Common Phrases

by Max Cryer

  Three years later, in 1941, the term “back-room boys” acquired a strong connotation of unsung scientists, inventors, or strategists—anyone whose essential work on a project went largely unpublicized. This came about when Lord Beaverbrook, Britain’s wartime Minister of Aircraft Production, made a speech honoring the government’s researchers. Beaverbrook—who must have been a Dietrich fan—announced:

  Let me say that the credit belongs to the boys in the back rooms. It isn’t the man who sits in the limelight like me who should have the praise. It is not the men in prominent places. It is the men in the back rooms.

  Bread and circuses

  The saying started life in the second century AD when Decimus Junius Juvenalis (Juvenal for short) wrote satirically of those Romans who had given up national pride. They were wooed by a government seeking populist political power through the provision of free grain and stadium spectaculars: “panem et circenses.” (Circus referred to a round or oval-shaped open space in which spectacular entertainments took place involving chariot races or gladiatorial contests.)

  In 1914 the expression moved into the English language with the publication of the book Bread and Circuses by prolific Britishborn poet Helen Parry Eden. The New York Times (July 1914) called it a “conundrum” that she had used that title for a collection of “pleasant verses”; however, she had put the expression into usage, ready to be picked up by Rudyard Kipling (Debits and Credits) and then Aldous Huxley (Brave New World Revisited).

  (They) broke the mold

  In literature, the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto is mainly identified with his work Orlando Furioso (1516), a poem dealing with the knights of Charlemagne in wars against the Saracens. One line from the lengthy work has gone into common usage:

  There never was such beauty in another man.

  Nature made him, and then broke the mold.

  (Non e un si bello in tante altre persone,

  Natura il fece, e poi roppa la stampa.)

  Brunch

  The word conjures an image of a contemporary urban lifestyle, but in fact it came into being in nineteenth-century Britain. Punch reported (August 1896) that the word brunch had been:

  . . . introduced last year by Mr. Guy Beringer, in the now defunct Hunter’s Weekly—indicating a combined breakfast and lunch . . . probably taken just after arriving home from hunting.

  (The) buck stops here

  Printed on a small sign sitting on the desk of President Harry S. Truman, the expression was firmly associated with the President himself, although not created by him.

  The expression was first referred to in a Nevada newspaper in 1942 as a “desk slogan” of Colonel A.B. Warfield. Three years later a version had turned up at the Federal Reformatory at El Reno, Oklahoma, where it was spotted by U.S. Marshal Fred M. Canfil. He arranged with the reformatory warden that a copy be made, which he posted to President Truman in 1945. Truman placed the sign on his desk and used the phrase quite often.

  It went into popular usage, even when referring to administrative hierarchies less exalted than the Presidency. One of its more unusual outings was in an unexpected context. Edward Mirzeoff’s 1992 British television documentary Elizabeth R, celebrating the fortieth year of the Queen’s reign, showed her dealing with a very large daily correspondence. Explaining her wish to see in person what people wrote to her, Her Majesty cheerfully acknowledged that “the buck stops here.”

  (The buck was the term used by poker players referring to the marker placed in front of the next person who was to deal—the buck stopped there. Should the player for any reason not want to deal, he passed the buck to someone else.)

  Bull in a china shop

  Although the expression in its current form came first from the pen of Frederick Marryat, the idea had been around for a long time before that—but not quite as we know it. James Boswell came close: in 1769 Boswell wrote that the “delicate and polite” Mr. Berenger had described Dr. Johnson’s behavior in genteel company as being like that of “an ox in a china shop.”

  Sir Walter Scott retained the action but changed the animal in The Fortunes of Nigel (1822):

  A person who had a general acquaintance with all the flaws and specks in the shields of the proud, the pretending and the nouveaux riches, must have the same scope for amusement as a monkey in a china shop.

  Just over a decade later, Marryat’s novel Jacob Faithful (1834) brought the image into line:

  Whatever it is that smashes, Mrs. T always swears it was the most valuable thing in the room. I’m like a bull in a china shop.

  (In 1936 considerable publicity was engendered by an incident in New York. Bandleader Fred Waring and actor Paul Douglas had a bet, which Waring lost. His penalty for losing the bet was to lead a full-grown bull through a real china shop and pay for any damage the bull might cause. In the event, the bull sauntered elegantly through the shop without damaging a single piece. Ironically, Waring was so nervous that he knocked over a table full of valuable ornaments.)

  Bunch of fives

  In spite of its contemporary sound, the expression bunch of fives was current in the early nineteenth century, and is first referred to in 1821 in Boxiana, a published collection of magazine articles on boxing by Pierce Egan.

  Blackwood’s Edinburgh Review of 1823 makes special mention of Egan’s bunch of fives expression. Charles Dickens had picked it up by 1837—in Pickwick Papers Orson Dabbs is said to be “shaking his bunch of fives sportively as one snaps an unloaded gun.”

  See also Tom and Jerry

  Burn the midnight oil

  In lifestyles that often included working late, with only candles and oil lamps available, burning midnight oil was no doubt a reality and this was long before the seventeenth century; however, it was 1635 when the concept was actually seen in print.

  Virtually forgotten now, English author Francis Quarles was secretary to the Primate of Ireland, “official chronologer” to the City of London, and father of eighteen children. Little surprise then that his 1635 poem “Emblems” included the lines:

  We spend our midday sweat, our midnight oil,

  We tire the night in thought, the day in toil.

  Business before pleasure

  Hardly a household name nowadays, Letitia Elizabeth Landon was an extremely popular and widely read writer in the nineteenth century. Remarkably, for a female writer of her time, she was able to maintain financial independence from her very prolific output: hundreds of published poems, children’s stories, translations of foreign works, literary reviews, several plays, a collection of short stories, and several novels.

  One of the latter, Francesca Carrara (1834), is now seldom mentioned, but a rare copy in the Harvard University Library shows that L.E. Landon came up with the first known use of what later became a byword of mercantile discipline:

  Business before pleasure, I am ready to grant; but when there is none, il faut s’amuser!

  Busy as a one-armed paper-hanger

  There have been various versions since (and possibly before) but O. Henry’s 1908 story “The Ethics of a Pig” told of a con man who buys an ordinary pig and attempts to on-sell it for exhibition as an “educated hog.” In this story the ancestor of the basic image was launched into the international arena:

  “Let me tote him in for you,” says Rufe; and he picks up the beast under one arm, holding his snout with the other hand, and packs him into my room like a sleeping baby . . . And then I got as busy as a one-armed man with the nettle-rash pasting on wall-paper. I found an old Negro man with an express wagon to hire; and we tied the pig in a sack and drove down to the circus grounds.

  Later alternative versions have the tradesman busy trying to work in a gale with his trouser buttons coming adrift, or afflicted with hives. Other offshoots tell about the one-legged man in a bum-kicking competition or a dog busy burying a bone in a marble floor.

  By hook or by crook

  Since it first appeared in English in the fourteenth century, the exact original mea
nings of “hook” and “crook” have become clouded and much disputed. But the overall sense remains intact—that something will be accomplished by any means possible, no matter how difficult.

  John Wycliffe in 1380 was writing his criticisms of the Catholic Church in English and not, like other scholars, in Latin. Wycliffe wanted his comments to be available to everyone:

  They sillen sacramentis ... and compellen men to bie alle this with hok or crok (They sell sacraments and compel men to buy all this with hook or crook).

  Call a spade a spade

  Ancient writers Menander, Lucian, Aristophanes, and Plutarch all referred to the idea, as far back as 200 BC, though there is some linguistic doubt whether they were calling a spade a spade or a trough a trough.

  Dutch scholar Erasmus chose spade when he wrote of the ancients, and the term came into English in 1539, translated by Richard Taverner. The latter’s Garden of Wysdome (1539) says:

  Whiche call a mattok nothing els but a mattok, and a spade a spade.

  (A mattock is another kind of digging tool.)

  Charles Dickens confirmed the contemporary English version in Hard Times (1854) when Bounderby says:

  There’s no imaginative sentimental humbug about me. I call a spade a spade.

  One of the expression’s more amusing outings occurs in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, in a dialogue of class war between Miss Cecily Cardew and the Hon. Gwendoline Fairfax. Proud of her honesty, Miss Cardew declares: “When I see a spade, I call it a spade,” only to be squelched by the Hon. Gwen with her reply: “I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade.”

  Canned laughter

  Laughter is generally infectious; humor is more exhilarating when enjoyed (and reacted to) by a group. In the fledgling days of American comedy shows on television, this proved to be a worry. People sitting at home in front of a box—alone or in twos and threes—lacked encouragement to feel fully amused.

  Columbia Broadcasting sound engineer Charley Douglass invented what he called canned laughter—a method of adding pre-recorded laughter to a studio performance where no audience was present, or adding and modifying laughter where some already existed but was deemed insufficient.

  The device made its debut on a no-audience situation in The Hank McCune Show (1949). Douglass’s invention had plenty of usage over the following decades—sometimes with doubtful results, such as the same recognizable “laugh” being repeated several times within a few minutes. There was also some doubt about its use with animated cartoon shows—everyone knew there could be no audience.

  Charley Douglass’s canned laughter began to fade from favor toward the close of the twentieth century.

  Cash register

  It’s a simple enough term, but someone had to be first. Back in 1879 Ohio restaurant proprietor James J. Ritty was concerned that some of his customers’ payments were going into staff pockets. On an ocean trip he saw a device which counted the number of revolutions made by a propeller, and he reasoned that there had to be a way of adapting it to register dollars and cents. It worked and became known as “the Incorruptible Cashier.”

  Some years later Ritty registered a patent on his invention—now called a “Cash Register and Indicator.” The term is still commonly used in regard to paying one’s bill in a restaurant or bar and other environments which are virtually cash-free.

  Chance would be a fine thing

  In 1912, British writer William Stanley Houghton’s play Hindle Wakes was a major success. Within a year of its opening, 2000 performances had taken place in England and America. The play was made into a movie three times (1927, 1931, and 1952) and into two major television specials, by the BBC (1950) and Granada (1976).

  However, mention of the play in more recent years has not drawn much response. But one of its lines survived from 1912. Fanny’s parents discover that their daughter, though unmarried, has spent the weekend with a man . . .

  CHRISTOPHER: This is what happens to many a lass, but I never thought to have it happen to a lass of mine!

  MRS HAWTHORN: Why didn’t you get wed if you were so curious? There’s plenty would have had you.

  FANNY: Chance is a fine thing. Happen I wouldn’t have had them!

  MRS HAWTHORN: Happen you’ll be sorry for it before long. There’s not so many will have you now, if this gets about.

  Fanny’s remark caught on, gradually morphing from the present indicative to the conditional: “Chance would be a fine thing.”

  Chariot of fire

  The image appears several times in the Bible and more than once in English literature—for example, in Milton, Robert Southey, and Thomas Gray.

  William Blake’s poem Jerusalem (1804) could have taken its place as just another one of the many to use the Biblical image, but being set to music by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916 transformed the poem into a hymn sung by millions:

  Bring me my Bow of burning gold;

  Bring me my Arrows of desire:

  Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:

  Bring me my Chariot of fire!

  Blake offered only one chariot. For some unknown reason the famous 1981 movie moved Blake’s chariot into the plural—Chariots of Fire—which has resulted in the line often being misquoted thus.

  Charm offensive

  Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General Alfred Maximilian Gruenther, originated the term in an October 1956 interview in the Fresno Bee Republican. Gruenther advised that although war was no longer just around the corner, there was a danger that democracies would relax their vigilance after the “launching of the Russian charm offensive.”

  Cheesecake

  Curiously, the word—in connection with attractive women—was in use during the 1660s in Britain and can be found in Poems and Songs Relating to the Late Times, published in 1662 shortly after Oliver Cromwell died and containing the following couplet in a lament on the occasion of Oliver Cromwell’s rusticating the ladies of the town.

  But ah! It goes against our hearts

  To lose our cheesecake and our tarts.

  A more influential usage was launched more than 200 years later. Fast forward to 1912, when James Kane, a photographer working for the New York Journal, was posing an attractive young woman. A breeze blew her skirt, and more leg than usual came on display. Mr. Kane (who was reputed to like real cheesecake) exclaimed:

  Wow! That’s better than cheesecake!

  And a universal metaphor was born.

  See also Beefcake

  Che sera sera

  The concept has been around at least since 1588, when Marlowe’s Faustus included the line:

  What doctrine call you this? Che sera sera, what will be shall be?

  Marlowe’s slight linguistic confusion (in French the term would be Que sera sera; in Italian Che sarà sarà) was avoided by Beaumont and Fletcher in The Scornful Lady (1616). When the character of Welford importunes The Lady with his determination to kiss her, she resignedly replies in English, “What must be must be.”

  But the internationally famous version came in 1956 when Jay Livingston and Ray Evans wrote the song “Que Sera Sera” for Doris Day to sing in the movie The Man Who Knew Too Much. The gentle conversion from “Che” to “Que” tidied the phrase into acceptable French (or Spanish “Que será será”) rather than muddled Italian; the song was a huge hit and its title went into vernacular use.

  (An old) chestnut

  When an incident or joke has been told and heard many times, it becomes a “chestnut.” Playwright William Diamond used the term in his play The Broken Sword, or, The Torrent of the Valley at Covent Garden in 1816. In the play, a character starts to relate an incident which promises to be boring because it is already familiar. When he mentions that it happened near a cork tree, the character of Pablo interrupts him with the declaration that he had heard the story twenty-seven times before, and it had always been a chestnut tree!

  The American actor William Warren, who played Pablo, used the word offstage in a public situa
tion when someone started to tell a stale joke, which Warren described as “a chestnut.” This incident became widely known, and the term chestnut gradually came to mean something already heard twenty-seven times or thereabouts.

  Chicken feed

  Regardless of the birds’ ages, American vernacular morphed hens, fowls, and poultry into one word—chickens. For practical reasons, early settlers, after harvesting, kept good grain for their own household cooking and used the inferior, usually smaller, grades to feed the hens. An association grew between “small grain” (chicken feed) and “small coins.” This figurative use of chicken feed was put into print by none other than Davy Crockett in 1834.

  His autobiographical A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett told about traveling gamblers taking bets on the old thimble-andpea trick, and then executing it so slickly that they were:

  picking up their shillings just about as expeditiously as a hungry gobbler would a pint of corn.

  Crockett described the arrival of a crooked gambler as coming “down like a hurricane in a corn field, sweeping all before it.” And Crockett stood looking on, “seeing him pick up the chicken feed from the greenhorns.”