Common Phrases

by Max Cryer

  The fictional Goldfinger (born in Latvia) was a brutal egotist planning to steal all the gold from Fort Knox. Enrö Goldfinger (born in Hungary) was himself no shrinking violet, and demanded that the publisher provide him with a proof copy. Having read it, he threatened to sue, on such strong grounds that the publishers were concerned they might have to pulp an entire edition.

  But a settlement was reached out of court, which included a requirement that every single time the name Goldfinger was mentioned in the book, it must be preceded by the character’s first name—hence, not just Goldfinger, but Auric Goldfinger (Au is the chemical symbol for gold).

  Fleming was so angry he threatened to change the character’s name to Goldprick. But this did not happen.

  Golliwog

  For a century golliwogs were a common toy for children. But eventually a growing awareness of insensitivity to black Americans sidelined the woolly-headed doll. Although inspired by American imagery, the golliwog and its name were actually invented in London. Englishwoman Florence Upton and her mother Bertha had lived in New York for some years, and on returning to Britain, they produced a children’s story: The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg (1895).

  Florence, an accomplished illustrator, was responsible for the golliwogg’s appearance. Popularity was immediate, and sequels followed. The final “g” got lost along the way, and the golliwog received further major exposure when his image joined the label of a popular jam.

  The golliwog later became a springboard for Enid Blyton’s tar babies Golly and Woggy. But during the 1990s Blyton’s tar babies and the Uptons’ black doll themselves faded to black.

  (As children, C.S. Lewis and his brother created and wrote, around 1916, about the mystical world Boxen, which included the characters of King Bunny and Golliwog.)

  Gone with the wind

  The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (1937) sold 30 million copies, and the blockbuster movie (1939) is still regarded as one of the all-time Hollywood classics. The expression gained front-line attention. Author Margaret Mitchell had plucked one line from a poem published more than forty years before, and she made that line world famous.

  The poem (1896) by British poet Ernest Dowson has the forbidding title “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae,” but contains the more accessible line:

  I have forgot much, Cynara! Gone with the wind . . .

  Besides being Mitchell’s title, the line occurs in the novel when Scarlett O’Hara is wondering if her home Tara is still standing. Mitchell had reputedly considered several other titles: Bugles Sang True, Not in Our Stars, and Tote the Weary Load. In hindsight it’s easy to agree Gone with the Wind was the best choice.

  Cole Porter was also apparently a fan of the same Dowson poem. In Porter’s show Kiss Me Kate the characters of Bill and Lois sing “Always True to You Darling in My Fashion,” echoing a sentiment from “Non Sum Qualis” in which Cynara is told repeatedly: “I have been faithful to thee Cynara! in my fashion.”

  (Incidentally, MGM’s highly publicized search to find a screen Scarlett O’Hara culminated in the choice of Vivien Leigh, one of the great beauties of the time. This decision was at quixotic variance with writer Margaret Mitchell’s opening line: “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful . . . ”)

  (A) good career move

  This remark, in spite of its rampant cynicism, contains a grain of truth. The industries which have grown around celebrity deaths have been notably prolific (largely due to a financial benefit which the aforesaid celebrities can no longer enjoy). In their book Live from New York Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller recount how the expression first arose, as reported by respected movie director John Landis.

  On August 16, 1977, Landis was in a discussion with Saturday Night Live comedy writer Michael O’Donahue when a secretary came in with the news that Elvis Presley had been found dead. Upon which O’Donahue remarked, “Good career move.” The remark rapidly went into show-business folklore and was at various times alleged to have been originated by John Lennon, or Presley’s manager Tom Parker. But Landis dismisses these and firmly pins it on O’Donahue because, as he says: “I was there.”

  The term has since been recycled following the deaths of celebrities who died young: Kurt Cobain, Andy Warhol, Princess Diana, Freddie Mercury, and Heath Ledger. Of the later uses of O’Donahue’s remark, one of the most publicized was seven years after Elvis died, when Gore Vidal repeated the line—this time about the death of Truman Capote.

  (A) good innings

  Obviously connected to cricket—an innings being the period the batsman has his turn at batting. So, a good innings is one in which many runs are clocked up. The expression remained in cricket parlance until 1837, when Charles Dickens in Pickwick Papers used it in another context referring to someone making a success of an opportunity. Sam Weller says:

  It’s my innings now gov’nor, and as soon as I catch ’old of this here Trotter, I’ll have a good ’un.

  The term then went into wider general use signifying a period of success—or a long rewarding life.

  (A) good man is hard to find

  However much a cliché it might now seem, the observation didn’t enter the language in that concise form until 1918 when legendary American jazz musician Eddie Green put it into a song, and also into the language—Green’s song garnered more than one hundred cover versions.

  A risqué expression (which might have been devised by Mae West) based on the song’s title inverted became almost as well known as the original.

  (A) good time was had by all

  Though not in vernacular use, the term was common in old-fashioned newspaper reports of genteel social functions, church fêtes, and birthday gatherings. British novelist and poet Stevie Smith eased it into common usage by using the term as the title of her published collection of poetry (1937).

  (The Book of Hollywood Quotes credits film star Bette Davis with remarking about an unnamed starlet: “She’s the original good time that’s been had by all.”)

  Google

  The well-known Internet search engine was invented in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They invented the name Google because the word suggested the similar word googol—a mathematical term denoting a figure followed by one hundred zeros. This association evoked an image of the Google search engine sweeping through hundreds of thousands of search options. (It is also believed that Page and Brin, in coming up with the name Google, had in mind to tease the CEO of Yahoo, whose name was Koogle.)

  The Google search engine has no known connection with the term googly, which like googol is also a real word—describing in cricket “an off break bowled with a leg break action.”

  Go the whole hog

  To act wholeheartedly and without reservation; to supply anything to the fullest possible level.

  In centuries past, hog may or may not have meant shilling, and spending all of it may or may not have engendered remarks about ‘the whole hog’. But there is no uncertainty that, all along, hog also meant pig.

  Americans regard the expression “whole hog” as having originated in the butchery trade in Virginia where meat for sale was charged by its trimmed weight. An entire beast provided a great deal of meat, which worked out at a cheaper cost per pound. Groups of neighbors could economize by buying a whole hog.

  The first person to refer to the whole hog in print definitely meant a genuine pig.

  In 1779, British poet William Cowper wrote “Hypocrisy Detected” about Muslims conferring over a cooked pig, and attempting to follow the religious law that allowed only one part of a pig to be eaten. However, they couldn’t remember which part. So by a process of hunger-influenced reasoning, they arrived at the inevitable conclusion:

  But for one piece they thought it hard

  From the whole hog to be debarr’d

  And set their wit at work to find

  What joint the prophet had in mind.

  Thus, conscience freed from every clog

  Mahometans eat up t
he hog.

  With sophistry their sauce they sweeten

  Till quite from from tail to snout ’tis eaten.

  The first time the expression is known to have moved from the butcher’s shop into more general application was in 1828 when Andrew Jackson was running for President. Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster wrote that Jackson: “Will either go with the party as they say in New York—or go the whole hog, as it is phrased elsewhere.”

  Grace under pressure

  F. Scott Fitzgerald received a letter from Ernest Hemingway in 1926 in which Hemingway mentioned the concept of grace under pressure (reprinted in Ernest Hemingway—Selected Letters.)

  The term came to wider notice when Hemingway was interviewed by Dorothy Parker for the New York Times, (“The Artist’s Reward,” November 1929). She asked him, “Exactly what do you mean by ‘guts’?” Hemingway replied: “Grace under pressure.”

  Grandfather clock

  Until 1876 tall clocks were always called long-case clocks and, in the antique trade, they still are. Legend has it that their cases were made by coffin makers during slow seasons. One such tall clock stood in the foyer of the George Hotel in Piercebridge in the English county of Yorkshire.The hotel was run by the two Jenkins brothers and their clock was notable for the consistency of its timekeeping.This was slightly unusual, since floor clocks of the era weren’t always accurate.

  The clock’s reliability started to fail when one of the Jenkins brothers died; gradually it began to fall behind until a whole hour of each day was lost. The surviving Jenkins brother reached the age of ninety, and then he too died.

  At the time the clock was fully wound, but it stopped completely and never worked again. The hotel’s new management respectfully left the clock in the foyer, standing silent with its hands at the position they were in when the second brother died.

  In 1875, American songwriter Henry Clay Work came to stay at the George Hotel. Mr. Work heard the story of the silent clock standing in the foyer and was intrigued. Back in America, he remembered the clock which stopped with the death of its owner and, adding a few fanciful variations, he wrote a song.

  Henry Work condensed the two Jenkins brothers into a fictional grandfather whose faithful clock had been bought on the day of his birth, had celebrated his marriage, and then stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died.

  Work’s song My Grandfather’s Clock was published in 1876 and the sheet music sold over a million copies. The song became so well known that it changed the name of the long case clock—but minus Mr. Work’s apostrophe. The grandfather’s clock became just a “grandfather clock.”

  Granny Smith

  Mrs. Maria Smith (née Sherwood) was a pioneer orchardist in Australia. During the 1860s, Mrs. Smith bought a crate of “French” crab apples, grown in Tasmania, and later their remains were thrown in a heap by a small river. From the heap, there grew an unusual tree. The tree was later defined as a “fixed mutation”—a hybrid, which retained its hybrid qualities into future generations.

  It produced apples with notable qualities: a strong and beautiful green skin; excellent properties for cooking as well as eating; slow to oxidize and turn brown, and therefore good for slicing into salads; and able to resist bruising during travel.

  In 1868, Mrs. Smith invited nearby orchardists Edwin Small and his father to examine her tree and its crop. By then Maria was sixtynine years old and a grandmother, so she referred to her new fruit as “Granny Smith’s apples.”

  Mrs. Smith died before her new apple became an industry—widely grown by other orchardists, exhibited in agricultural shows, and taking prizes for cooking. In 1895, the New South Wales Department of Agriculture pronounced “Granny Smith’s seedlings” as being suitable for export.The bright green apple went on to become one of the most recognizable fruits in the world, and the Beatles used it as a company logo for Apple Records.

  Grassroots

  Apart from its obvious literal meaning, grassroots came to mean the essential foundations of society at a local level. This metaphor was first seen in print in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901).The old holy Teshoo Lama tells the young Kim:

  Then I was shaken in my soul: my soul was darkened, and the boat of my soul rocked upon the waters of illusion. Not till I came to Shamlegh could I meditate upon the Cause of Things, or trace the running grass-roots of Evil.

  (The) great unwashed

  There are traces of this expression in the Bible (“washed” referring to “cleansed of sin”) and in Shakespeare (meaning literally “not washed”). But referring to the great unwashed as a social distinction may have originally crept into English when used in private by the upper classes to indicate a certain contempt for the lower classes.

  It didn’t appear in the public arena before being seen in print in 1830. By then the expression great unwashed had come to include not only the lower orders, but also was used to dismiss any group that didn’t agree with whoever was holding a certain opinion.

  The novel Pelham—The Adventures of a Gentleman by prolific British writer Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton was published in 1828. The author was less than pleased when the fictional character of Pelham came in for some censure from one or two critics of the day.

  After waiting two years to hit back, in 1830 Bulwer-Lytton published the novel Paul Clifford, which included an “Epistle of Dedication” to an unnamed friend. In the epistle he mentioned the earlier criticism, finding it completely unwarranted and totally misinterpreting the intended characterisation of Pelham. In disparaging tones Bulwer-Lytton dismissed the critics as “the Great Unwashed.” Whether or not Bulwer-Lytton invented the phrase, this appears to be the first time it was seen in print (suggestions that Edmund Burke said it earlier are difficult to substantiate).

  (Incidentally, Bulwer-Lytton’s fictional character Pelham was a society fashion plate who drew attention to himself by not wearing colorful clothes at evening functions, instead dressing all in black. Bulwer-Lytton himself followed the same principle, declaring that a person “must be very distinguished to look well in black.” British society men followed his lead, which is said to have given rise to the customary black dinner suit now considered the norm in Britain.)

  See also It was a dark and stormy night

  Gridlock

  A familiar (and dreaded) term, originally coined to describe the situation where the flow of traffic through a grid of intersecting streets is locked into immobility. In a city this happens when the lights change at an intersection but the number of vehicles trying to get across is greater than the time allotted, and those which can’t get through back up across the intersection.Those wanting to cross the intersection at right angles can’t get through, and the grid is locked.

  The word first came to light in public during a 1980 transit strike in New York. The Chief Engineer of the New York Department of Transportation, Sam Schwartz, described the traffic congestion as gridlock in several prominent contexts, and was quoted in newspapers. He didn’t claim to have invented it, but later explained that the word had already been used among his staff.

  Shortly after, in 1980, the New York Times Magazine defined gridlock as “a panic inside a nightmare inside a worst case. Instead of going with the traffic flow, everything stops and every frenzied driver leans on his horn.”

  Soon the expression moved beyond traffic problems and is now applied to other similarly jammed situations: overloading of a telephone exchange; heavy Internet usage; or too much legislation facing Congress. There is even “vocal gridlock,” when several people on a television or radio panel talk at the same time and none of them can be heard clearly.

  Grin like a Cheshire cat

  The first publication to mention this eccentric image was the work of satirist Peter Pindar (pseudonym of John Wolcot), who wrote A Pair of Lyric Epistles (1795) containing the line:

  Lo, like a Cheshire cat our court will grin!

  Seventy years later William Makepeace Thackeray in The Newcomes also referred t
o the infamous grinning cat:

  Mr. Newcome says to Mr. Pendennis in his droll humorous way, “That woman grins like a Cheshire cat.”

  Then in 1865 Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland brought the Cheshire cat to center stage. Carroll didn’t invent the image, but he certainly brought it wide international awareness and usage.

  (There are various theories as to why Cheshire cats are described as grinning. Round Cheshire cheeses with semi-circular “smiles” impressed on them is one possibility. But when Alice asks the Duchess why the cat has a grin, she replies, “It’s a Cheshire cat, and that’s why.” With that we have to be satisfied.)

  Grotty

  Meaning unpleasant and unattractive, this slang version of “grotesque” may have been in use prior to the rise of the Beatles. But in 1964 Alun Owen’s script for the movie A Hard Day’s Night showed George Harrison being asked an opinion on the fashion appeal of some trendy shirts. Harrison described them as “dead grotty, yeah,” and the word came into wider use. (After the movie’s premiere, Princess Margaret asked what the word meant.)

  In 1976, British television viewers were introduced to a variation on grotty by the character Reginald Perrin, for whom writer David Nobbs introduced the word “grot” for goods and gifts which were of absolutely no use or value (e.g., tiny drinking glasses for canaries to put their false teeth into).