Common Phrases

by Max Cryer

  Only the late Michael Jackson got it right. His fantasy farm recreating the whimsy of Barrie’s mythical island was entitled Neverland without the repeat, exactly as Peter Pan (and J.M. Barrie) intended.

  Never say never

  Although it became world famous as the title of a James Bond movie, the expression had musical beginnings. Songwriter Harry McGregor Woods composed “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bobbin’ Along” (1926), “I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover”(1927), and “Side by Side” (1927).

  His 1935 song “I’ll Never Say Never Again” was recorded that same year by the Boswell Sisters and by Ozzie Nelson. Over forty years later, actor Sean Connery reportedly told his wife that having played Bond in six movies, he would never do another—and she replied, “Never say never.”

  Soon after, Connery was signed for his last Bond outing, an adaptation of the Ian Fleming novel Thunderball, filmed in 1983 as Never Say Never.

  (The) new black

  The very versatile expression arose as a variation on a remark from the former editor of Vogue Diana Vreeland. In 1962, when commenting on fashions in India, her actual words were “Pink is the navy blue of India.” At the time variations on pink predominated in Indian fabrics, whereas navy blue was the safely respectable color in New York.

  The expression caught on and as black became the basic color for a certain level of fashion, Vreeland’s original statement morphed into whatever color was fashionable that season becoming described as “the new black.”

  Nice work if you can get it

  The 1937 movie Damsel in Distress, based on a P.G. Wodehouse story, doesn’t have a high profile in film history. But one Gershwin song from that movie, sung by Fred Astaire, put a new phrase into the language.

  In their study of America’s Songs, Philip Furia and Michael L. Lasser tell how American lyricist Ira Gershwin found the genesis of that song in the caption to a British cartoon, which had put an amusing slant on a phrase known around Britain at the time.

  Two London charwomen were shown discussing the daughter of a mutual friend. One woman confided to the other that the girl had become a whore. The second woman replied, “Nice work if you can get it.” The cartoonist was later identified as George Belcher.

  George Gershwin provided the tune, Ira added lines about “holding hands at midnight, ’neath a starry sky . . . ,” the resultant song became a classic, and the charwoman’s observation travelled far and wide.

  No brainer

  In 1942 Americans first saw a comic cartoon strip about a pleasant middle-class family of five called “The Berrys.” The strip ran until 1974, drawn by Carl Grubert.

  During the 1950s the term “no brainer” arose informally among Americans, meaning that a decision or solution was easy and obvious.The term first saw light in Grubert’s cartoon in 1959, showing that during a game of Scrabble the father Peter chooses a word that to mother Pat seems so easy she dismisses his choice as a “no brainer.” Before long the expression was in wide international use.

  No great shakes

  The reason for referring to “shakes” is obscure and may have arisen from the image of a dice being shaken but only an insignificant number thrown. “No great shakes” must have been a recognizable expression in early nineteenth-century Britain, but unlike some English words and expressions that have come into the language from an ancient Latin origin, this one is first registered in actual Latin.

  In 1865, Lord John Cam Broughton, a British statesman, prolific author and friend of Byron, published his Recollections of a Long Life. There he recounted a memory of visiting an art gallery with a group of friends in 1816. Broughton found one piece of displayed sculpture somewhat lacking, and—presumably to avoid offending anyone connected with the piece—remarked to his friends:

  Nullae magnae quassationes.

  His group greeted the remark with laughter, having understood immediately that he was saying, “No great shakes.”

  No more Mr. Nice Guy

  This developed from a stern dictum uttered by Leo Durocher, manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team from 1939 to 1946, and misquoted later as: “Nice guys finish last.” In his autobiography Durocher pointed out that his original statement was actually four separate statements:

  They’re all nice guys. They’ll finish last. Nice guys. Finish last.

  Subsequent reporters and headline writers condensed his words into a neater epigram. (Although he denounced the restructuring of his original line, that did not stop Durocher from entitling his autobiography Nice Guys Finish Last.)

  From this there developed an image of nice guys seeming to lack some fibre or strength. Three decades after Durocher, during the presidential election campaign of 1972, a slight development of Durocher’s decree surfaced twice. A contender for the vicepresidency was Senator Edmund Muskie, whose polite manner and gentlemanly personality seemed to some to be ill-suited to a vigorous political arena. Journalist David Broderin referred to him as “cautious cool Mr. Nice Guy.” The team strategy to realign his image into something more edgy and independent was identified as: “No more Mr. Nice Guy.”

  During the same campaign, journalist Robert Novak was denied a seat on presidential candidate Senator McGovern’s campaign plane, and instead was despatched to the secondary craft carrying camera crews and technicians. Not pleased, Novak told McGovern’s press aide Dick Dougherty:

  From now on, no more Mr. Nice Guy.

  Seizing the moment, Alice Cooper’s “shock rock” song “No More Mr. Nice Guy” was released a few months later.

  No news is good news

  At one point in the lead-up to the problematic trial of the Earl of Somerset in 1616, King James I wrote to Sir George Moore, Lieutenant of the Tower of London, saying:

  No newis is bettir then evill newis.

  No pain, no gain

  Crisp and contemporary though it sounds, the term dates back to at least the sixteenth century. The ancestor of the expression is:

  They must take pain that look for any gayn.

  It is found in Workes of a Young Wit from the prolific British poet Nicholas Breton in 1577. Over the centuries successive versions transpired, with compression and adjustments in spelling, until the concise “No pain, no gain” took hold.

  Nose out of joint

  The sour grimace of someone whose pride has been dented. The image has been around since 1581. Soldier and romantic writer Barnabe Riche in Apolonius and Silla wrote of the duke that:

  It could bee no other then his owne manne, that has thrust his nose so farre out of ioynte.

  Over the years, thrust has been replaced by the slightly less aggressive put.

  No such thing as a free lunch

  As far back as the nineteenth century some bars would offer a “free” lunch providing that a drink had been bought. This was a thin disguise for gaining more revenue from drinkers who stayed on.

  The reality—that getting something for nothing is unlikely—was referred to by a Washington journalist Paul Mallon who in 1942 pointed out that:

  ... such a thing as a ‘free’ lunch never existed. Until man acquires the power of creation, someone will always have to pay for a free lunch.

  In June 1949 journalist Walter Morrow in the San Francisco News came out with the more concise “no such thing as a free lunch,” which the New York Times in January 1994 credited as the first use of that exact phrase.

  The term was later popularized by science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, and economist Milton Friedman.

  Not a penny more, not a penny less

  There had been earlier expressions concerning pennies, but not with the neat plus-minus balance put together by George Bernard Shaw in Pygmalion (1914).

  Eliza Doolittle has come to Professor Higgins’ house so she may learn to speak like a lady in a flower shop. Her father Alfred misinterprets the (strictly business) relationship between Higgins and Eliza, and he insists that he must be paid for her presence in the Professor’s house.

&
nbsp; After both shock and argument, Higgins (who is unwilling to give up Eliza’s language training) finally agrees, and Doolittle asks for five pounds. Uncharacteristically amiable, Higgins raises the offer to ten pounds. Alfred is horrified:

  Ten pounds is a lot of money: it makes a man feel prudent like; and then goodbye to happiness. You give me what I ask you, Governor: not a penny more, and not a penny less.

  The phrase made a good title for Jeffrey Archer’s 1976 novel about financial see-saws.

  Nothing comes from nothing

  That nothing can be created when there is nothing with which to create, is a familiar philosophical concept throughout recorded history. It can be found in the fifth century BC in a poem by the Greek Parmenides of Elea, and later in Latin translation as “Ex nihilo nihil fit” (Nothing can be created from nothing).

  Over 2,000 years later in English, there is prominent use of the line more than once by Shakespeare in King Lear (c.1608)—Lear to Cordelia: “Nothing can come of nothing.”

  An endearing version occurs in the movie The Sound of Music in a song sung by Julie Andrews and Bill Lee (dubbing for Christopher Plummer):

  Nothing comes from nothing,

  Nothing ever could ...

  No time like the present

  A fairly obvious precept, but it didn’t see the light of day in English until 1562 in a now obscure work: Accidence of Armoury, by G. Legh:

  To be sure sir no time better than euen now.

  A century later it appeared in its more recognizable form in a Drury Lane theater comedy The Lost Lover (1696), by a gently radical feminist writer Mrs. Delariviere Manley:

  There is no time like the present.

  Not in my back yard

  The expression originated in America, mainly to describe those who opposed nuclear development, and was quickly shortened to the acronym NIMBY. While known in Britain, it only received major publicity when British MP and Environment Secretary Nicholas Ridley in 1988 publicly dismissed the attitude of rural dwellers who opposed housing in nearby developments as “pure Nimbyism.” The terms (now usually lower case) nimby and nimbyism rapidly went into wider use.

  Not turn a hair

  After vigorous activity such as racing, the coat of a horse is likely to be ruffled and sweaty. It has “turned a hair,” a familiar stable term as far back as the eighteenth century. If the horse has not turned a hair, it can be regarded as cool and calm.

  Jane Austen took the term out of the stables and into wide readership in Northanger Abbey (1797). Catherine Morland meets her brother and John Thorpe after arriving in Bath, and Catherine remarks that their horse looked hot. John Thorpe remonstrates that the horse

  . . . had not turned a hair till we came to Walcot church!

  Not what it’s cracked up to be

  During the fourteenth century, crack up meant to speak confidently and boldly (which survives in “cracking a joke”) and also meant “to praise.” So its negative—not cracked up—signified that the praise had been misplaced.

  This negative version must have been in American usage prior to 1834, for it occurs in Davy Crockett’s Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee. Davy wrote the expression in a casual style that he seemed to expect readers would understand:

  We worked on for some years renting ground and paying high rent, until I found it wasn’t the thing it was cracked up to be; and that I couldn’t make a fortune of it just at all.

  A decade later the term turns up in Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), where Dickens uses it in a positive way in the sense of giving praise. Chollop tells Mark:

  We are the intellect and virtue of the airth . . . our backs is easy ris. We must be cracked up or they rises and we snarls.

  The positive use seems to have faded, but the negative—“not cracked up”—remains.

  No woman can be too rich or too thin

  Encapsulating as it does the aspirations of so many during the current and previous century, this line is too good to ignore. But the problem of clarifying who originally said it has bothered researchers for fifty years. It has been attributed to Dorothy Parker, Coco Chanel, Joan Rivers, the Duchess of Windsor, Rose Kennedy, Diana Vreeland, Barbara Paley, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Mrs. J. Gordon Douglas Snr.

  There is also a strong possibility that the line was created by a man—Truman Capote. He is reported to have said it on TV, on the David Susskind Show around 1959, but the videotape has never been available for verification.

  In 1970 the Los Angeles Times put its faith in the Duchess of Windsor as the originator of the line, but offered no provenance. One thing is a known fact: in June 1971 journalist Marian Christy from the Ohio newspaper Elyria Chronicle visited the Duchess of Windsor, and reported that the Duchess had the line embroidered on a cushion (on which one of her dogs customarily sat). But whether to remind herself of the ruling, or to advertise to visitors that she was the first to use it, nobody knows.

  Nudge-nudge, wink-wink, say no more

  Already extant as a music-hall innuendo, the nudge-nudge expression went into popular parlance after a Monty Python show broadcast in 1969. One sketch written by Eric Idle showed a barroom encounter in which a dignified British gentleman is harassed about his wife’s sex life by a brash bystander (played by Idle himself). Central to the discussion is the brash one’s clumsy avoidance of direct questioning, saying instead,“Nudge nudge, grin grin, wink wink, say no more.” The phrase, shortened to “nudge-nudge, wink-wink, say no more,” rapidly went into English vernacular as a comic substitute for direct discussion of sexual matters.

  Old Glory

  The American flag acquired this nickname in 1831 when William Driver, as skipper of the brig Charles Doggett, was about to sail to the South Pacific—a trip which would include returning the descendants of the Bounty mutiny survivors from Tahiti back home to Pitcairn. The New York Times (September 15, 1918) reported that just before the brig left Salem, Massachusetts, a group of friends appeared and presented Driver with a “large and beautifully made American flag.”

  Driver named the flag Old Glory, and after retiring from the sea flew it from his Tennessee house every day—until the Civil War. It was later reported that he hid the flag by stitching it inside his bedcover until the Union army arrived, when he presented Old Glory to their general, to be hoisted on the Capitol.

  Old soldiers never die

  In 1855 a singing evangelist nun, Sister Abby Hutchinson, composed a tune to some anonymously written words:

  Kind words can never die; cherished and blest,

  God knows how deep they lie, stored in the breast;

  Like childhood’s simple rhymes, said o’er a thousand times,

  Go through all years and climes, the heart to cheer.

  Before long a mock version had arisen, first printed in London but also known in America to the cadets of West Point, satirically referring to the official rations provided to the military:

  There is an old cookhouse, far far away

  Where we get pork and beans, three times a day.

  Beefsteak we never see, damn-all sugar for our tea

  And we are gradually fading away.

  Old soldiers never die,

  Never die, never die,

  Old soldiers never die

  They just fade away.

  In 1951 a former West Point cadet who had become General Douglas MacArthur made a speech to Congress, closing his fiftytwo years of military service. Perhaps without realizing it was a mocking version of a Christian hymn, MacArthur recalled his student days and mentioned:

  ... the refrain of one of the most popular barrack ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that “old soldiers never die; they just fade away.” And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away.

  The “just” varies from time to time—becoming “simply” or “always” or “only”—and although nobody knows who said it first, General MacArthur’s speech during those early days of Ameri
can television riveted the nation and put the expression into common parlance.

  On a razor’s edge

  Straight from the Iliad of Homer (800 BC). Robert Fitzgerald translates Nestor (from the section of the Greek population known as the Achaeans) saying to Diomedes:

  Terrible pressure is upon us. The issue teeters on a razor’s edge for all Achaeans—whether we live or perish.

  The expression—as The Razor’s Edge—became the title of a W. Somerset Maugham novel in 1944, which was made into a movie in 1946 (earning Ann Baxter an Academy Award).

  One good turn deserves another

  There is speculation that a version of this expression existed during the reign of Nero, but evidence is thin. Later, various convolutions can be found telling that one good turn “asks,” “requires” or “deserves” another.

  But in 1620, the Rev. Joseph Hall, Bishop of Norwich, introduced the form which settled into English and has been used ever since. A prolific writer on theological matters, his Contemplations on the Historical Passages in the Old and New Testaments discusses the relationship between Nabal’s flocks and David’s followers and comments: