Common Phrases

by Max Cryer

  Flogging (beating) a dead horse

  The landlubber’s version may have originated in an old seagoing term. Admiral Smyth’s Sailor’s Word Book explains this as the time when a seaman ashore is paid in advance for a month’s work and immediately spends it, then for the first month at sea feels he is working for no pay—it is a “dead horse” month. At the end of his prepaid month when normal wages ensue, the crew makes an effigy of a horse, drags it around the deck and casts it into the sea. The dead horse has been flogged.

  The expression came ashore and into public awareness when it surfaced in the British Houses of Parliament. John Bright was a radical MP, a Quaker and a renowned orator (he coined the phrase “Britain is the mother of Parliaments”). In 1867, Parliament’s dealing with the Reform Bill seemed to be becoming bogged down, and Members of Parliament appeared to be showing a lack of interest. John Bright attempted to ignite the Members to more vigorous action and announced in a speech that trying to get the matter activated was like flogging a dead horse and trying to make it pull a load.

  (A year later, John Campbell Colquhoun used the term in describing “Popery” as a “dead horse”.)

  Fools rush in where angels fear to tread

  In times past, the word “fool” implied simple lack of judgement rather than foolhardy risk-taking. Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711) was a sounding-off against literary critics, rather than a finger-wagging at people whose courage exceeds their common sense:

  No Place so Sacred from such Fops is barr’d,

  Nor is Paul’s Church more safe than Paul’s Church-yard:

  Nay, fly to Altars; there they’ll talk you dead;

  For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.

  Foreign muck

  British writer Johnny Speight, creator of the enormously popular television series Till Death Us Do Part (first seen in 1965), put the words into character Alf Garnett’s mouth, and thus eventually into the front line of current expression.

  The concept wasn’t new—people were often suspicious of foods with which they were unfamiliar in their own culture. The attitude can be found in 100 AD when ancient Roman writer Juvenal expressed dislike of everyone and everything not of his own immediate circle.

  Alf Garnett (and later his American spin-off Archie Bunker) specialized in shock-value put-down phrases spoken out loud on television. Alf referred to dark skinned people as coons, called his wife a silly old moo and his son-in-law a randy scouse git.

  Most of these shock phrases were clever adaptations by the scriptwriter of expressions already in existence. In Garnett’s view, foreign muck included avocados, lemon grass, tandoori chicken, lasagne, sushi, and aubergines.

  People who lived in England as long ago as the 1920s report that although the phrase foreign muck was well within the common vernacular, it was still shocking to hear actor Warren Mitchell announcing it loudly on television whenever anyone mentioned pasta or pizza.

  Fresh as a daisy

  Because many daisies close their petals at night and open up again in daylight, they gained a reputation for being “fresh.” In 1834, Captain Frederick Marryat put the expression into English in Jacob Faithful:

  Rouse a bit, wash your face with old Thames water, and in half-an-hour you’ll be as fresh as a daisy.

  From cradle to grave

  In essence, the concept—from birth to death—has been around since antiquity. The more idiomatic “cradle” version surfaced as a translated saying of Islam founder Muhammad (“Seek knowledge from cradle to grave”), but it has been in English in its own right since 1857.

  In Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Thomas Hughes writes:

  After all, what would life be without fighting, I should like to know? From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real highest, honestest business of every son of man.

  Dickens used it later (in Somebody’s Luggage), as did both Edgar Rice Burroughs and E.M. Forster. The expression achieved prominence in Britain during 1948 when it was cited as part of the creed of the newly established National Health Service.

  (In 1931, a story was published by American writing team Colin Campbell Clements and his wife Florence Ryerson, entitled “From the Cradle to the Shave.”)

  Gentrification

  Berlin-born Ruth Lazarus (later Glass) moved to London in 1932 when she was twenty. By 1943, she was conducting surveys for Planning and Regional Construction, and became a respected urban sociologist.

  In the early 1960s, she identified a trend in which the shabby Victorian dwellings of working-class areas of London were being bought and renovated by young people perceived as “gentry.” In 1964 Ruth Glass published her article “Aspects of Change” in which she coined the word gentrification:

  Once this process of “gentrification” starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.

  Get a life

  During the 1980s, the growth in popularity of video games and computers resulted in many young people hovering over machines for hours at a time. Keyboards and screens seemed to be taking over their lives—hence the exhortation to “get a life”—meaning to take part in “real” life and leave fantasies behind.

  The term had major public exposure in 1987 when actor William Shatner—Captain Kirk in Star Trek—appeared in a comedy skit on Saturday Night Live. This was a satiric send-up involving Star Trek fans, who were depicted as fanatics wearing pointy ears and asking absurdly trivial questions (e.g., “What was the combination of the safe Captain Kirk opened in episode 38?”).

  At the end of the sketch, Shatner told the besotted trekkies they should “Get a life.” His remark was given wide coverage and is believed to have kick-started the term’s popularity.

  Get off my back

  The actual authorship of A Thousand and One Nights is lost in Middle-Eastern antiquity. It appeared in French in 1717, with several English versions following. Among the tales with which Scheherazade regales the Caliph is the story of Sinbad the sailor, who gives a poor old man a ride on his shoulders. The old man clamps his legs around Sinbad’s neck, shoulders and back, and for several days refuses to get off.

  Unlike earlier translations with their rather elaborate Victorian style, Sir Richard Burton’s 1850 version was in easily accessible English.After telling of Sinbad begging the old man to “dismount,” Burton has Sinbad saying:

  But he would not get off my back.

  From that literal beginning grew the metaphorical concept of some relationship or other issue proving difficult to dislodge from one’s life.

  Get someone’s back up

  Everyone’s seen an angry cat do it, and that was doubtless the image behind the original use of the term.This was in the play The Provok’d Husband (1728) by architect and dramatist Sir John Vanbrugh, and Colly Cibber, showing the character of Jenny relishing the fact that she is to marry a Count, giving her a higher rank than her mother. Jenny’s comment on the matter:

  Oh Lud! How her back will be up then, when she meets me at an assembly!

  Ghostwriters

  For many centuries it has been common practice for someone in a back room to write well-crafted prose for someone else to speak or publish. The names of popes, prelates, presidents, stars of stage, screen, and sports field have all been linked to words they themselves did not create.

  The back-room writer is sometimes credited (“as told to”), but often remains unknown. In other areas, the back-roomer is widely known but faintly disguised with an alternative job description: communications coordinator, press secretary, or information officer.

  While ghostwriter carries a slightly pejorative air, speechwriter does not—and countless politicians and public figures employ (and do not hide) speechwriters (who are never referred to as ghostwriters, though that is what they are).

  Initially, the practice was somewhat clandestine and was known simply as
“ghosting.” Then, in 1921, an entrepreneurial American called Christy Walsh enlarged the concept and coined the term “ghostwriter.” Walsh formed an organization that arranged ghostwriting for many major sports stars, and there was no secret about it. Observer writer Tim Adams (“The Honorable Tradition of Ghostwriting”) quoted Christy Walsh’s first rule about sports stars’ so-called autobiographies:

  Don’t insult the intelligence of the public by claiming these men write their own stuff.

  Ginormous

  This combination of “giant” and “enormous” was known among British military personnel during World War II, but it was only in limited public usage. Then a minor incident in the U.S. helped bring the term first into public print, then gradually into wider use.

  In Muskingum County, Ohio, in May 1951, the Zanesville Signal newspaper interviewed a helicopter operator called Carl Agar. He worked for the Okanagon Air Service, British Columbia and when asked the size of the service for which he was a pilot he replied: “It’s ginormous.”

  The term had surfaced from somewhere in Mr. Agar’s background, possibly through military connections. But his remark (despite being reported in a provincial newspaper) gradually spread the usage across the U.S. and eventually into the Merriam-Webster dictionary and the English-speaking world at large.

  Glittering prizes

  The Education of Henry Adams was written by Boston author and well-respected historian Henry Adams about himself. Initially, it was only printed privately in 1907, and contained the following:

  Among all these, Clarence King, John Hay, and Henry Adams had led modest existences, trying to fill in the social gaps of a class which, as yet, showed but thin ranks and little cohesion. The combination offered no very glittering prizes, but they pursued it for twenty years with as much patience and effort as though it led to fame or power.

  Since this book was at first self-published and distributed only among friends, Henry Adams might not have been considered as the first person to put the term before the public eye. But after he died in 1919, the book was published commercially and put on the open market. The following year it won the Pulitzer Prize.

  Whether or not Britain’s Lord Birkenhead had read The Education of Henry Adams is not known but, making a speech as Lord Rector of Glasgow University in November 1923, he advised the students that there were still “glittering prizes” to be had, rewarding “stout hearts and sharp swords.”

  Global village

  Predicting the effects of growth in electronic technology long before the explosion of the Internet, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase global village in his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy:

  The new electronic inter-dependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

  He mentioned the term again in his The Medium is the Massage (1967).

  Go ahead, make my day

  In the 1983 movie Sudden Impact, Clint Eastwood as (Dirty) Harry Callahan walked into a coffee shop being held up by some violent characters. He told them that “we” weren’t going to let them escape—“we” being “Smith, Wesson, and me.”

  The resulting shootout left just one man holding a waitress hostage, and a gun pointed at Harry. With his own gun pointing straight at the robber, Harry spoke the memorable taunt:

  Go ahead, make my day.

  The line was written for him by Joseph Stinson. It is now included by the American Film Institute as number six in their one hundred all-time most memorable film quotes.

  Gobbledygook

  Although gobbledygook can now be used to indicate any kind of nonsensical language, its original application was a dismissive reference to the unfathomable kind of jargon that tends to come from official sources.

  American Maury Maverick was elected to Congress in 1934 and grew to dislike long-winded euphemistic language. During World War II, he worked for the Office of Price Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, the War Production Board and the Smaller War Plants Corporation. In the middle of all that, he rebelled against the over-inflated, convoluted and pompous way information was distributed. In 1944 he invented a word to describe it—gobbledygook—based on the meaningless “gobbling” noise of turkeys when make by a human “gook.”

  Fittingly, Maury Maverick was a grandson of Samuel Maverick, who inspired the word maverick, meaning one who goes against the tide. In later times gobbledygook widened its meaning to include other kinds of confusing wordiness, and the official kind became known as corporate-ese.

  Gobsmacked

  Gobsmacked is a dialect expression, long familiar in the Northern counties of England, usually referring to slapping the hand over the mouth in astonishment. The term reached prominence in 1991 when, as the Independent newspaper reported, the Chairman of the Conservative Party heard of Labour’s claim that its poll-tax replacement would save the average household £140.

  The Conservative Chairman Chris Patten (former Governor of Hong Kong) declared himself “gobsmacked.” The comment made headline news and quickly went into widespread popular usage.

  God helps those who help themselves

  It sounds as if it comes from the Bible, but it doesn’t.The clue is in the plural—the original expression is: “The gods help them that help themselves.” It can be found in the fables of Aesop—several centuries BC—and from an ancient Greek culture which worshipped many gods.

  British historian James Howell, a glass-factory administrator who became a secretary to the Privy Council, is believed to be the first British writer to earn a living writing solely in the English language. In 1659 he introduced Aesop’s maxim into English as:

  God helps him who helps himself.

  In successive centuries it quietly slid back to its original nongender-specific form as “God helps them (or those) who help themselves.”

  Go down like a lead balloon

  The idiom originated in 1924 with American cartoonist Loren Taylor, whose character Pop excitedly bought shares in a mothball company. But when he visited the Stock Exchange, he saw the shares “go up like a lead balloon.”

  While the failure of a lead balloon to “go up” is obvious, in ensuing decades the “go up” has sometimes been replaced with “go over” or “go down,” both theater expressions that indicate an audience didn’t “get” a joke or dramatic twist.

  Going for a song

  In current times, going for a song indicates that something of great value is available, or has been procured, for a mere fraction of its true worth. The expression’s origin indicated exactly the opposite.

  Edmund Spenser’s poem The Faerie Queene was written to honor Queen Elizabeth I. Thomas Fuller in Worthies of England (1662) reported that Good Queen Bess—who was never one to turn her back on flattery—ordered that Spenser’s effort be honored in return with £100, an enormous sum in the 1590s.

  On hearing about the Queen’s wish, William Cecil (Lord Burghley, the Lord High Treasurer) exclaimed petulantly, “What? All this for a song?” His remark was widely repeated and went into common usage, meaning a high payment for something of low value. Over the centuries the term became both shortened and overturned in meaning.

  Going-going-gone!

  In 1777 Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s successful play The School for Scandal played at Drury Lane Theatre, London. An auctioneer’s closing statement, this may have been in use before, but Sheridan’s play was its first known use before the public, and in print.

  In the story, Charles Surface expresses a wish to sell off his own family, and after much banter and bargaining a sum of £300 is agreed, whereupon the auctioneer calls “Going-going-gone!” Auctioneers have been doing it ever since.

  (Sheridan would have known about auctions. Auction laws were first passed in England, and licenses granted c.1500 during the reign of Henry VII. Sotheby’s was established in 1744 and Christies in 1766.)

  Golden handshake

  A generous one-off payment, over and above their salary, made to someone leaving a business at retirement, o
r possibly to persuade them not to make a fuss about something.

  The term golden handshake was coined in Britain c.1965 by the city editor of the Daily Express, Frederick Ellis. It was so apt and immediately successful that it was followed by the imitative forms golden hello, golden boot, and golden parachute.

  (Frederick Ellis was knowledgeable about city finances—most of the time. In 1964, he publicly and strongly advised readers not to invest in the Beatles’ publishing company Northern Songs. Some years later the company sold for $47 million.)

  Goldfinger

  The combined talents of Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and Shirley Bassey made the name Goldfinger known internationally. What wasn’t widely known was that this megalomaniac force of evil was deliberately named after a genuine living person.

  Enrö Goldfinger was a London architect whose tower block designs were the subject of much attention and some controversy. Goldfinger’s wife Ursula had a cousin, John Blackwell, with whom Ian Fleming played golf. Fleming heard Blackwell mention the architect’s name, liked it, and without asking, allocated the name to a totally fictional evil character in a novel he was working on. In 1959, information filtered through to Enrö Goldfinger that a depiction of a world-class villain was about to be published, with his unusual but real surname.