Common Phrases Read online

  Also by Max Cryer:

  Hear Our Voices, We Entreat (Exisle 2004)

  The Godzone Dictionary (Exisle 2006)

  Love Me Tender (Exisle 2008)

  Common Phrases

  . . . And the Amazing Stories Behind Them

  Max Cryer

  Copyright © 2010 by Max Cryer

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 555 Eighth Avenue, Suite 903, New York, NY 10018.

  Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 555 Eighth Avenue, Suite 903, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cryer, Max.

  Common phrases : and the amazing stories behind them / Max Cryer.

  p. cm.

  9781616081430

  1. English language--Terms and phrases--Dictionaries. 2. English language--Idioms--Dictionaries. 3. English language--Etymology--Dictionaries. I. Title.

  PE1689.C79 2010

  423’.1--dc22

  2010023863

  ALA edition ISBN: 978-0-8389-1097-9

  Printed in the United States of America

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by Max Cryer:

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  A

  B

  C

  D

  E

  F

  G

  H

  I

  J

  K

  L

  M

  N

  O

  P

  Q

  R

  S

  T

  U

  V

  W

  Y

  The last word

  Sources

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author thanks Joe Gilfillan, Graeme and Valerie Fisher, Robbie Ancell, Nigel Horrocks, Bryan Staff, Stephen Jennings, David Stevens, Geoffrey Pooch, Paul Barrett, Richard and Pamela Wolfe, and Ian Watt.

  INTRODUCTION

  After seeing a performance of Hamlet, a little old lady supposedly remarked, “So many quotes!” But she could well have said the same thing at any other point in her day. We are surrounded by quotes in everyday speech, not necessarily from Shakespeare.

  Other bright minds have come up with expressions we now take for granted as part of the English language, and which we use freely in vernacular speech. But unlike Hamlet, the originators of many of our most useful second-hand remarks go uncredited.

  Who said it first?

  This collection sets out to credit—as far as it’s possible to do so—the people who actually created many familiar terms in common use. For example, poor Ernest Dowson is all but forgotten, but author Margaret Mitchell read his 1891 poem “Non Sum Qualis” and brought one phrase from that poem to the attention of millions. The phrase that caught her eye was “…gone with the wind.” (In 1867, Dowson also wrote another familiar phrase: “…the days of wine and roses.”)

  And who remembers Mrs. Daeda Wilcox? In 1887 she told her realtor husband about an attractive name she heard mentioned on a train as she was returning to her home in Los Angeles. Mr.Wilcox liked it and immediately registered the land he owned nearby as—Hollywood.

  Sometimes it has to be acknowledged that an expression became known because someone other than the originator introduced an existing term to a wider public, either in print or by exclamation.

  Only a limited number of people would know of Sir Edward Spencer Ford, but in 1992 he wrote a letter to the Queen making a kindly comment on the difficult year she’d had. He included a variation on a phrase taken from the title of a 1667 poem by John Dryden.

  In a speech soon afterward, the Queen said:

  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.

  The term “annus horribilis” hit the headlines immediately, clearly because of the impact of Elizabeth Windsor saying it, rather than Dryden or Sir Edward Spencer Ford.

  This collection does not claim to include every expression in common usage that arose from a specified person—there are too many to cover in one book. Two major (and rich) sources of English expressions—the Bible and the works of Shakespeare—have generally been excluded, partly because they have been covered many times before. One exception can be found under “Red Sky”, and Bernard Levin’s brilliant condensation of just some of Shakespeare’s expressions is reproduced by permission on pages 315–16.

  Some of our favorite and frequently used expressions date back to ancient civilizations and an impressive number come from nineteenth-century literary luminaries. Dickens, Thackeray, and Scott have all left small but active landmarks on our speech—but then so has party-girl Mandy Rice-Davies, who simply said, “Well he would, wouldn’t he?”

  Sometimes there are gentle surprises: “brunch” was invented in England in 1896; Graham Greene first linked “fame” with “aphrodisiac”; “iron curtain” had been in use for forty years before Winston Churchill said it; we have P.G. Wodehouse to thank for “straight from the horse’s mouth”; and H. Rider Haggard for “she who must be obeyed.”

  There is no evidence at all that Queen Victoria ever said, “We are not amused,” or that Marie Antoinette said, “Let them eat cake.” But Andy Warhol did say that everyone would be “famous for fifteen minutes.”

  Where did he say it, and when? Read on ...

  A-1

  In London in 1716, Edward Lloyd began publishing a weekly Lloyd’s List of shipping information. Ships were given two symbols: a letter of the alphabet used to classify ships’ hulls, attached to one of the initials G, M, or B, signifying the ship’s equipment as “Good,” “Middling” or “Bad.”

  In 1776 the quality of equipment symbols G, M, B were replaced by the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, still in combination with A, E, I, O, U. Thus A-1 became a designation of the greatest excellence.

  Absence makes the heart grow fonder

  Born around 50–45 BC, the Latin poet Sextus Aurelius Propertius in one of his Elegies pronounced, “Passion is always warmer towards absent lovers” (Semper in absentes felicior aestus amantes).

  The phrase first appeared in English 1,500 years later as the title of a poem by an anonymous writer. This poem and others on the theme of absence were included in the collection called Poetical Rhapsody (1602), put together by Elizabethan poet (and spy) Francis Davison.

  But the expression only began to assume the status of a proverb after 1844, following the publication of Englishman Thomas Haynes Bayly’s poem “Isle of Beauty.” The stanza which drew attention:

  What would not I give to wander

  Where my old companions dwell?

  Absence makes the heart grow fonder:

  Isle of Beauty, fare thee well!

  Bayly never knew how widely used the phrase would become—his poem appeared over a decade after he had died.

  See also Out of sight, out of mind

  Accidentally on purpose

  Combining as it does two normally contradictory terms, “accidentally on purpose” is a fine example of an oxymoron. Its first known appearance was in the memoirs of prol
ific Irish writer and poet Sydney, Lady Morgan, published in 1862. Her use of quotation marks suggests the phrase may have already been known to her:

  Dermody neglected the order –

  perhaps “accidentally on purpose.”

  (The) affluent society

  As far back as AD 115, the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus acknowledged that

  Many who seem to be struggling with adversity are happy; many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable.

  So the awareness wasn’t new. After World War II, Canadianborn economist John Kenneth Galbraith contemplated the growing prosperity and materialism of America—the increasing ownership of cars, televisions, home appliances, etc., but observed that these consumer “needs” could be considered trivial against the importance of larger and less well financed public systems.

  He coined a term intended to be ironic—“the affluent society,” which in 1958 became the title of his widely discussed book. In later usage, the term lost its ironic overtones and simply came to mean general prosperity.

  Agree to disagree

  John Wesley, the English theologian who developed Methodism, had doctrinal differences with the evangelist George Whitefield, yet respected the other man’s strength of belief and firmness of opinion.When Whitefield died in 1770,Wesley said in his sermon:

  There are many doctrines of a less essential nature . . .

  In these we may think and let think; we may “agree to

  disagree.” But, meantime, let us hold fast the essentials . . .

  Wesley’s use of quote marks suggests the phrase was a term already in use, but his sermon marks its first known appearance in print.

  John Wesley and his brother Charles were also at odds over religious matters. Charles Wesley gave us an alternative version, replacing “disagree” with “differ.” In 1787 Charles wrote to John: “Stand to your own proposal, ‘let us agree to differ.’”

  All dressed up and nowhere to go

  A lament of the socially isolated, the term originated as “no place to go,” from two separate songs in 1913. The Indiana University holds “All Dressed Up and No Place to Go” by Joseph Daley and Thomas Allen, though it is not heard of much elsewhere. But the other song from the same year, “All Dressed Up and No Place to Go,” music by Silvio Hein, words by Benjamin Hapgood Burt, was a huge success in the Broadway show Beauty Shop (1914), as sung by Raymond Hitchcock.

  When you’re all dressed up and no place to go,

  Life seems weary, dreary and slow. My heart has ached and

  bled for the tears I’ve shed, When I’d no place to go unless I

  went back to bed.

  All of a doodah

  American songwriter Stephen Foster’s song officially called “Gwine To Run All Night” was published in 1850, telling of a haphazard race meeting near a workingmen’s tent city. The opening line introduced a famous catchphrase with no particular meaning: “Camptown ladies sing dis song, doo dah, doo dah.”

  A century later P.G. Wodehouse launched an adaptation of the phrase into the language, having created a meaning for it signifying that someone (or it could be something) was being distinctly aberrant in behavior. In Pigs Have Wings (1952) we are told that Galahad Threepwood observed that Lord Clarence Emsworth had the look of a dying duck and was clearly in distress:

  Poor old Clarence was patently all of a doodah.

  All over bar the shouting

  Although the meaning is clear—that the conclusion of a matter appears evident—the actual genesis of the expression is clouded. It could have arisen in the context of nineteenth-century sports or politics.

  It appeared in print for the first time in 1842. Charles James Apperley, born in Plas-Grenow, Wales, began writing for The Sporting Magazine in 1821, often using the pen-name Nimrod. His 1842 book The Life of a Sportsman, while depicting a horse-racing situation, carried the first printing of what became a vernacular term:

  “I’ll bet an even hundred on the young one,” roars O’Hara. “Done with you,” says Lord Marley.

  “I’ll bet 6 to 4 on the young one,” roars Nightingale, with a small telescope to his eye; no one answered. “It’s all over but shouting,” exclaims Lilly; “Antonio’s as dead as a hammer.”

  This was the forerunner of the variants “all over bar the shouting” and “all over except the shouting.”

  All’s fair in love and war

  The centuries have smoothed out the syntax a little, but the meaning is clear in John Lyly’s Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit (1579). Written in the elaborate and artificial style (euphuism) that was eventually named after it, there is the line:

  Anye impietie may lawfully be committed in loue, which is lawlesse.

  All’s right with the world

  In 1841 the people of Asolo in Northern Italy were rather offended by a series of poems depicting a poor orphan girl wandering through the less savory areas of their town and describing in a matter-of-fact manner the squalid sights she encountered.

  Poet Robert Browning created this girl in his poem “Pippa Passes.” The scandalous goings-on Pippa recounts (including those of Ottima the adulteress) are long forgotten, but the line in which Pippa’s optimism transcends her hard life has remained in collective memory:

  God’s in his Heaven—All’s right with the world.

  This line is sometimes misquoted as “All’s well with the world.”

  All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening

  American writer and drama critic Alexander Woolcott told Readers Digest in 1933:

  All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening.

  In use, the order of the first two adjectives is sometimes reversed. Comedy movie actor W.C. Fields repeated a version of the line the following year, as the sheriff Honest John Hoxley in Six of a Kind.

  (The) almighty dollar

  British writer Ben Jonson recognized that the regard for wealth often engendered a quasi-religious respect when he wrote to the Countess of Rutland in 1616:

  Whilst that for which all virtue now is sold,

  And almost every vice, almightie gold.

  Two centuries later the American writer Washington Irving travelled through the riverbank settlements of Louisiana and, noting their “contented poverty,” wrote that:

  The almighty dollar, that great object of universal devotion throughout our land, seems to have no genuine devotees in these peculiar villages.

  When Irving’s remarks were published in 1836, a new catchphrase entered the language.

  Annus horribilis

  When Queen Elizabeth II used the expression during a speech at the Guildhall, referring to the year 1992, its aptness and novelty caught immediate attention. Her use of the expression was widely quoted and the term was often attributed to the Queen herself. But the conduit which brought it to her, and the English-speaking world at large, was sidelined by commentators who overlooked one part of the Queen’s speech. She said:

  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.”

  The expression was a modern reversal of the term known in the 1600s and used by John Dryden as the title of his 1667 poem “Annus Mirabilis, the Year of Wonders, 1666.”

  Prior to the Queen’s speech, the “Mirabilis” version had been seen occasionally as an expression in newspapers and as the title of a Philip Larkin poem in 1967. But the Queen’s “sympathetic correspondent,” Sir Edward Spencer Ford, who had been secretary to her father King George, reversed the term in a letter to the Queen, which she quoted in her Guildhall speech.

  When Sir Edward Spencer Ford died, the Guardian described him as the person who gave “the Queen’s worst year in office its Latin tag.”

  Any port in a storm

  The idiom suggests taking any chance that offers itself, especially when connected to storms at sea, but the expression’s first outing
in print involved “ports” of a rather more ribald kind. The words come from John Cleland’s Fanny Hill—Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749). One of Fanny’s love partners is a sailor who, in the throes of passion, confuses Fanny about what might be called his sense of misdirection and which “door” he is approaching. Fanny reports that the sailor uses nautical imagery in replying:

  “Pooh,” says he, “my dear, any port in a storm.”

  A-OK

  The possible origins of OK have resulted in the world dividing into numerous factions, each of which believes their derivation to be the correct one.

  A-OK has a slightly narrower reference base. In 1961, when American astronaut Alan Shepard was in suborbital space flight, he made at one point a particularly jubilant call of OK.

  Back at the NASA base, Colonel John Powers misheard the call as A-OK. This had a certain logic to it—an amplification of satisfaction surpassing good old OK to mean “very OK” or “beyond OK,” and Powers put the term about the base and the media before he had the opportunity to discuss it with Shepard in person.

  Some confusion later arose about whether Shepard did actually say A-OK, or whether Powers misheard him.