by Max Cryer
Different strokes for different folks
The genesis of the expression is unknown, though accredited to the southern states of the U.S. Strokes may refer either to the sport of rowing, or to a recreation of a more intimate kind.The term was brought into the open in 1966 when boxing star Muhammad Ali was reported in the Kansas newspaper the Great Bend Daily Tribune to have used it. But a greater impact came two years later with the release of the number-one hit single Everyday People by Sly and the Family Stone with its catch line: “Different strokes for different folks.”
Distance lends enchantment
From Scottish poet Thomas Campbell’s Pleasures of Hope (1799):
’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,
And robes the mountain in its azure hue.
Doc Martens
In 1945 in the German town of Seeshaupt, Doktor Klaus Maertens damaged a foot in a skiing mishap. To facilitate the healing, he made a pair of shoes with trapped air built into the soles, which assisted walking.
Maertens was persuaded to produce more of them, and they found a ready market with elderly women having foot troubles. The designs were patented and the shoes sold throughout Germany, until 1960 when a British firm was contracted.
Doktor Klaus Maertens’ name was anglicized to Doc Marten and the shoes became one of the most recognized brands in the world (also sometimes known as Doc Martins).
(The) domino effect
During the 1950s, American journalist Joseph Alsop wrote a column entitled “Matter of Fact,” which often referred to the dangers of Communism and the dangers of it spreading from one country to another by the “falling domino” effect: if one country embraced Communism, others in the same region would follow.
At a presidential press conference in 1954 the relevance of Communism in South East Asia was a topic. President Dwight Eisenhower drew on Alsop’s domino image and said:
. . . you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the falling domino principle.You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration.
Eisenhower’s statement received wide publicity and Alsop was rapidly sidelined. The abbreviated form became known as Eisenhower’s “domino theory,” or the “domino effect.” Soon it was applied to any situation, political or not, where a single action could instigate a succession of related, and usually unfavorable, events.
Don’t call us—we’ll call you
Believed to have originated in show business (where it remains a dreaded alternative to “You’ve got the part . . . ”) the expression was exposed to a wider audience by American journalist Dorothy Killgallen, whose column in the Massachusetts paper the Lowell Sun (March 1944) featured a “Fable from the Forties,” telling of a (fictional) heroine for whom:
Audition after audition left her with nothing but “Sorry” and “Not the type” and “Don’t call us we’ll call you” and a heart that was close to breaking.
The expression remained part of show business but in time also came into use in almost any sphere where someone is being euphemistically dismissed.
Don’t panic
The BBC television series Dad’s Army began broadcasting in 1968 and ran for a decade. From it arose a parallel radio version, a feature movie, and a theater show. Throughout the series—written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft—the character of Lance-Corporal Jack Jones (actor Clive Dunn) used the catchphrase “don’t panic.”
The same catchphrase showed up when The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy began as a radio serial in 1968, later growing into a cult classic spawning five published books, a television series, a full-length movie, comic books, a computer game, and stage shows.
Down memory lane
Like some other expressions in vernacular use, down memory lane seems to have arisen from a song.
In 1924, songwriters Buddy De Sylva, Con Conrad, and Larry Spier provided the song “Memory Lane” for the Broadway show Betty Lee starring comedian Joe E. Brown. The song was popular and surfaced again in high-profile company as a sometime theme for the Voice of Firestone radio show, which ran from 1938 to 1956. It was also a featured song in the Abbott and Costello movie In Society (1944).
Gradually, the song title seemed to morph quite naturally into “Down Memory Lane,” and appeared thus as the title of a collection of Mack Sennett comedy movies in 1949.
Down the tubes
A variation on “down the pan,” “down the drain,” or “down the gurgler.” The first known public use of the tubes version came from William “Parry” O’Brien, an American who twice won gold as an Olympic shot-put champion. He broke the world record seventeen times. Besides his eminence in sporting achievements, O’Brien left a lasting memento in the language.
After his gold medal-winning feat in the 1952 Olympics, he was told that an earlier record from his university days had been broken by a younger athlete. O’Brien told the Charleston Daily Mail that because of this he had visions of all his records “going down the tubes.”
He needn’t have worried. He was flag-bearer for the U.S. Olympic team in 1964 and inducted into the American Track and Field Hall of Fame, the American Olympians Hall of Fame, and University of South Carolina’s Athletic Hall of Fame.
Do your own thing
Not as 1960s as it seems, the line originated over a century earlier with Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Essay on Self Reliance (1841):
If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible Society, vote with a great party either for the Government or against it . . . Under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are . . . But do your own thing, and I shall know you.
In later printings of Emerson’s line, busybody do-gooders changed the word “thing” to “work,” but the original still stands.
(The) dreaded lurgy
A lurgy is an unspecified illness or infection, at its worst referred to as “the dreaded lurgy.”
A German firm specializing in metal and chemical processing, named Metallurgische Gesellschaft, was founded in 1897.The firm used five letters of its name—lurgi—as its cable address, and it was split into various companies in 1919, one of which concentrated on gaseous products and was actually named Lurgi.
The name Lurgi was well known to industrial chemists and because the company was involved in metal manufacture, the word was printed on containers, including the containers which held poisonous gases. So, among the Allied military in both wars, there was an association made between the word lurgi and poisonous gas.
In 1951, Britain and the Commonwealth were somewhat startled to hear a new radio program called “The Goon Show.” The Goons specialized in creative lateral thinking and wrote and broadcast such icons of appealing nonsense as “The Legend of the Phantom Head Shaver,” “The Affair of the Lone Banana,” and “The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler of Bexhill-on-Sea.”
In November 1954 they broadcast a story called “Lurgi Strikes Britain,” which was about a mysterious and somewhat ridiculous disease. The word lurgy entered the language almost immediately (because it was initially only heard spoken on radio, it emerged in print with various spellings). It has been used ever since to mean any unidentified illness.
Several of the Goons had strong military associations, so it is likely they knew of the German metallurgische, or there is a faint possibility they made a deliberate corruption of allergy. Either way, the lurgy went into wide English usage because of the Goons.
(The) Eagle has landed
In July 1969, as the Apollo 11 space mission craft touched down on the moon, Neil Armstrong announced: “The Eagle has landed.” Apparently, no official announcement had been prepared, and the way Armstrong phrased the remark was a surprise to everyone concerned.
The eagle is a national symbol in America and the spacecraft was named Eagle, so the announcement was completely logical. The rhythm
ic neatness of the remark caught the public’s imagination as well, and the line reappeared for decades afterwards in various guises.
Jack Higgins’ novel The Eagle Has Landed (1975) used the expression but shifted the action to World War II, as did the movie of the same name the following year. Heavy metal musicians Saxon released their Eagle Has Landed album in 1982. A punning version also appeared—the ego has landed—referring pejoratively to a person’s over-confidence. In 1999, British pop star Robbie Williams used the term, in deliberate self-deprecation, as the title of his Ego Has Landed album.
Ear candy
Australian singing star Helen Reddy had spectacular successes during the 1970s, selling 15 million albums, appearing in movies and on the Broadway stage, and starring in her own television series. Her 1972 recording “I Am Woman” was greeted with enthusiasm among feminists and won that year’s Grammy Award for Female Pop Vocal Performance. At the televised ceremony, after accepting her award, Helen Reddy gained worldwide attention by thanking God “because She makes everything possible.”
While Reddy’s rich singing voice and charismatic presence continued to drive her career, there was occasional comment about her choice of easy-listening repertoire. Recording company Capitol guessed ahead when settling on a title for Reddy’s 1977 album, and with just two words captured an ironic reference to any comment which might arise about its pleasant and elegantly sung list of items. The album was called Ear Candy.
If the term had been used prior to 1977, few people noticed. But the Reddy album’s name soon went into the vernacular referring to music perceived as having an attractive sound and pleasing appeal, but little lasting quality.
See also Arm candy
Eat my hat
This declaration of certainty (or failure—it depends on the circumstances) may or may not have appeared in Homer’s works, but it came into English as a deliberate parody of his style as part of Thomas Brydges’ Homer Travestie: Being a New Burlesque Translation (1747), a work which is justifiably obscure:
For though we tumble down the wall
And fire upon their rotten boats and all
I’ll eat my hat if Jove don’t drop us
Or play some queer rogue’s trick to stop us.
Eating one’s hat was given far more prominence in 1837 when Charles Dickens’ creation Mr. Pickwick was depicted seeking new accommodation. He was visiting a very unpromising room which had the added disadvantage of “chummage” (in modern terms, roommates). Dismayed by the lack of comfort and unwilling to accede to the eccentric requirements of the others, Mr. Pickwick wondered aloud if he could break the agreement and go to live elsewhere. At that, one of the “chummers” (a rather dodgy cleric) announced:
If I knew as little of life as that I’d eat my hat and swallow the buckle.
Economical with the truth
A way of referring to a delicate conveying of information that may possibly skip over some salient points—in other words, a softened description of lying. The expression has been employed for several centuries: Edmund Burke wrote “in the exercise of all virtues, there is economy of the truth,” (1769) and Rudyard Kipling in 1904 described a character being “by temperament, economical of the truth.”
But its leap into common usage came in 1986 when the expression surfaced during a colorful court case. The British government attempted to prevent publication of the book Spycatcher by former spy Peter Wright. At one widely publicized point, the British Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert Armstrong attempted to differentiate between a lie, a misleading impression, and “being economical with the truth.” The television program Four Corners reported that journalists covering the case “all but ran out of the court with their notes burning in their hands.” And the expression became common parlance.
Egg on your face
The origin of the expression has never been satisfactorily pinned down. It could be a simple description of remnants of yolk left around the mouth after eating a soft-boiled egg, or possibly the result of a very real protest aimed at old-time actors (or politicians) in the form of a thrown egg. Rural America believes the blame lies with farm dogs who, after a tasty snack in the hen-house, carry the evidence plain to see around a furry snout.
Whichever of these versions is true, the meaning is always clear: you’ve done something foolish, maybe said something you regret, and the consequences of your action have rebounded on you in an unwelcome form.
While not unfamiliar in America, where it was heard on a 1950s television series (Front Page Detective), the term came to prominence in Britain in 1972 when former Labour minister Lord Chalfont wrote somewhat scathingly in The Times:
There is something reassuringly changeless about the capacity of the highest military authorities for getting egg on their face.
Eight days a week
Drummer Ringo Starr was fond of using this colorful Liverpudlian term meaning “hard work.” Lennon and McCartney decided it would be a good title for a song (1964), and it was, although the eight-day week of the song referred to loving rather than manual labor.
The French sometimes refer to a week as huitaine—eight days; whether or not Liverpudlians picked up the eight-day concept from France isn’t clear.
Elementary, my dear Watson
Sherlock Holmes never said it in any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s books. Doyle died in 1930, and nine years later a movie was released called The Return of Sherlock Holmes, which contained the line, “Elementary, my dear Watson.”
The scriptwriters were Garrett Fort and Basil Dean.
Elephants never forget
It is acknowledged that elephants are highly intelligent and do remember certain things such as traditional jungle pathways, burial locales, other related elephants, and certain taught behaviors.
British writer H.H. Munro (aka Saki), was born in Burma (Myanmar) where his father was an inspector-general of police, and young Munro later spent two years in the Burmese police himself. He was very familiar with elephants.
In 1904, Saki’s fictional character Reginald first introduced English readers to the concept of elephants having good memories. His story “Reginald on Besetting Sins” told of an unnamed woman who had an unwelcome habit of always telling the exact truth, and once told Miriam Klopstock what she thought of her dress. Then she went to the kitchen and reprimanded the cook for drinking too much. The result:
The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go she went. Miriam Klopstock came to lunch the next day. Women and elephants never forget an injury.
Elvis has left the building
In 1954, when Elvis Presley was just starting out, he sang on the Louisiana Hayride radio program. He came across as an appealing singer, minus the wriggling and sneering that had yet to develop. Teenage girls began to take notice, and Presley’s continuing performances on the show rapidly acquired an audience.
Over the next couple of years, the Presley phenomenon far outgrew the twenty-eight states to which Louisiana Hayride program was broadcast. Aiming to conquer audiences nationwide, Elvis gave his last performance for the show on December 15, 1956. His broadcast had a fairground audience of 10,000 excited teenagers, who screamed all the way through, and continued screaming for more when he left the stage.
Attempting to dampen the hysteria and get on with the rest of the show, announcer Horace Logan said: “Elvis has left the building,” little knowing his spontaneous remark would go into show-business history.
The term was subsequently widely used to signal that Elvis had left a concert venue when he’d finished performing, but, curiously, its meaning reversed. That first time in Louisiana, Horace Logan wanted the audience to stay so the show could go on. But over the years, when Elvis had finished performing solo concerts, it was said to encourage audiences to leave . . . Elvis would not be returning to the stage.
In time, the term became a catchphrase which no longer referred to Elvis personally. It came to mean that the excitement is over; the proceedings (of whatever kind)
have come to an end.
Eskimo pie
In 1919, a Danish immigrant to the U.S. came up with the idea of coating an ice cream bar with melted chocolate, then refreezing it. In 1920, Christian Nelson sold the first “I-Scream-Bar.”
Russell Stover, a chocolate manufacturer, went into business with Christian Nelson to manufacture and patent the confection, but he didn’t like the name. Russell’s wife Mrs. Stover came up with the name Eskimo Pie, which was patented and franchised. The first advertisement carrying the name Mrs. Stover had invented appeared in 1921, and within two years there were more than 1,000 franchises offering the chocolate ice cream bar.
(In 2009, an Inuit tourist in New Zealand bitterly criticized the continuing use of the name Eskimo Pie, which she said was offensive to her people.)
(The) Establishment
As a verb,“establish” has been around since the fourteenth century, referring to the action of making something permanent or stable—a group, a business, a skill, an organization, etc. Gradually, a noun developed that had a special aura when referring to an upper echelon with power over nominated groups, e.g., a literary establishment or art establishment, meaning the eminent literary and artistic figures whose opinions made or broke the reputations of those less well placed.