

another part of the wood Title of the first volume of (Lord) Kenneth Clark’s autobiography (1974) and taken from the stage direction to Act 3, Sc. 2 of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Scene locations such as this were mostly not of Shakespeare’s own devising but were added by later editors. Clark said he wished also to allude to the opening of Dante’s Inferno: ‘I found myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.’ Lillian Hellman had earlier entitled one of her plays Another Part of the Forest (1946) and Beryl Bainbridge, a novel, Another Part of the Wood (1968).

another Sunday and sweet FA This phrase was used as the title of a Granada TV play by Jack Rosenthal (UK 1972) about the struggles of a referee during an (amateur) Sunday-morning football game. But was it a phrase before the play? Compare the (subsequent) diary of a member of the British forces in the Falklands conflict, found on the internet. On Sunday 16 May 1982, he wrote: ‘All I can say about today is another bloody Sunday and sweet FA. We were due to be linked up with the rest of the task force during the night but due to the extreme bad weather all ships have had to slow down.’

answer See IS THE RIGHT.

(the) answer is in the plural and they bounce That is to say, ‘balls!’ – reputedly the response given by the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens to a Royal Commission. However, according to Robert Jackson, The Chief (1959), when Gordon (later Lord) Hewart was in the House of Commons, he was answering questions on behalf of David Lloyd George. For some time, one afternoon, he had given answers in the customary brief parliamentary manner – ‘The answer is in the affirmative’ or ‘The answer is in the negative’. After one such non-committal reply, several members arose to bait Hewart with a series of rapid supplementary questions. He waited until they had all finished and then replied: ‘The answer is in the plural!’

(the) answer’s a lemon! Fobbing-off phrase. ‘My Cumbrian grandmother when asked a question would reply, “The answer’s a lemon”. “Why?” we asked – “Suck it and see,” was her response’ – Janet C. Egan (2000). This exchange brings together two well-known expressions. ‘The answer is a lemon’, being a non-answer to a question or a refusal to do something requested of one, is probably of American origin and seems to have been in use by 1910. A lemon is acidic and sour, and there are several other American phrases in which a lemon suggests that something is unsatisfactory or not working properly. The lemon is also the least valuable object on a fruit machine. ‘Suck it and see’, meaning ‘try out’, presumably derives from what you would say about a sweet – ‘suck it and see whether you like the taste of it’. It was used as a catchphrase by Charlie Naughton of the Crazy Gang, though it is probably of earlier music-hall origin – at least according to W. Buchanan-Taylor, One More Shake (1944). Partridge/Slang dates it from the 1890s. A correspondent, H. E. Johnson, suggested (1999) that it started with a Punch cartoon at the turn of the 19th/20th century, with the caption: First urchin: ‘I don’t know if this here’s a plum or a beetle.’ Second urchin: ‘Suck it and see.’

(to) answer the call of nature A lavatorial euphemism known since 1761 when Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy had that someone ‘hearkened to the call of nature.’ ‘The calls of nature are permitted and Clerical Staff may use the garden below the second gate’ – Tailor & Cutter (1852). ‘Call of nature “sent [Robert] Maxwell overboard”…He would frequently get up in the middle of the night and found it more convenient, as a lot of men do on a boat, to relieve themselves over the side as it was moving’ – headline and text, The Independent (21 October 1995). There is also the variant, ‘(to) answer a certain requirement of nature.’ The call of the great outdoors may also be used in the same way. Originally the phrase ‘great outdoors’ was used simply to describe ‘great open space’ (by 1932).

(the) answer to a maiden’s prayer An eligible bachelor – especially one who is young, good-looking and wealthy. Perhaps a Victorian coinage, now used only ironically or somewhat mockingly and also used in a wider sense to refer to anything one might have been searching for. There is an ancient tradition that maidens prayed to St Agnes (patron saint of virgins) on 20 January, in the hope of being granted a vision of their future husbands. Hence, the poem by John Keats, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (1820). ‘The Maiden’s Prayer’ was the translated title given to the piano solo popular in Victorian drawing-rooms, ‘Molitwa dziewicy’ by the Polish composer Thekla Badarzewska (1834–61). ‘Here, you Freshmen, Seniors, et al, is the answer to a maiden’s prayer’ – Mademoiselle Magazine (15 August 1935).

Anthea, give us a twirl See DIDN’T HE DO WELL.

anxiety See AGE OF.

any colour so long as it’s black An expression used to convey that there is, in fact, no choice. This originated with Henry Ford, who is supposed to have said it about the Model T Ford that came out in 1909 and is quoted in his My Life and Work (written with Henry Crowther, 1922). Hill and Nevins in Ford: Expansion and Challenge (1957) have him saying: ‘People can have it any colour – so long as it’s black.’ However, in 1925, the company had to bow to the inevitable and offer a choice of colours. Dr Harry Corbett commented (1996): ‘Initially, the T model was available in several colours but…the early finishing technique was a carryover from the carriage industry and resulted in curing times of up to four weeks. This meant that huge numbers of cars had to be stored during the finishing process. From what I can gather, Ford changed to a faster drying product – which was only available in black – to rid himself of the warehousing difficulties.’

any gum, chum? Remark addressed to American GIs based in Britain during the Second World War. ‘Crowds of small boys gathered outside American clubs to pester them for gifts, or called out as American lorries passed: “Any gum, chum?” which rapidly became a national catchphrase’ – Norman Longmate, How We Lived Then (1971).

any more fer sailing? See BY GUM.

any more for the Skylark? The age-old cry of swarthy fishing-folk inviting seaside visitors to take a trip around the bay but now domesticated into a ‘generalised invitation’, as Partridge/Catch Phrases puts it. But how did it get into the language in the first place? A pamphlet (undated) entitled ‘Any More for the Skylark? The Story of Bournemouth’s Pleasure Boats’ by L. Chalk tells of a whole series of ‘Skylark’ vessels run by a certain Jake Bolson at that seaside resort from 1914 to 1947. There is, however, a much earlier source. A researcher at the Brighton Fishing Museum disclosed that a boat owner/skipper of those parts called Captain Fred Collins had owned many ‘Skylarks’ in his career. As he died in 1912, Collins was clearly ahead of the Bournemouth boats. Indeed, the Brighton Gazette had mentioned a ‘new pleasure yacht, “The Skylark”’ arriving from the builders in May 1852. The Gazette’s earliest citation of the actual phrase ‘Any more for the Skylark’ occurs in the edition of 17 November 1928 (in an article concerning Joseph Pierce, who took over from Collins). This does not explain how the phrase caught on beyond Brighton (perhaps through a song or stage-show sketch?) The edition of 8 May 1948 placed it among other pleasure boat cries: ‘Brighton’s fishermen…will take their boats down to the sea and the summer season chorus of “Any more for the Skylark,” “Half-way to China,” “Motor boat going” and “Lovely ride out” will start again.’ A variation, all aboard the Skylark!, was apparently popularized by Noah and Nelly, an animated British TV children’s programme of the mid-1970s.

(is there/have you) any more, Mrs Moore? Elaborations of ‘any more?’, from the British music-hall song ‘Don’t Have Any More, Mrs Moore!’ – written by Castling & Walsh (early 1900s) and performed by Lily Morris.

anyone for tennis? This perkily expressed inquiry from a character entering through French windows and carrying a tennis racquet has become established as typical of the ‘teacup’ theatre of the 1920s and 30s (as also in the forms who’s for tennis? and tennis, anyone?). A clear example of it being used has proved elusive, however, although there are many near misses. The opening lines of Part II of Strindberg’s Dance of Death (1901) are (in translation): ‘Why don’t you come and play tennis?’ A very near miss occurs in the first act of Shaw’s Misalliance (1910) in which a character asks: ‘Anybody on for a game of tennis?’ Teddie in Somerset Maugham’s The Circle (1921) always seems on the verge of saying it, but only manages, ‘I say, what about this tennis?’ Myra in Noël Coward’s Hay Fever (1925) says, ‘What a pity it’s raining, we might have had some tennis.’ Perhaps it is just another of those phrases that was never actually said in the form popularly remembered. Unfortunately, a terrible wild-goose chase was launched by Jonah Ruddy and Jonathan Hill in their book Bogey: The Man, The Actor, The Legend (1965). Describing Humphrey Bogart’s early career as a stage actor (circa 1921) they said: ‘In those early Broadway days he didn’t play menace parts. “I always made my entrance carrying a tennis racquet, baseball bat, or golf club. I was the athletic type, with hair slicked back and wrapped in a blazer. The only line I didn’t say was, ‘Give me the ball, coach, I’ll take it through.’ Yes, sir, I was Joe College or Joe Country Club all the time.” It was hard to imagine him as the originator of that famous theatrical line – “Tennis anyone?” – but he was.’ It is clear from this extract that the authors were merely adding their own gloss to what Bogart had said. Bartlett (1968) joined in and said it was his ‘sole line in his first play’. But Bogart (who died in 1957) had already denied ever saying it (quoted in Goodman, Bogey: The Good-Bad Boy and in an ABC TV documentary of 1974 using old film of him doing so). Alistair Cooke in Six Men (1977) is more cautious: ‘It is said he appeared in an ascot and blue blazer and tossed off the invitation Tennis, anyone?’ – and adds that Bogart probably did not coin the phrase. In British show business, it has been suggested that Leon Quatermaine, a leading man of the 1920s and 30s, was the first man to say it. In the form ‘Anyone for tennis?’ the phrase was used by J. B. Priestley as the title of a 1968 television play, and in 1981 it was converted into Anyone for Denis? by John Wells as the title of a farce guying Margaret Thatcher’s husband.

anyone we know? Originally, a straightforward request for information when told, say, that someone you know is getting married and you want to know to whom. Then it became a playful catchphrase: ‘She’s going to have a baby’ – ‘Who’s the father – anyone we know?’ The joke use certainly existed in the 1930s. In the film The Gay Divorcee (US 1934), Ginger Rogers states: ‘A man tore my dress off.’ A woman friend asks: ‘Anyone we know?’ ‘The moment from which many of us date the genre was when the curtain rose on a production by Harry Kupfer in the late 1970s – I think of a work by Richard Strauss – to reveal a set dominated by a huge phallus, occasioning, from one male in the stalls to his gentleman friend, the loud whisper: “Anyone we know, duckie?”’ – The Times (17 May 1986).

any one who…can’t be all bad Format phrase suggesting that something about which doubt has been expressed is really rather good. Perhaps the original is what Leo Rosten said about W. C. Fields (and not, as is sometimes reported, what Fields himself said of another): ‘Any man who hates children and dogs can’t be all bad’ (or ‘Anybody who hates dogs and babies can’t be all bad’). This was at a Masquers’ Club dinner (16 February 1939). Subsequently: ‘Anyone with a name like Hitler can’t be all that bad’ – Spike Milligan, The Last Goon Show of All (1972); ‘All the same, Garland and Rooney as Babes In Arms…plus long-lost tracks from Band Wagon and Good News and Brigadoon and It’s Always Fair Weather, can’t be all bad’ – Sheridan Morley in Theatreprint, Vol. 5, No. 95 (May 1995).

any port in a storm Meaning, metaphorically, ‘any roof over your head is better than none’ or ‘you can’t be choosy about shelter in adversity’. The phrase makes an early appearance in John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1749): ‘I feeling pretty sensibly that it [her lover’s member] was going by the right door, and knocking desperately at the wrong one, I told him of it: “Pooh, says he, my dear, any port in a storm”.’

anything can happen and probably will The standard opening announcement of the BBC radio show Take It From Here (1948–59) was that it was a comedy programme ‘in which anything can happen and probably will.’ The show was based on literate scripts by Frank Muir (1920–98) and Denis Norden (b. 1922) and featured Jimmy Edwards (1920–88), Dick Bentley (1907–95) and June Whitfield (b. 1926) (who succeeded Joy Nichols).

anything for a laugh Casual reason given for doing something a little out of the ordinary, since the 1930s. P. G. Wodehouse, Laughing Gas (1936): ‘“Anything for a laugh” is your motto.’ In the 1980s it was combined with the similar phrases good for a laugh (itself used as the title of a book by Bennett Cerf in 1952) and game for anything to produce the title of the British TV show Game For a Laugh (1981–5). This consisted of various stunts and had elements of Candid Camera as it persuaded members of the public to take part in stunts both in and out of the studio. The title was much repeated by the presenters of the show, as in ‘Let’s see if so-and-so is game for a laugh…’

anything for a quiet life The Jacobean playwright Thomas Heywood used this proverbial phrase in his play Captives, Act 3, Sc. 3 (1624), but Thomas Middleton had actually entitled a play Anything For a Quiet Life (possibly written with John Webster) in about 1620. Swift included the phrase in Polite Conversation (1738) and Dickens incorporated it as a Wellerism in The Pickwick Papers, Chap. 43 (1837): ‘But anythin’ for a quiet life, as the man said wen he took the sitivation at the lighthouse.’

anything goes! Meaning, ‘there are no rules and restrictions here, you can do whatever you like.’ Popularized by the song and musical show with the title written by Cole Porter (1934). Compare the much older this is/it’s Liberty Hall, which was probably coined by Oliver Goldsmith in She Stoops To Conquer, Act 2 (1773): ‘This is Liberty-hall, gentlemen. You may do just as you please.’ W. W. Reade wrote a book with the title Liberty Hall (1860).

anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence against you The police ‘caution’ to a person who may be charged with a crime has had various forms in the UK. The version you might expect from reading fiction would go something like: ‘You are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so but, I must warn you, whatever you do say will be taken down and may be given in evidence against you.’ But this does not conform with modern practice. British police are advised that care should be taken to avoid any suggestion that evidence might only be used against a person, as this could prevent an innocent person making a statement that might help clear him of a charge. Old habits die hard, however. The phrase is etched on the national consciousness, and it must have been said at one time. Charles Dickens in Our Mutual Friend (1864–5) has Mr Inspector (an early example of a police officer in fiction) give ‘the caution’ (which he refers to as such) in these words: ‘It’s my duty to inform you that whatever you say, will be used against you’ (Bk 4, Chap. 12). Earlier, Dickens had Mr Bucket saying in Bleak House, Chap. 49 (1852–3): ‘It’s my duty to inform you that any observation you may make will be liable to be used against you.’ Examples of the ‘against you’ caution also appear in Sherlock Holmes short stories by Conan Doyle (1905 and 1917). In the US, the phrase may still be found. In Will (1980), G. Gordon Liddy describes what he said during a raid on Dr Timothy Leary’s house in connection with drugs charges (in March 1966): ‘I want you to understand that you don’t have to make any statement, and any statement you do make may be used against you in a court of law.’ A decision of the US Supreme Court (Miranda v. Arizona, 1966) – known as the Miranda Decision – requires law enforcement officials to tell anyone taken into custody that, inter alia, anything the person says can be used against them.

any time, any place, anywhere A line from Martini advertisements in the UK from the early 1970s. Barry Day of the McCann-Erickson advertising agency that coined the phrase agreed (1981) that there is more than a hint of Bogart in the line, but adds: ‘As a Bogart fan of some standing, with my union dues all paid up, I think I would have known if I had lifted from one of his utterances, but I honestly can’t place it.’ Possibly there is a hint of Harry Lime, too. In the film The Third Man (1949), Lime says (in the run-up to the famous cuckoo-clock speech): ‘When you make up your mind, send me a message – I’ll meet you any place, any time…’ Two popular songs of the 1920s were ‘Anytime, Any Day, Anywhere’ and ‘Anytime, Anywhere, Any Place – I Don’t Care’. The exact phrase ‘any time, any place, anywhere’ had occurred, however, before the Martini ads in the song ‘I Love To Cry at Weddings’ from the musical Sweet Charity (1966) and in the film script of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (US 1958). Precisely as ‘Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere’, it was the title of an R&B hit for Joe Morris in the US (1950) – sung by Little Laurie Tate. Even earlier it was spoken in the film The Strawberry Blonde (US 1941) of which the last lines are: ‘When I want to kiss my wife, I’ll kiss her anytime, anyplace, anywhere. That’s the kind of hairpin I am’ – this was written by the Epstein brothers who co-wrote Casablanca, so perhaps that is the Bogart connection? And then in His Girl Friday (US 1940), Cary Grant says to Rosalind Russell: ‘I’d know you anytime, anyplace, anywhere’ – having just re-met his ex-wife, he is recalling a line he had used to her on the night he proposed. In April 1987, a woman called Marion Joannou was jailed at the Old Bailey for protecting the man who had strangled her husband. She was nicknamed ‘Martini Marion’ because, apparently, she would have sex ‘any time, any place, anywhere’.

a-okay Another way of saying ‘OK’ or ‘All systems working’. From NASA engineers in the early days of the US space effort ‘who used to say it during radio transmission tests because the sharper sound of “A” cut through the static better than “O”’ – Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (1979). Now largely redundant, it seems never to have been used by astronauts themselves. President Reagan, emerging from a day of medical tests at a naval hospital in June 1986, pronounced himself ‘A-OK’. Another derivation is that ‘a-okay’ is a melding of ‘A1’ and ‘OK’.

‘appen ‘It may happen; happen it may; maybe; perhaps’ – a North of England dialect expression, used for example by Uncle Mort (Robin Bailey), the scuffling, seedy old misogynist in Peter Tinniswood’s funereal Yorkshire comedy series I Didn’t Know You Cared on BBC TV (1975–9).

apple See AMERICAN AS.

(to be the) apple of one’s eye To be what one cherishes most or holds most dear. The pupil of the eye has long been known as the ‘apple’ because of its supposed round, solid shape. To be deprived of the apple is to be blinded and lose something extremely valuable. The Bible has: ‘He kept him as the apple of his eye’ in Deuteronomy 32:10.

apple-pie order Meaning ‘with everything in place; smart’, this expression (known since 1780) possibly derives from the French cap-à-pied, wearing armour ‘from head to foot’. Another suggested French origin is from nappe pliée, a folded tablecloth or sheet – though this seems a more likely source for the term apple-pie bed, known since 1781, for a bed made so that you can’t get into it. On the other hand, a folded cloth or napkin does convey the idea of crispness and smartness.

(an) appointment in Samarra An appointment with Death, or one that simply cannot be avoided. The novel Appointment in Samarra (1934) by John O’Hara alludes to the incident – described also by W. Somerset Maugham in his play Sheppey (1933) – in which a servant is jostled by Death in the market at Baghdad. Terrified, he jumps on a horse and rides to Samarra (a city in northern Iraq) where he thinks Death will not be able to find him. When the servant’s master asks Death why he treated him in this manner, Death replies that he had merely been surprised to encounter the servant in Baghdad…‘I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.’ The story appears earlier in Jean Cocteau, Le Grand Écart (1923) – translator not known: ‘A young Persian gardener said to his Prince: “Save me! I met Death in the garden this morning, and he gave me a threatening look. I wish that by tonight, by some miracle, I might be far away, in Ispahan.” The Prince lent him his swiftest horse. That afternoon, as he was walking in the garden, the Prince came face to face with Death. “Why,” he asked, “did you give my gardener a threatening look this morning?” “It was not a threatening look,” replied Death. “It was an expression of surprise. For I saw him there this morning, and I knew that I would take him in Ispahan tonight”.’

approbation from Sir Hubert Stanley is praise indeed Ironic comment on the source of praise or compliment. There is no actual Sir Hubert Stanley in Who Was Who or the DNB. However, there is a Sir Herbert Stanley, colonial administrator (1872–1955) who might fit the bill. But no, the origin of this remark is the line ‘Approbation from Sir Hubert Stanley is praise indeed’ which comes from the play A Cure for the Heartache, Act 5, Sc. 2 (1797) by the English playwright Thomas Morton (?1764–1838). Charles Dickens has ‘Praise from Sir Hubert Stanley’ in Dombey and Son, Chap. 1 (1846–8). P. G. Wodehouse uses the expression as ‘this is praise from Sir Hubert Stanley’ in both Psmith Journalist, Chap. 15 (1915) and Piccadilly Jim, Chap. 18 (1918). It is alluded to in Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night, Chap. 15 (1935): ‘At the end of the first few pages [Lord Peter Wimsey] looked up to remark: “I’ll say one thing for the writing of detective fiction: you know how to put your story together; how to arrange the evidence.” “Thank you,” said Harriet drily; “praise from Sir Hubert is praise indeed”.’

après nous le déluge [after us, the flood] The Marquise de Pompadour’s celebrated remark to Louis XV was made on 5 November 1757 after Frederick the Great had defeated the French and Austrian armies at the Battle of Rossbach. It carries with it the suggestion that nothing matters once you are dead and has also been interpreted as a premonition of the French Revolution. Bartlett (1980) notes that this ‘reputed reply’ by the king’s mistress was recorded by three authorities, though a fourth gives it to the king himself. Bartlett then claims the saying was not original anyway but ‘an old French proverb’. However, the ODP has as an English proverb, ‘After us the deluge’…deriving from Mme de Pompadour. Its only citation is Burnaby’s Ride to Khiva (1876): ‘Our rulers did not trouble their heads much about the matter. “India will last my time…and after me the Deluge”.’ Metternich, the Austrian diplomat and chancellor, may later have said ‘après moi le déluge’, meaning that everything would grind to a halt when he stopped controlling it. The deluge alluded to in all cases is a dire event like the Great Flood or ‘universal deluge’ of Noah’s time.

Aquarius See AGE OF.

Arabs See FOLD ONE’S TENTS.

aren’t plums cheap? Catchphrase of the British music-hall ‘Naval Comic’, Bob Nelson, of whom no other information is to hand. In The Bandsman’s Daughter (1979), Irene Thomas recalls, ‘One comedian acrobat who towards the end of his act used to do a handstand balanced on the back of a chair. Then, upside down, he’d turn his poor old beetroot coloured face towards the audience and croak, apropos nothing, “Aren’t plums cheap today?”’

aren’t we all? In Frederick Lonsdale’s play Aren’t We All? (1924) – the title proving that the phrase was well established by then – the Vicar says, ‘Grenham, you called me a bloody old fool,’ and Lord Grenham replies, ‘But aren’t we all, old friend?’ Ray Henderson composed the song ‘I’m a Dreamer, Aren’t We All’ in 1929. The collusive use has possibly weakened and the phrase become a simple jokey retort or a way of coping with an unintentional double entendre: ‘I’m afraid I’m coming out of my trousers’ – ‘Aren’t we all, dear, aren’t we all?’

aren’t you the lucky one? Congratulatory phrase from the 1920s, tinged with mockery but no envy.

are there any more at home like you? Partridge/ Catch Phrases traces this chat-up line to the musical comedy Floradora (1899), which contains the song (written by Leslie Stuart) ‘Tell Me, Pretty Maiden (Are There Any More At Home Like You?)’ Partridge adds that the line was ‘obsolete by 1970 – except among those with long memories’. Indeed, Tom Jones may be heard saying it to a member of the audience on the album Tom Jones Live at Caesar’s Palace Las Vegas (1971).

are we downhearted? – no! A morale-boosting phrase connected with the early stages of the First World War but having political origins before that. The politician Joseph Chamberlain said in a 1906 speech: ‘We are not downhearted. The only trouble is, we cannot understand what is happening to our neighbours.’ The day after he was defeated as candidate in the Stepney Borough Council election of 1909, Clement Attlee, the future British Prime Minister, was greeted by a colleague with the cry, ‘Are we downhearted?’ (He replied, ‘Of course, we are.’) On 18 August 1914, the Daily Mail reported: ‘For two days the finest troops England has ever sent across the sea have been marching through the narrow streets of old Boulogne in solid columns of khaki…waving as they say that new slogan of Englishmen: “Are we downhearted?…Nooooo!” “Shall we win?…Yessss!”’ Horatio Nicholls (Lawrence Wright) incorporated the phrase into a song (1917).

are yer courtin’ [are you courting]? Stock phrase from the BBC radio show Have A Go (1946–67) – what the host, Wilfred Pickles, would say when chatting up unmarried women contestants of any age (‘from nineteen to ninety’).

are you all right? Fanny’s all right! Stock phrase of the American actress, comedienne and singer Fanny Brice (1891–1951).

are you a man or a mouse? Usually said by a female disparagingly of a timorous male, this seems to have originated in the US, by the 1930s. A correspondent, Irene Summers (1998), remembered it being a feature of an Eddie Cantor film, Strike Me Pink (1935): ‘Eddie played a coward as usual, working in a dry cleaners. He triumphed in the end, beat the bullies and got the girl. When we came out, the attendants gave us little coins, with a mouse on one side and a man on the other, with the words, “Are you a man or a mouse?” and “See Eddie Condon in ‘Strike Me Pink’”.’ In the Marx Bros’ film A Day At the Races (1937) Alan Jones asks it of Groucho, who replies: ‘You put a piece of cheese down here and you’ll find out.’ Later on, the fondly remembered Sabrina recorded the song ‘Man Not a Mouse’ from the 1950s’ musical Grab Me a Gondola. In BBC TV, Yes, Minister (1980s), a minister overridden by a spokesman is asked, ‘Are you a man or a mouth?

are you going to pardon me? Catchphrase from the BBC radio show Ray’s a Laugh (1949–60), spoken by Charles Hawtrey as Mr Muggs.

are you looking for a punch up the bracket? Stock phrase of Tony Hancock in his BBC radio show, Hancock’s Half-Hour (1954–9), though merely popularized and not coined by him. For no accountable reason, ‘bracket’ refers to the nose and mouth, but really the target area is unspecified. Compare: a punch up the conk, where the nose is obviously specified – as in the BBC radio Goon Show, ‘The Mysterious Punch-Up-the-Conker’ (7 February 1957).

are you married? See OOH, YOU ARE AWFUL.

are you now or have you ever been (a member of the Communist Party)? The stock phrase of McCarthyism, the pursuit and public ostracism of suspected US Communist sympathizers at the time of the war with Korea in the early 1950s. Senator Joseph McCarthy was the instigator of the ‘witch hunts’, which led to the blacklisting of people in various walks of life, notably the film business. Those appearing at hearings of the House of Representatives Committee on UnAmerican Activities (1947-circa 1957) were customarily challenged with the full question. Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been? was the title of a radio/stage play (1978) by Eric Bentley.

are you ready, Eddie? Slogan for the Today newspaper in the UK (1986). Not an immortal slogan but worth mentioning for what it illustrates about advertising agencies and the way they work. Today, a new national newspaper using the latest production technology, was launched by Eddie Shah, hitherto known as a unionbusting printer and publisher of provincial papers. In its collective wisdom, the Wight Collins Rutherford Scott agency, charged with promoting the new paper’s launch, built the whole campaign around the above slogan. Why had they chosen it? Starting with the name ‘Eddie’ – Mr Shah being thought of as a folk hero in some quarters – the agency found that it rhymed with ‘ready’. So the man was featured in TV ads being asked this important question by his staff. Unfortunately, the ad agency had zeroed in all too well on the most pertinent aspect of the new paper’s launch. Today was not ready, and the slogan echoed hollowly from the paper’s disastrous start to the point at which Mr Shah withdrew. The phrase had earlier been used as the title of a track on the Emerson, Lake and Palmer album Tarkus (1971), where it referred to the recording engineer, Eddie Offord (to whom it had, presumably, been addressed). The same rhyme occurs in ready for Freddie, meaning ‘ready for the unexpected, the unknown or the unusual’ (according to DOAS, 1960), and was a phrase that came out of the ‘L’il Abner’ comic strip of the 1930s; are you ready for Freddy? was used as a slogan to promote the film Nightmare on Elm Street – Part 4 (US 1989) – referring to the gruesome character, Freddy Krueger.

are you ready to take the challenge? This was used in some marketing tests in 1990–1 for an unidentifed product – ‘I fill out a form and stand in line. When it came to my turn I was presented with a tray on which stood two unmarked beakers and two upturned tubs. My jolly uniformed woman smiled and said: “Are you ready to take the challenge?”’ – Independent on Sunday (23 September 1990). Taking up a challenge was originally a procedure in medieval chivalry. The knight making the challenge would throw down his gauntlet. The person accepting the challenge would formally pick it up. Mostly in political and business use, there is the phrase to meet the challenge – a cliché by the mid-20th century. It occurs along with other rhetorical clichés during the ‘Party Political Speech’ (written by Max Schreiner) on the Peter Sellers’ comedy album The Best of Sellers (1958): ‘If any part of what I say is challenged, I am more than ready to meet that challenge’. ‘With the Tories reeling from their worst nationwide election defeat in modern times, the Prime Minister [John Major] marched out to Downing Street to promise: “I will meet a challenge whenever it comes”’ – Evening Standard (London) (6 May 1994); ‘The World Bank reports: “Deficiencies in the system of legal education and training and a dearth in appropriate standards of professional ethics, have left legal practitioners complacent and unprepared to meet the challenge of their business clients competing in a global economy”’ – Financial Times (15 July 1994).

are you sitting comfortably? – then I’ll begin This was the customary way of beginning stories on BBC radio’s daily programme for small children, Listen with Mother. The phrase was used from the programme’s inception in January 1950. Julia Lang, the original presenter, recalled in 1982: ‘The first day it came out inadvertently. I just said it. The next day I didn’t. Then there was a flood of letters from children saying, “I couldn’t listen because I wasn’t ready”.’ It remained a more or less essential part of the proceedings until the programme ended in 1982. Sometimes Lang said, ‘…then we’ll begin.’ In the archive recording of 7 February 1950, Lang says, ‘Are you sitting quite comfortably, then I’ll begin.’ In the Times obituary (18 January 1988) of Frieda Fordham, an analytical psychologist, it was stated that she had actually coined the phrase when advising the BBC’s producers. From the same programme came the stock phrase and when it/the music stops, [Daphne Oxenford, or some other] will be here to tell you a story.

are you there, Moriarty? Name of a rather rough party game that has probably been played since the early 20th century, if not earlier. Why it is called this is not known, though perhaps it might have something to do with the evil ex-Professor James Moriarty, arch-enemy of Sherlock Holmes and the man who apparently killed him off. In the game, two blindfolded individuals lie on the floor, facing each other and holding left hand to left hand. In their free hands they hold rolled-up newspapers or magazines. One says, ‘Are you there, Moriarty?’ The other answers, ‘Yes’ or ‘I am here’, and the first then attempts to hit him on the head, if he can locate it. Obviously, the person about to be hit can attempt to move his head out of the line of fire. It takes all people…

‘arf a mo’, Kaiser! A 1915–16 recruiting poster during the First World War showed a British ‘Tommy’ lighting a pipe prior to going into action, with this caption underneath. The phrase caught on from there. A photograph of a handwritten sign from the start of the Second World War shows it declaring, ‘’Arf a mo, ‘itler!’ In 1939, there was also a short documentary produced by British Paramount News with the title ‘Arf a Mo’ Hitler.

Argentina See DON’T CRY.

arm See CHANCE ONE’S.

(to cost an) arm and a leg A measurement of (high) cost, as in ‘That’ll cost you an arm and a leg’. Probably of American origin, mid-20th century. Compare this with B. H. Malkin’s 1809 translation of Le Sage’s Gil Blas: ‘He was short in his reckoning by an arm and a leg.’

armed to the teeth Heavily armed, alluding to the fact that pirates are sometimes portrayed as carrying a knife or sabre held between the teeth. ‘Is there any reason why we should be armed to the teeth?’ – Richard Cobden, Speeches (1849); ‘Mujahedin…played a major role in bringing down the Shah and armed to the teeth’ – The Daily Telegraph (21 August 1979); ‘Once upon a time it would have been pirates fighting over buried treasure. Nowadays it’s redneck firemen (Bill Paxton and William Sadler) under siege from a posse of drug dealers (headed by rappers Ice T and Ice Cube) who are armed to the teeth with guns and mobile phones’ – The Sunday Telegraph (9 May 1993).

armpit See MAKES YOUR.

arms and the man The title of George Bernard Shaw’s play Arms and the Man (1894) comes from the first line of Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘Arma virumque cano [Of arms and the man, I sing]’ or rather from Dryden’s translation of the same: ‘Arms, and the man I sing.’ Earlier than Shaw, Thomas Carlyle, suggesting in Past and Present (1843) that a true modern epic was technological rather than military, had written: ‘For we are to bethink us that the Epic verily is not Arms and the Man, but Tools and the Man.’

(the) army game The Army Game was an immensely popular British TV comedy series (1957–62). Its title homed in on a phrase that seemed to sum up the attitude of those condemned to spend their lives in the ranks. Apparently of American origin, possibly by 1900, ‘it’s the old army game’ refers to the military system as it works to the disadvantage of those in the lower ranks. From Theodore Fredenburgh’s Soldiers March (1930): ‘I get the idea. It’s the old army game: first, pass the buck, second…’ The phrase also occurs in the film You Can’t Take It With You (US 1938). Compare war game (known by 1900), a theoretical way of fighting battles (and a type of chess). The War Game (1965) was the title of a TV film by Peter Watkins that was for a long time not shown because of its vivid depiction of the effect of nuclear war on the civilian population.

(the) arrogance of power The Arrogance of Power (1967) was the title of a book by the American Democratic politician J. William Fulbright. It questioned the basis of US foreign policy, particularly in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. In the previous year, Fulbright, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had given lectures establishing his theme: ‘A psychological need that nations seem to have…to prove that they are bigger, better or stronger than other nations.’

arse See ALL BALLS; DOESN’T KNOW HIS.

arsehole See FROM ARSEHOLE.

arsenic and old lace Title of a play (1941) by Joseph Kesselring (filmed US 1941) about two old ladies who poison elderly gentlemen. It plays upon the earlier lavender and old lace, itself used as the title of sentimental novel (1902) by Myrtle Reed. That phrase came to be used as a way of indicating old-fashioned gentility.

ars gratia artis Motto of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film company. Howard Dietz, director of publicity and advertising with the original Goldwyn Pictures company, had left Columbia University not long before creating it circa 1916. When asked to design a trademark, he based it on the university’s lion and added the Latin words meaning ‘art for art’s sake’ underneath. The trademark and motto were carried over when Samuel Goldwyn retired to make way for the merger of Metropolitan with the interests of Louis B. Mayer in what has become known since as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Goldwyn may never have subscribed to the sentiment it expressed. Most of his working life was spent as an independent producer, famously more interested in money than art.

art See AS THE ART.

Arthur See BIG-HEARTED.

Arthur’s bosom A malapropism for ABRAHAM’S BOSOM from Shakespeare’s Henry V, II.iii.9 (1599). The Hostess (formerly Mistress Quickly) says of the dead Falstaff: ‘Nay, sure, he’s not in hell: he’s in Arthur’s bosom, if ever man went to Arthur’s bosom.’

artificial See AMUSING.

(the) art of the possible What politics is said to be. A phrase used as the title of memoirs (1971) by R. A. (Lord) Butler, the British Conservative politician. In the preface to the paperback edition of The Art of the Possible, Butler noted that this definition of politics appears first to have been used in modern times by Bismarck in 1866–7 (in conversation with Meyer von Waldeck: ‘Die Politik ist keine exakte Wissenschaft, wie viele der Herren Professoren sich einbilden, sondern eine Kunst [politics are not a science, as many professors declare, but an art]’). If he said precisely the phrase as used by Butler, it would have been: ‘Die Politik ist die Lehr vom Möglichen’. Others who have touched on the idea included Cavour, Salvador de Madriaga, Pindar and Camus. To these might be added J.K. Galbraith’s rebuttal: ‘Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable’ – letter to President Kennedy (March 1962), quoted in Ambassador’s Journal (1969).

art thou weary? From a hymn ‘translated from the Greek’ by the Reverend J. M. Neale (1818–66). It continues: ‘…art thou languid, / art thou sore distressed?’ Compare: ‘Art thou troubled? / Music will calm thee. Art thou weary…’ – an aria from Handel’s opera Rodelinda (1725), with libretto by Salvi.

as any fule kno [as any fool know] A stock phrase of the schoolboy character Nigel Molesworth in the books written by Geoffrey Willans and illustrated by Ronald Searle in the 1950s. The books retained the schoolboy spelling of the ‘Curse of St Custard’s’. From Down With Skool! (1953): ‘A chiz is a swiz or swindle as any fule kno.’ The phrase had a revival from the 1980s onwards when the books were republished.

as awkward as a pig with side pockets (Of a person) very awkward. Apperson finds ‘as much need of it as a toad of a side pocket, said of a person who desires anything for which he has no real occasion’, by 1785, and ‘as much use as a cow has for side pockets’, in Cheshire Proverbs (1917). Compare as awkward as a cow with a musket.

as black as Egypt’s night Very black indeed. The allusion is biblical. Exodus 10:21 mentions the plague of ‘darkness which may be felt’ (a sandstorm, perhaps), that Moses imposed on the Pharaoh in response to the Lord’s instruction. Samuel Wesley (d. 1837) had: ‘Gloomy and dark as Hell’s or Egypt’s night’; and John and Charles Wesley’s version of Psalm 55 contains (although the Bible doesn’t): ‘And horror deep as Egypt’s night, or hell’s tremendous gloom.’ A more benign view of Egypt’s night occurs in Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (1899) where the people of India complain of British colonization: ‘Why brought ye us from bondage, / Our loved Egyptian night?’ – where the reference is to civilized Egypt. In the poem ‘Riding Down from Bangor’, written by the American Louis Shreve Osborne and anthologized by 1897, a bearded student and a village maiden make the most of it when the railway train in which they are travelling enters a tunnel: ‘Whiz! Slap! Bang! into the tunnel quite / Into glorious darkness, black as Egypt’s night…’

as black as Newgate knocker This comparison meaning ‘extremely black’ and known by 1881 alludes to Newgate gaol, the notorious prison for the City of London until 1880. It must have had a very formidable and notable knocker because not only do we have this expression but a ‘Newgate knocker’ was the name given to a lock of hair twisted to look like a knocker.

as black as the Devil’s nutting bag Apperson has this by 1866. Mrs Jean Wigget wrote (1995) that her mother used to say that ‘Dirty hands looked “like the colour of Old Nick’s nutting bag”.’

as busy as a one-armed paperhanger with the itch Colourful comparison, listed by Mencken (1942) as an ‘American saying’. ‘As busy as a one-armed man with the nettle-rash pasting on wall-paper’ appears in O. Henry, Gentle Grafter: The Ethics of Pig (1908). The supply is endless, but here are a few more: ‘as scarce as rocking-horse manure’ (an example from Australia); ‘as lonely as a country dunny’ (ditto); ‘as mad as a gumtree full of galahs’ (ditto); ‘as inconspicuous as Liberace at a wharfies’ picnic’ (ditto); ‘as black as an Abo’s arsehole’ (ditto); ‘as easy as juggling with soot’; ‘as jumpy as a one-legged cat in a sandbox’; ‘as much chance as a fart in a windstorm’; ‘as much use as a one-legged man at an arse-kicking contest’ (or ‘a legless man in a pants-kicking contest’ – Gore Vidal, Life Magazine (9 June 1961); ‘as likely as a snowstorm in Karachi’. In his 1973 novel Red Shift, Alan Garner has ‘you’re as much use as a chocolate teapot’; ‘as useless as a chocolate kettle’ (of a UK football team), quoted on BBC Radio Quote…Unquote (1986).

as cold as charity Ironic description of charity that is grudgingly given or dispensed without warmth – particularly by the public charities of the Victorian era. In 1382, John Wycliffe translated Matthew 24:12 as: ‘The charite of many schal wexe coold.’ Robert Southey, The Soldier’s Wife (1721), has: ‘Cold is thy heart and as frozen as charity’. Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, Chap. 43 (1865) has: ‘The wind is as cold as charity.’

as dark as the inside of a cow As dark as it can possibly be. A likely first appearance of this phrase is in Mark Twain, Roughing It, Chap. 4 (1891). He puts it within quotes, thus: ‘…made the place “dark as the inside of a cow,” as the conductor phrased it in his picturesque way.’ So probably an American coinage. A few years later Somerville & Ross were writing in Some Experiences of an Irish RM, Chap. 10 (1899): ‘As black as the inside of a cow’.

as different as chalk from cheese Very different indeed (despite the superficial similarity that they both look whitish). In use since the 16th century, although the pairing of the alliterative chalk and cheese has been known since 1393. Sometimes found as ‘not to know chalk from cheese’ – unable to tell the difference – or ‘to be able to tell chalk from cheese’ – to have good sense.

as dim as a Toc H lamp Very dim (unintelligent). Dates from the First World War in which there was a Christian social centre for British ‘other ranks’ opened at Talbot House in Poperinghe, Belgium, in 1915 and named after an officer who was killed – G. W. L. Talbot, son of a Bishop of Winchester. ‘Toc H’ was signalese for ‘Talbot House’. The institute continued long after the war under its founder, the Reverend P. B. (‘Tubby’) Clayton. A lamp was its symbol.

as Dorothy Parker once said…The title of a stage show (circa 1975), devoted to the wit of Dorothy Parker and performed by Libby Morris. This is testimony to the fact that Parker is undoubtedly the most quoted woman of the 20th century. It is probably an allusion to the verse of Cole Porter’s song ‘Just One of Those Things’ (1935), that begins: ‘As Dorothy Parker once said to her boy friend, “Fare thee well”…’

as easy as falling off a log Very simple. This citation from the New Orleans Picayune (29 March 1839) suggests a North American origin and the quotation marks, that it was reasonably well established by that date: ‘He gradually went away from the Lubber, and won the heat, “just as easy as falling off a log”.’

as every schoolboy knows ‘It is a well-known fact’ – a consciously archaic use. Robert Burton wrote ‘Every schoolboy hath…’in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) and Bishop Jeremy Taylor used the expression ‘every schoolboy knows it’ in 1654. In the next century, Jonathan Swift had, ‘I might have told how oft Dean Perceval / Displayed his pedantry unmerciful, / How haughtily he cocks his nose, / To tell what every schoolboy knows’, in his poem ‘The Country Life’ (1722). But the most noted user of this rather patronizing phrase was Lord Macaulay, the historian, who would say things like, ‘Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma, and who strangled Atahualpa’ (essay on ‘Lord Clive’, January 1840). But do they still?

as if I cared…Catchphrase from the 1940s BBC radio series ITMA. Sam Fairfechan (Hugh Morton) would say, ‘Good morning, how are you today?’ and immediately add, ‘As if I cared…’ The character took his name from Llanfairfechan, a seaside resort in North Wales, where Ted Kavanagh, ITMA’s scriptwriter, lived when the BBC Variety Department was evacuated to nearby Bangor during the early part of the Second World War.

as it happens A verbal tic of the British disc jockey Jimmy Savile (later Sir James Savile OBE) (b. 1926). He used it as the title of his autobiography in 1974. However, when the book came out in paperback the title had been changed to Love Is an Uphill Thing because (or so it was explained) the word ‘love’ in the title would ensure extra sales. After dance-hall exposure, Savile began his broadcasting career with Radio Luxembourg in the 1950s. His other stock phrase how’s about that then, guys and gals? started then. For example, on Radio Luxembourg, The Teen and Twenty Disc Club, he certainly said, ‘Hi, there, guys and gals, welcome to the…’

as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted…A humorous phrase used when resuming an activity after an enforced break. In September 1946, Cassandra (William O’Connor) resumed his column in the Daily Mirror after it had been suspended for the duration of the Second World War, with: ‘As I was saying when I was interrupted, it is a powerful hard thing to please all the people all the time.’ In June of that same year, announcer Leslie Mitchell is reported to have begun BBC TV’s resumed transmissions with: ‘As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted.’ The phrase sounds as if it might have originated in music-hall routines of the I DON’T WISH TO KNOW THAT, KINDLY LEAVE THE STAGE type. Compare A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh (1926): ‘“AS – I – WAS – SAYING,” said Eeyore loudly and sternly, “as I was saying when I was interrupted by various Loud Sounds, I feel that –”.’ Fary Luis de León, the Spanish poet and religious writer, is believed to have resumed a lecture at Salamanca University in 1577 with, ‘Dicebamus hesterno die…[We were saying yesterday].’ He had been in prison for five years.

as I walked out one midsummer morning The title of Laurie Lee’s memoir As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) uses a format phrase that occurs in a number of English folk songs. Indeed, in his earlier Cider With Rosie, Lee refers to an old song with the line, ‘As I walked out one May morning’. Another folk song begins, ‘As I rode out one midsummer’s morning.’ Compare the line from the Robert Burns’ poem, ‘As I went out ae [= one] May morning’ (which is based on an old Scottish song).

ask See DON’T.

ask a silly question (get a silly answer) A response to an answer that is less than helpful or amounts to a put-down. The second part is often not spoken, just inferred. Probably since the late 19th century.

ask the man who owns one This slogan for Packard motors, in the USA from circa 1902, originated with James Ward Packard, the founder of the company, and appeared for many years in all Packard advertising and sales material. Someone had written asking for more information about his motors. Packard told his secretary: ‘Tell him that we have no literature – we aren’t that big yet – but if he wants to know how good an automobile the Packard is, tell him to ask the man who owns one.’ A 1903 Packard placard is the first printed evidence of the slogan in use. It lasted for more than 35 years.

as lazy as Ludlum’s dog who lay down to bark Very lazy. Partridge/Slang has ‘lazy as Ludlum’s/(David) Laurence’s/Lumley’s dog…meaning extremely lazy…According to the [old] proverb, this admirable creature leant against a wall to bark’ and compares the 19th-century ‘lazy as Joe the marine who laid down his musket to fart’ and ‘lazy as the tinker who laid his budget to fart’. Apperson finds ‘lazy as Ludlam’s dog, that leant his head against a wall to bark’ in Ray’s proverb collection (1670).

as long as you’ve got your health, that’s the main thing A resounding cliché – uttered in BBC TV, Hancock, ‘The Blood Donor’ (23 June 1961). The corollary: ‘If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything.’

as many---as you’ve had hot dinners Originally perhaps ‘I’ve had as many women…’, this is an experienced person’s boast to one less so. Well established by the mid-20th century, then subjected to endless variation. ‘I’ve had more gala luncheons than you’ve had hot dinners’ – BBC TV, Monty Python’s Flying Circus (12 October 1969); ‘If I agreed to these sorts of requests my name would be on more notepaper than you’ve had hot dinners’ – letter from Kenneth Williams (16 July 1975) in The Kenneth Williams Letters (1994).

as near as damn is to swearing Very close indeed. First heard from a Liverpool optician in 1963. No confirmation from any other source.

as night follows day…Inevitably. Possibly a Shakespearean coinage – in Hamlet (I.iii.78) (1600), Polonius says: ‘This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow as the night the day / Thou canst not then be false to any man’. Further examples: ‘Because, if incomes run ahead of production, it will follow as night follows day, that the only result will be higher prices and no lasting improvement in living standards’ – Harold Wilson in a speech to the Shopworkers’ Union Conference (1965); ‘As surely as night follows day, the pompous, the pretentious and the politically correct will seize the lion’s share of the money available’ – leading article, Daily Mail (28 April 1995).

as one does A slightly destabilizing comment in conversation. Indentified by Miles Kington in The Independent (2 May 2000): ‘One recent expression that has caught on in a big way is: “As one does,” or variants of it. Someone says, “I was going along the Piccadilly the other day wearing one green, one brown sock,” and while all the other listeners are waiting patiently to hear why this happened and whether it can be made funny, there is always one smart alec who pipes up: “As one does.” That is still very trendy, and I wish it wasn’t.’ Another version is as you do. ‘The couple retain a pad in Canada as well as homes in London, New York and Palm Beach, and it’s to Toronto that Lady Black “flies to get her hair cut”. As you do’ – The Guardian (26 August 2002).

as pleased as Punch The earliest citation for this phrase is in a letter from the poet Thomas Moore to Lady Donegal in 1813: ‘I was (as the poet says) as pleased as Punch.’ Obviously this alludes to the appearance of Mr Punch, a character known in England from the time of the Restoration (1660). As his face is carved on wood, it never changes expression and is always beaming. The Longman Dictionary of English Idioms (1979) is thus clearly wrong in attributing the origin of the phrase to ‘the cheerful pictures of the character Punch, who appeared on the covers of Punch magazine in the 1840s’. Even earlier, there was the expression as proud as punch. A description of a visit by George III and his Queen to Wilton House in 1778 is contained in a letter from a Dr Eyre to Lord Herbert (1 January 1779). He says: ‘The Blue Closet within was for her Majesty’s private purposes, where there was a red new velvet Close Stool, and a very handsome China Jordan, which I had the honour to produce from an old collection, & you may be sure, I am proud as Punch, that her Majesty condescended to piss in it.’ This version – ‘as proud as Punch’ – would now seem to have died out, more or less, although Christy Brown, Down All the Days, Chap. 17 (1970) has, ‘Every man-jack of them sitting there proud as punch with their sons…’

as queer as Dick’s hatband (it went round twice and then didn’t meet or wouldn’t tie) Very odd. Numerous versions of this saying have been recorded but all indicate that something is not right with a person or thing. ‘A botched-up job done with insufficient materials was “like Dick’s hat-band that went half-way round and tucked”’ – according to Flora Thompson, Lark Rise, Chap. 3 (1939). The OED2 gives the phrase thus: ‘as queer (tight, odd, etc.) as Dick’s (or Nick’s) hatband’, and adds: ‘Dick or Nick was probably some local character or half-wit, whose droll sayings were repeated.’ Partridge/Slang describes it as ‘an intensive tag of chameleonic sense and problematic origin’ and dating it from the mid-18th to the early 19th century, finds a Cheshire phrase, ‘all my eye and Dick’s hatband’, and also a version that went, ‘as queer as Dick’s hatband, that went nine times round and wouldn’t meet.’ In Grose (1796) is the definition: ‘I am as queer as Dick’s hatband; that is, out of spirits, or don’t know what ails me.’ But who was Dick, if anybody? Brewer (1894) was confident that it knew the answer: Richard Cromwell (1626–1712), who succeeded Oliver, his father, as Lord Protector in 1658 and did not make a very good job of it. Hence, ‘Dick’s hatband’ was his ‘crown’, as in the following expressions: Dick’s hatband was made of sand (‘his regal honours were a “rope of sand”’), as queer as Dick’s hatband (‘few things have been more ridiculous than the exaltation and abdication of Oliver’s son’) and as tight as Dick’s hatband (‘the crown was too tight for him to wear with safety’).

as right as ninepence Very right, proper, correct, in order. But why ninepence? Once again, the lure of alliteration lead to the (probably) earlier phrase ‘as nice as ninepence’, and then the slightly less happy phrase resulted when someone was coining an ‘as right as’ comparison. In any case, the word ‘ninepence’ occurs in a number of proverbial phrases (‘as like as nine pence to nothing’, ‘as neat as ninepence’), dating from the time when this was a more substantial amount of money than it now is.

as seen on TV A line used in print advertising to underline a connection with products already shown in TV commercials. Presumably of American origin and dating from the 1940s/50s. Now also used to promote almost anything – books, people – that has ever had the slightest TV exposure. From Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure (1976): ‘There was sponge cake of the most satisfactory consistency. Unlike the bready stuff that passes for sponge cake today (machine-made, packaged to be stirred up, as seen on TV)…’

as sure as eggs is eggs Absolutely certain. A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew by ‘B.E.’ has ‘As sure as eggs be eggs’ in 1699. There is no very obvious reason why eggs should be ‘sure’, unless the saying is a corruption of the mathematician or logician’s ‘x is x’. But by the 18th century, the saying was being shortened to ‘as sure as eggs’, which might dispose of that theory. Known by 1680. It occurs also in Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, Chap.43 (1836–7). Compare the rather different like as one egg to another (i.e. very like) which dates from Plautus in Latin but can be found in English forms from 1542. Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, I.ii.129 (1611) has: ‘Yet they say we are / Almost as like as eggs.’

as sure as I’m riding this bicycle A rather meaningless assertion of certainty or truth, not to be taken too seriously. Michael Flanders says, ‘Absolutely true, as sure as I’m riding this bicycle’, in his explanation following the song ‘Commonwealth Fair’ on the record album Tried By the Centre Court (1977). This was obviously a questionable assertion as he was sitting in his wheel-chair at the time. Similar expressions, to be believed or not, include ‘True as I’m strangling this ferret’ in BBC radio’s I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again (1960s), ‘as true as the gospel’ (earliest citation 1873), ‘as true as I live’ (1640), ‘as true as steel/velvet’ (1607).

(the) Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold An allusion to Byron’s line, ‘The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold’ from ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’, St. 1 (1815). Byron based his poem on 2 Chronicles 32 and 2 Kings 19, in which Sennacherib, King of Assyria, gets his comeuppance for besieging Jerusalem in this manner.

as the art mistress said to the gardener! Monica (Beryl Reid), the posh schoolgirl friend of Archie Andrews in the BBC radio show, Educating Archie (1950–60), used this as an alternative to the traditional:

as the Bishop said to the actress (or vice versa)! A device for turning a perfectly innocent preceding remark into a double entendre (e.g. ‘I’ve never seen a female “Bottom”…as the Bishop said to the actress’). The phrase was established by 1930 when Leslie Charteris used it no fewer than five times in Enter the Saint, including: ‘“I should be charmed to oblige you – as the actress said to the bishop,” replied the Saint’; ‘“There’s something I particularly want to do to-night.” “As the bishop said to the actress,” murmured the girl’; and, ‘“You’re getting on – as the actress said to the bishop,” he murmured.’

as the crow flies The shortest distance between two points. Known by 1800. In fact, crows seldom fly in a straight line but the point of the expression is to express how any bird might fly without having to follow the wanderings of a road (as an earthbound traveller would have to do).

as the monkey said…Introductory phrase to a form of Wellerism. For example, if a child says it can’t wait for something, the parent says: ‘Well, as the monkey said when the train ran over its tail, “It won’t be long now”.’ According to Partridge/Slang, there is any number of ‘as the monkey said’ remarks in which there is always a simple pun at stake: e.g. ‘“They’re off!” shrieked the monkey, as he slid down the razor blade.’

as the poet has it/says A quoter’s phrase, exhibiting either a knowing vagueness or actual ignorance. ‘As the poet says’ was being used in 1608. This is in a letter from the poet Thomas Moore to Lady Donegal in 1813: ‘I was (as the poet says) as pleased as Punch.’ When Margaret Thatcher was British Prime Minister, she was interviewed on radio (7 March 1982) about how she felt when her son, Mark, was believed lost on the Trans-Sahara car rally. She realized then, she said, that all the little things people worried about really were not worth it…‘As the poet said, “One clear morn is boon enough for being born,” and so it is.’ (In this case, she might be forgiven for using the phrase, as the authorship of the poem is not known.) The phrase can also be used to dignify an undistinguished quotation (rather as PARDON MY FRENCH excuses swearing): P. G. Wodehouse, Mike (1909): ‘As the poet has it, “Pleasure is pleasure, and biz is biz”.’

as the saying is Boniface, the landlord in George Farquhar’s play The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707), has a curious verbal mannerism. After almost every phrase, he adds, ‘As the saying is…’, but this was in itself a well-established phrase even then. In 1548, Hugh Latimer in The Sermon on the Ploughers had: ‘And I fear me this land is not yet ripe to be ploughed. For as the saying is: it lacketh weathering.’ Nowadays, ‘as the saying goes’ seems to be preferred. From R. L. Stevenson, Treasure Island, Chap. 4 (1883): ‘There were moments when, as the saying goes, I jumped in my skin for terror.’ Stevenson also uses ‘as the saying is’, however. Another, less common, form occurs in Mervyn Jones, John and Mary, Chap. 1 (1966): ‘She gave herself, as the phrase goes. It wouldn’t normally be said that I gave myself: I took her, as the phrase goes.’

as thick as two short planks Very thick (or stupid) indeed. Of course, the length of the planks is not material here, but never mind. OED2’s sole mention of the phrase dates only from 1987. Partridge/Slang dates the expression from 1950.

as though there were no tomorrow Meaning, ‘recklessly, with no regard to the future’ or ‘with desperate vigour’ (especially the spending of money), as Paul Beale glosses it in his revision of Partridge/Slang, suggesting that it was adopted from the USA in the late 1970s. However, it had been known since 1862. ‘The free travel scheme aimed at encouraging cyclists to use trains unearthed a biking underground which took to the trains like there was no tomorrow’ – Time Out (4 January 1980); ‘The evidence from the last major redrawing of council boundaries is mixed. Some authorities did go for broke, and spent their capital reserves as though there were no tomorrow’ – The Times (9 June 1994).

astonish me! A cultured variant of the more popular amaze me! or surprise me! inserted into conversation, for example, when the other speaker has just said something like, ‘I don’t know whether you will approve of what I’ve done…’ In some cases, an allusion to the remark made by Serge Diaghilev, the Russian ballet impresario, to Jean Cocteau, the French writer and designer, in Paris in 1912. Cocteau had complained to Diaghilev that he was not getting enough encouragement and the Russian exhorted him with the words, ‘Étonne-moi! I’ll wait for you to astound me’ – recorded in Cocteau’s Journals (1956).

as we know it ‘Politics as we know it will never be the same again’ – Private Eye (4 December 1981). This simple intensifier has long been with us, however. From Grove’s Dictionary of Music (1883): ‘The Song as we know it in his [Schubert’s] hands…such songs were his and his alone.’ From a David Frost/Peter Cook sketch on sport clichés (BBC TV, That Was the Week That Was, 1962–3 series): ‘The ghastly war which was to bring an end to organised athletics as we knew it.’

as we say in the trade A slightly self-conscious (even camp) tag after the speaker has uttered a piece of jargon or something unusually grandiloquent. First noticed in the 1960s and probably of American origin. From the record album Snagglepuss Tells the Story of the Wizard of Oz (1966): ‘“Once upon a time”, as we say in the trade…’ Compare the older as we say in France, after slipping a French phrase into English speech (from the 19th century) – and compare THAT’S YOUR ACTUAL FRENCH.

as you may know…or as you may not know See GOD, WHAT A BEAUTY.

at a stroke Although this expression for ‘with a single blow, all at once’ can be traced back to Chaucer, the allusion latterly has been to the supposed words of Edward Heath, in the run-up to the British General Election of 1970. ‘This would, at a stroke, reduce the rise in prices, increase productivity and reduce unemployment’ are words contained in a press release (No. G.E. 228), from Conservative Central Office, dated 16 June 1970, that was concerned with tax cuts and a freeze on prices by nationalized industries. The perceived promise of ‘at a stroke’, though never actually spoken by Heath, came to haunt him when he became Prime Minister two days later.

at daggers drawn Meaning, ‘hostile to each other’. Formerly, ‘at daggers’ drawing’ – when quarrels were settled by fights with daggers. Known by 1668 but common only from the 19th century. ‘Three ladies…talked of for his second wife, all at daggers drawn with each other’ – Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (1801). ‘It just might be different this time, however, because of a dimension that, amid all the nuclear brouhaha, has received much less attention than it merits. The two Korean governments may be at daggers drawn, but this has not stopped their companies from doing business’ – The Independent (28 June 1994); ‘The trick will be shown on The Andrew Newton Hypnotic Experience which starts on BSkyB next Friday and will have fellow illusionist Paul McKenna glued to his seat – the pair have been at daggers drawn for years’ – Today (8 October 1994).

(the) Athens of the North Nickname for Edinburgh, presumably earned by the city because of its reputation as a seat of learning. It has many long-established educational institutions and a university founded in 1583. In addition, when the ‘New Town’ was constructed in the early 1800s, the city took on a fine classical aspect. As such, it might remind spectators of the Greek capital with its ancient reputation for scholastic and artistic achievement. Calling the Scottish capital either ‘Athens of the North’ or ‘Modern Athens’ seems always to have occasioned some slight unease. James Hannay, writing ‘On Edinburgh’ (circa 1860), said: ‘Pompous the boast, and yet a truth it speaks: / A Modern Athens – fit for modern Greeks.’ Most such phrases date from the 19th century, though this kind of comparison has now become the prerogative of travel writers and journalists. Paris has been called the ‘Athens of Europe’, Belfast the ‘Athens of Ireland’, Boston, Mass., the ‘Athens of the New World’, and Cordoba, Spain, the ‘Athens of the West’. In one of James A. Fitzpatrick’s ‘Traveltalks’ – a supporting feature of cinema programmes from 1925 onwards – the commentator said: ‘And as the midnight sun lingers on the skyline of the city, we most reluctantly say farewell to Stockholm, Venice of the North…’ From Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers (1972): ‘McFee’s dead…he took offence at my description of Edinburgh as the Reykjavik of the South.’ ‘All those colorful canals, criss-crossing the city, that had made travel agents abroad burble about Bangkok as the Venice of the East’ – National Geographic Magazine (July 1967); ‘Vallam is a religious spot, once known as the Mount Athos of the North’ – Duncan Fallowell, One Hot Summer in St Petersburg (1994).

at one fell swoop In a single movement or action, all at once. A Shakespearean coinage. In Macbeth (IV.iii.219), Macduff is reacting to being told of the deaths of his wife and all his children: ‘Did you say all? – O Hell-kite! – All? / What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam, / At one fell swoop?’ So the image is that of a kite swooping on its prey. ‘Fell’ here means ‘fierce, ruthless’.

at one with the universe Meaning, ‘in harmony with the rest of mankind’ or, at least, ‘in touch with what is going on in some larger sphere’. When the Quaker George Fox (1624–91) consented to take a puff from a tobacco pipe, he said no one could accuse him of ‘not being at one with the universe’. Sometimes the phrase is ‘atoneness with the universe’. Compare, from Gore Vidal, Myra Breckinridge, Chap. 13 (1968): ‘[With a hangover from gin and marijuana] I lay in that empty bathtub with the two rings, [and] looking up at the single electric light bulb, I did have the sense that I was at one with all creation.’

attention all shipping! For many years on BBC radio, the shipping (weather) forecasts were preceded by this call when rough seas were imminent. Then would follow: ‘The following Gale Warning was issued by the Meterological Office at 0600 hours GMT today…’ (or whatever).

at the crack of dawn (or day) Meaning, ‘at the break of day, dawn’, but often used jovially in the sense of unpleasantly early, as when complaining of having to get up early to carry out some task. Apparently of US origin (by 1887), ‘crack of day’ seems to have come before ‘crack of dawn’.

at the drop of a hat Originally an American expression meaning ‘at a given signal’ – when the dropping of a hat was the signal to start a fight or race. The phrase has come to mean something more like ‘without needing encouragement, without delay.’ For example, ‘He’ll sit down and write a witty song for you at the drop of a hat.’ Hence, the title of a revue At the Drop of a Hat (1957) featuring Michael Flanders and Donald Swann – who followed it up with At the Drop of Another Hat (1963).

at the end of the day This must have been a good phrase once – alluding perhaps to the end of the day’s fighting or hunting. It appeared, for example, in Donald O’Keeffe’s 1951 song, ‘At the End of the Day, I Kneel and Pray’. But it was used in epidemic quantities during the 1970s and 1980s, and was particularly beloved of British trade unionists and politicians, indeed anyone wishing to tread verbal water. It was recognized as a hackneyed phrase by 1974, at least. Anthony Howard, a journalist, interviewing some BBC bigwig in Radio Times (March 1982), asked, ‘At the end of the day one individual surely has to take responsibility, even if it has to be after the transmission has gone out?’ Patrick Bishop, writing in The Observer (4 September 1983), said: ‘Many of the participants feel at the end of the day, the effects of the affair [the abortion debate in the Irish Republic] will stretch beyond the mere question of amendment.’ And Queen Elizabeth II, opening the Barbican Centre in March 1982, also used it. But it is the Queen’s English, so perhaps she is entitled to do what she likes with it.

at the grassroots (or from the grassroots) A political cliché, used when supposedly reflecting the opinions of the ‘rank and file’ and the ‘ordinary voter’ rather than the leadership of the political parties ‘at national level’. The full phrase is ‘from the grassroots up’ and has been used to describe anything of a fundamental nature since circa 1900 and specifically in politics from circa 1912 – originally in the US. A cliché in the UK since the late 1960s. A BBC Radio programme From the Grassroots started in 1970. Katherine Moore writing to Joyce Grenfell in An Invisible Friendship (letter of 13 October 1973): ‘Talking of writing – why have roots now always got to be grass roots? And what a lot of them seem to be about.’ ‘In spite of official discouragement and some genuine disquiet at the grassroots in both parties, 21 such joint administrations have been operating in counties, districts and boroughs over the past year’ – The Guardian (10 May 1995); ‘The mood of the grassroots party, and much of Westminster too, is for an end of big government, substantial cuts in taxation, cuts in public spending, toughness on crime, immigration and social-security spending, and as little Europe as possible’ – The Guardian (10 May 1995).

at the midnight hour The ‘midnight hour’ phrase may first have occurred in the poetry of Robert Southey. Thalaba the Destroyer (written 1799–1800, published 1801), a romance set in medieval Arabia, contains (Bk 8): ‘But when the Cryer from the Minaret / Proclaims the midnight hour, / Hast thou a heart to see her?’ Charles Lamb’s friend ‘Ralph Bigod’ [John Fenwick] in his essay ‘The two Races of Men’ (1820) has: ‘How magnificent, how ideal he was; how great at the midnight hour…’ In the same year, John Keats, ‘Ode to Psyche’, has: ‘Temple thou hast none, nor / Virginchoir to make delicious moan / Upon the midnight hours’. Keats also wrote of, ‘[Sleep] embalmer of the still midnight’, and so on. Edward Lear’s poem ‘The Dong With the Luminous Nose’ (1871) has ‘at that midnight hour’. The full phrase ‘at the midnight hour’ is a quotation from the Weston & Lee song ‘With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm (She Walks the Bloody Tower)’ (1934), as notably performed by Stanley Holloway. In a speech to the Indian Constituent Assembly (14 August 1947), Jawharlal Nehru said: ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.’ Wilson Pickett, the American soul singer, established the phrase ‘In the Midnight Hour’ with his hit single of that title (1965).

at the psychological moment Now rather loosely used to describe an opportune moment when something can be done or achieved. It is a mistranslation of the German phrase das psychologische Moment (which was, rather, about momentum) used by a German journalist during the 1870 siege of Paris. He was thought to be discussing the moment when the Parisians would most likely be demoralized by bombardment. With or without the idea of a mind being in a state of receptivity to some persuasion, a cliché by 1900. ‘The Prince is always in the background, and turns up at the psychological moment – to use a very hard-worked and sometimes misused phrase’ – Westminster Gazette (30 October 1897); The Psychological Moment – title of a book (1994) by Robert McCrum; ‘Indeed, some would argue that the end of hanging in 1969 was the psychological moment at which we ceased to take crime as a whole seriously, putting the liberal-humanitarian “conscience” first’ – Daily Mail (27 August 1994).

at this moment in time (or at this point in time) I.e. ‘now’. Ranks with AT THE END OF THE DAY near the top of the colloquial clichés’ poll. From its periphrastic use of five words where one would do, it would be reasonable to suspect an American origin. Picked up with vigour by British trade unionists for their ad-lib wafflings, it was already being scorned by 1971: ‘What comes across vis-à-vis the non-ambulant linguistic confrontation is a getting together of defensible media people at this moment in time. I am personally oriented towards helpless laughter at the postures of these bizarre communicators’ – letter to The Times from J. R. Barnes (2 December 1971); ‘There were five similar towers…but at this moment in time, they were only of passing interest’ – Clive Eagleton, October Plot (1974); ‘The phrase “at that point of time”…quickly became an early trademark of the whole Watergate affair’ – Atlantic Monthly (January 1975); ‘At this point in time’ was described by Eric Partridge in the preface to the 5th edition of his A Dictionary of Clichés (1978) as the ‘mentally retarded offspring’ of IN THIS DAY AND AGE. ‘The Marines, of course, had other ideas, but fortune was not favouring them at this moment in time’ – R. McGowan and J. Hands, Don’t Cry for Me, Sergeant Major (1983); ‘Thoroughly agree with you about the lowering of standards in English usage on the BBC. “At this moment of time” instead of “Now” is outrageous’ – Kenneth Williams, letter of 8 October 1976, in The Kenneth Williams Letters (1994); ‘At this point in time the private rented sector of the housing market was shrinking’ – The Irish Times (8 June 1977).

attitudes See ANGLO-SAXON.

at your throat or at your feet Either attacking you or in submissive mode. Working backwards through the citations: according to J. R. Colombo’s Popcorn in Paradise (1979), Ava Gardner said about a well-known American film critic: ‘Rex Reed is either at your feet or at your throat.’ From Marlon Brando in Playboy (January 1979): ‘Chaplin reminded me of what Churchill said about the Germans: either at your feet or at your throat.’ In fact, almost every use of the phrase tends to mention Winston Churchill. He said in a speech to the US Congress (19 May 1943): ‘The proud German Army by its sudden collapse, sudden crumbling and breaking up, has once again proved the truth of the saying “The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet”.’ That is as far back as the phrase has been traced, though Dorothy L. Sayers, Have His Carcase, Chap. 12 (1932), has the similar: ‘Like collies – lick your boots one minute and bite you the next.’

au contraire, mon frère See EAT MY SHORTS.

August See MAKES YOUR ARMPIT.

auld lang syne Meaning, ‘long ago’ (literally, ‘old long since’). ‘Syne’ should be pronounced with an ‘s’ sound and not as ‘zyne’. In 1788, Robert Burns adapted ‘Auld Lang Syne’ from ‘an old man’s singing’. The title, first line and refrain had all appeared before as the work of other poets. Nevertheless, what Burns put together is what people should sing on New Year’s Eve. Here is the first verse and the chorus: ‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot, / And never brought to min[d]? / Should auld acquaintance be forgot, / And days of o’ lang syne. / (Chorus) For auld lang syne, my dear / For auld syne, / We’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet / For auld lang syne.’ ‘For the sake of auld lang syne’ should not be substituted at the end of verse and chorus.

aunt See AGONY; MY GIDDY.

Aunt Edna During the revolution in British drama of the 1950s, this term was called into play by the new wave of ‘angry young’ dramatists and their supporters to describe the more conservative theatregoer – the type who preferred comfortable three-act plays of the Shaftesbury Avenue kind. Ironically, the term was coined in self-defence by Terence Rattigan, one of the generation of dramatists they sought to replace. In the preface to Vol. II of his Collected Plays (1953) he had written of: ‘A nice, respectable, middle-class, middle-aged maiden lady, with time on her hands and the money to help her pass it…Let us call her Aunt Edna…Now Aunt Edna does not appreciate Kafka…She is, in short, a hopeless lowbrow…Aunt Edna is universal, and to those who may feel that all the problems of the modern theatre might be solved by her liquidation, let me add that…she is also immortal.’

Auntie/Aunty BBC (or plain Auntie/Aunty) The BBC was mocked in this way by newspaper columnists, TV critics and her own employees, most noticeably from about 1955 at the start of commercial television – the Corporation supposedly being staid, over-cautious, prim and unambitious by comparison. A BBC spokesman countered with, ‘An Auntie is often a much loved member of the family.’ The corporation assimilated the nickname to such effect that when arrangements were made to supply wine to BBC clubs in London direct from vineyards in Burgundy, it was bottled under the name Tantine. In 1979, the comedian Arthur Askey claimed that he had originated the term during the Band Waggon programme as early as the late 1930s. While quite probable, the widespread use of the nickname is more likely to have occurred at the time suggested above. Wallace Reyburn in his book Gilbert Harding – A Candid Portrayal (1978) ascribes the phrase to the 1950s’ radio and TV personality. The actor Peter Bull in I Know the Face, But… (1959) writes: ‘I would be doing my “nut” and probably my swansong for Auntie BBC.’ The politician Iain Macleod used the phrase when editing The Spectator in the 1960s. Jack de Manio, the broadcaster, entitled his memoirs To Auntie With Love (1967), and the comedian Ben Elton had a BBC TV show The Man from Auntie (1990–4).

au reservoir! A jokey valediction (obviously based on au revoir) popularized by E. F. Benson in his Lucia novels of the 1920s. The phrase may have existed before this, possibly dating from a Punch joke of the 1890s.

(an) auspicious occasion Cliché used in speech-making or at any time when portentousness or pomposity is demanded. In fact, almost any use of the word ‘auspicious’ is a candidate for clichédom: ‘Drinking around the imposing stone in order to celebrate some auspicious occasion’ – Charles T. Jacobi, The Printers’ Vocabulary (1888); ‘An auspicious debut on the platform was made the other day by Mr Winston Churchill, elder son of the late Lord Randolph Churchill’ – Lady (5 August 1897); ‘What about a glass of sherry to celebrate the auspicious occasion?’ – ‘Taffrail’, Pincher Martin (1916); ‘The longer the game wore on the more obvious it became that Forest could not even rise to this auspicious occasion, much as they yearned to give their manager the mother and father of all send-offs’ – The Sunday Times (2 May 1993).

Austin Reed service See IT’S ALL PART OF THE SERVICE.

Australia See ADVANCE.

author! author! The traditional cry of an audience summoning the playwright whose work it has just watched to come on the stage and receive its plaudits. Date of origin unknown. ‘After the final curtain [at the first night of Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892)] the applause was long and hearty, and Wilde came forward from the wings to cries of “Author!”’ – Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde, Chap. 14 (1987); Author! Author! – title of a book (1962) by P. G. Wodehouse.

avoid ‘five o’clock shadow’ The expression ‘five o’clock shadow’ for the stubbly growth that some dark-haired men acquire on their faces towards the end of the day would appear to have originated in adverts for Gem Razors and Blades in the USA before the Second World War. A 1937 advert added: ‘That unsightly beard growth which appears prematurely at about 5 pm looks bad.’ The most noted sufferer was Richard Nixon, who may have lost the TV debates in his US presidential race against John F. Kennedy in 1960 as a result. In his Memoirs (1978), Nixon wrote: ‘Kennedy arrived…looking tanned, rested and fit. My television adviser, Ted Rodgers, recommended that I use television make-up, but unwisely I refused, permitting only a little “beard stick” on my perpetual five o’clock shadow.’

(to) avoid---like the plague To avoid completely, to shun. The OED2 finds the poet Thomas Moore in 1835 writing, ‘Saint Augustine…avoided the school as the plague’. The 4th-century St Jerome is also said to have quipped, ‘Avoid as you would the plague, a clergyman who is also a man of business.’ A well-established cliché by the mid-20th century. It may have been Arthur Christiansen, one of the numerous former editors of the Daily Express about that time, who once posted a sign in the office saying: ‘ALL CLICHÉS SHOULD BE AVOIDED LIKE THE PLAGUE.’

Avon calling! A slogan first used in the USA in 1886. The first Avon Lady, Mrs P. F. A. Allre, was employed by the firm’s founder, D. H. McConnell, to visit customers at home and sell them cosmetics.

award-winning---As used in promotion, especially of theatre, films and publishing. Depressing because it does not describe its subject in any useful way. Almost any actor in a leading role is likely to have received one of the many theatrical awards available at some time, just as any writer may (however illegitimately) be called a ‘best-selling author’ if more than just a few copies of his or her books have been sold. The phrase was in use by 1962. From the Evening Standard (London) (17 February 1993): ‘Why go on about the latest “award-winning documentary maker”? If you get a documentary on television, you win an award: it goes with the territory.’ ‘Giles Cooper, who died nearly twenty years ago, is described in today’s Times as “award-winning playwright Giles Cooper”. I’d have thought one of the few things to be said in favour of death was that it extinguished all that’ – Alan Bennett, diary entry for 30 June 1984, quoted in Writing Home (1994); ‘Awardwinning actor Michael Gambon can also be seen…David Hare has written many successful plays and screenplays, including his award-winning trilogy…the Pulitzer Prize winning author, John Updike…’ – Royal National Theatre brochure (26 June–28 August 1995); ‘We also introduce some new writers this week. Allison Pearson, the award-winning TV Critic of the year, joins us from the Independent on Sunday…Kenneth Roy, another new award-winning voice…will be writing a personal weekly peripatetic notebook’ – The Observer (27 August 1995).

away See AND AWAY.

aw, don’t embarrass me! British ventriloquist Terry Hall (b. 1926) first created his doll, Lenny the Lion, from a bundle of fox fur and papier-mâché – with a golf ball for a nose – in 1954. He gave his new partner a gentle lisping voice, and added a few mannerisms and a stock phrase that emerged thus: ‘He’s ferocious! (drum roll) / He’s courageous! (drum roll) / He’s the king of the jungle! (drum roll) / – Aw, don’t embarrass me! (said with a modest paw over one eye).’ Unusually for the originator of a successful phrase, Terry Hall said (in 1979) that he made sure he did not overuse it and rested it from time to time.

awful See AMUSING.

awkward See AS AWKWARD.

(the) awkward age Adolescence – when one is no longer a child but not yet a fully fledged adult. Current by the late 19th century and possibly a development of the French l’âge ingrat. Hence, The Awkward Age, the title of a novel (1899) by Henry James.

(the) awkward squad Of military origin and used to denote a group of difficult, uncooperative people, the phrase originally referred to a squad that consisted of raw recruits and older hands who were put in it for punishment. The phrase may also have been applied to a group of soldiers who are briefed to behave awkwardly and in an undisciplined fashion in order to test the drilling capabilities of an officer under training. Sloppy in Our Mutual Friend (1864–5) is described by Charles Dickens as ‘Full-Private Number One in the Awkward Squad of the rank and file of life’. The dying words of the Scots poet Robert Burns in 1796 are said to have been, ‘John, don’t let the awkward squad fire over me’ – presumably referring to his fear that literary opponents might metaphorically fire a volley of respect, as soldiers sometimes do over a new grave.

(I) awoke one morning and found myself famous Byron’s famous comment on the success of the first two cantos of Childe Harold in 1812 has become an expression in its own right. It was first quoted in Thomas Moore, The Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830).

AWOL ‘Absent WithOut Leave’ – unwarranted absence from the military for a short period but falling short of actual desertion. This expression dates from the American Civil War when offenders had to wear a placard with these initials printed on it. During the First World War, the initials were still being pronounced individually. It does not mean ‘absent without official leave’.

(to have an) axe to grind The expression meaning ‘to have an ulterior motive, a private end to serve’ would appear to have originated with an anecdote related by Benjamin Franklin in his essay ‘Too Much for Your Whistle’. A man showed interest in young Franklin’s grindstone and asked how it worked. In the process of explaining, Franklin – using much energy – sharpened up the visitor’s axe for him. This was clearly what the visitor had had in mind all along. Subsequently, Franklin (who died in 1790) had to ask himself whether other people he encountered had ‘another axe to grind’. Cited as a ‘dying metaphor’ by George Orwell in ‘Politics and the English Language’ in Horizon (April 1946). ‘Manhattan Cable showed that some of the most ordinary people are very good on TV. In Britain, where the idea of access is a familiar one, it’s still a very mediated and restricted thing where you have to have a politically correct axe to grind’ – The Guardian (24 October 1991).

aye, aye, that’s yer lot! Signing-off line of Jimmy Wheeler (1910–73), a British Cockney comedian with a fruity voice redolent of beer, jellied eels and winkles. He would appear in a bookmaker’s suit, complete with spiv moustache and hat, and play the violin. At the end of his concluding fiddle piece, he would break off and intone these words.

aye caramba See EAT MY SHORTS.

aye, well – ye ken noo! ‘Well, you know better now, don’t you!’ – said after someone has admitted ignorance or has retold an experience that taught a lesson. It is the punch line of an old Scottish story about a Presbyterian minister preaching a hell-fire sermon whose peroration went something like this: ‘And in the last days ye’ll look up from the bottomless pit and ye’ll cry, “Lord, Lord, we did na ken [we did not know]”, and the Guid Lord in his infinite mercy will reply…“Aye, well – ye ken noo!”’

ay thang yew! A distinctive pronunciation of ‘I thank you!’ picked up from the cry of London bus conductors by Arthur Askey for the BBC radio show Band Waggon (1938–39) and used by him thereafter. He commented (1979): ‘I didn’t know I was saying it till people started to shout it at me.’ Later, as I Thank You, it became the title of one of Askey’s films (1941).

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