by Max Cryer
There’s no accounting for taste
Although the familiar English version has a contemporary ring, it dates back to 1794 (and indeed much further; classical Latin tells us De gustibus non est disputandum—there is no disputing about tastes) .
Mrs. Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Mysteries of Udolpho introduced the term into English, though in the plural:
I have often thought the people he disapproved were much more agreeable than those he admired—but there is no accounting for tastes.
Udolpho is often called the first or quintessential Gothic novel. It abounds with crumbling castles, Italian brigands, an heiress in financial decline, an evil Marchioness, and apparently supernatural happenings. Jane Austen had a fine old time sending it up in her Northanger Abbey.
There’s no place like home
The idea can be found eight centuries BC in the ancient Greek farmer-poet Hesiodos whose 800-verse Works and Days collection contains (in Greek) the line:“There’s no place like home.” By 1546 this had traveled into English as “Home is homely though it be poore in sight.”
But the most familiar outing came in 1823 in Sir Henry Rowley Bishop’s opera Clari. Bishop composed seventeen operas and over 100 operettas, ballets, and symphonic works. But after all that, only one of his compositions remains in people’s memory—the leading lady’s solo from Clari: “Home Sweet Home.”
It owes its success and longevity to the plaintive melody, and the words provided by American writer John Howard Payne. Payne had arrived in London penniless and eventually created, adapted or translated sixty theater works. The public loved “Home Sweet Home” and over a hundred thousand copies of the sheet music were sold in the first year. But Payne’s payment was small, and he returned to America. The song opens with:
’Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home . . .
In East Hampton, NY, a picturesque old house believed to have belonged to John Howard Payne’s grandfather is preserved as a memorial to Payne. The house is known as the “Home Sweet Home Cottage.”
Thick as thieves
An old French expression encapsulates the concept that thieves are inclined to form a certain discreet brotherhood of collusion. Versions can be found in Pierre de Bourdelle Bratome’s Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies (1666) as “like thieves at a fair” and Balzac’s Domestic Peace (1832) has it as “military fellows work together like thieves at a fair.”
In English, the slightly adjusted French phrase first surfaced in 1866 as “thick as thieves” when used by author Thomas Hook in The Parson’s Daughter.
Things aren’t what they used to be
A common enough opinion, but the first time the now familiar wording is known to have appeared was in America in 1941.
Because of a union strike, jazz music star Duke Ellington was unable to do some night-time broadcasts and his son Mercer Ellington stood in for him. The younger Ellington used the opportunity to broadcast some of his own compositions, including a blues number—“Things Aren’t What They used To Be”—whose name and lyrics came from Ted Persons.
This predated by nineteen years Lionel Bart’s use of the same title for his quintessentially Cockney musical Fings Ain’t What They Used To Be, which opened in London in 1960.
Things that go bump in the night
The expression is part of an anguished—and very old—prayer or litany from Cornwall. Nobody knows how old, or who might have composed it. But in 1926 the Cornish Arts Association made a collection of traditional adages originating from, or based around, the fishing village of Polperro, and illustrated with poker-work line drawings on wood.
So to that association, and to Frederick Thomas Nettlinghame who put it all together, we give credit for being first to print—and rescue—a fondly regarded expression in general English.
From ghoulies and ghosties
And long leggety beasties
And things that go bump in the night –
Good Lord deliver us.
The Cornish Litany is found in the Cornish Studies Library in Polperro.
Third World
The first known use of the term Third World was in 1952 by French anthropologist and historian Alfred Sauvy. He described what he called the Third World as being comparable to the Third Estate of the French Revolution:
... at the end this ignored, exploited, scorned Third World like the Third Estate, wants to become something too.
Three years later the Bandung Conference in Indonesia brought together 1,000 representatives of fifty states. French diplomat Georges Balandier then referred to twenty-nine African and Asian nations as “third world.” The term stuck, and quickly came to refer to nations perceived as underdeveloped, especially those with significant poverty issues.
Over time the “undeveloped” aspect of the description has been softened—the Third World nations are now usually defined as “developing.”
Thirty days has September
Prior to England adopting the Gregorian calendar (1752), each fourth year had a “leap” day. However, that day was accepted simply as part of the preceding day’s date, so is not mentioned in the first known rhyme cataloguing the months—Richard Grafton’s 1562 Chronicles of England:
Thirty dayes hath Nouember,
Aprill, Iune, and September,
February hath twenty-eight alone,
And all the rest have thirty-one.
In 1696, Return from Parnassus carried a new version of Grafton’s original, which is the basis of the form now familiarly used:
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
February eight-and-twenty all alone,
And all the rest have thirty-one:
Unless that leap-year doth combine,
And give to February twenty-nine.
Throw the baby out with the bathwater
The origin is German—Das Kind mit dem Bade ausschütten (1512)—and it didn’t appear in English until 1849. Thomas Carlyle wrote an essay for Frazer’s Magazine concerning the slave trade (also published separately in 1853). Carlyle was knowledgeable about all things German and while opining about the necessity of being kind to slaves, he included an English version of the old German proverb:
The Germans say ‘You must empty-out the bathing-tub, but not the baby along with it.’ Fling-out your dirty water with all zeal, and set it careering down the kennels; but try if you can keep the little child! How to abolish the abuses of slavery, and save the precious thing in it alas, I do not pretend that this is easy . . .
Throw the book
The term was in circulation among the American criminal underworld as a warning of what might happen if a planned crime should go wrong. The book would be thrown—meaning the maximum punishment the law allowed could be incurred.
In 1933 Collier’s magazine published “Three Wise Guys,” a Damon Runyon story about Blondy Swanson, Miss Clarabelle Cobb and a speakeasy. During the story, this line occurred:
The judge throws the book at him when he finally goes to bat.
And the expression then moved into the public arena.
(In the same year Collier’s published another Damon Runyon story, “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown,” which later became Guys and Dolls.)
Throw your hat in the ring
The expression was once a literal statement. At nineteenth-century boxing evenings, a punter would demonstrate his willingness to fight by simply throwing his hat into the ring. The practice was known in Britain as well as America, and was first referred to in print when English poet John Hamilton Reynolds (aka Peter Corcoran) wrote “The Fancy” in 1820:
And dauntless man step full of hopes
Up to the P.C. stakes and ropes
Throw in his hat, and with a spring
Get gallantly within the ring
(P.C. means “Pugilist Club.”)
The term became metaphorical, usually referring to entering some kind of contest. There is no doubt th
at Theodore Roosevelt made this figurative use famous when in 1912 he was asked if he planned to run for President, and replied:
My hat’s in the ring—the fight is on and I’m stripped to the buff.
Till the cows come home
Cows occupy their time fairly languidly all day, then head for home when milking is due—taking their time about getting there. So to say something will last until the cows come home implies that will be of a reliably long duration.
The saying originated from a line in a Beaumont and Fletcher play Scornful Lady (1616), now slightly adjusted from the original, which was:
Kiss till the cow comes home.
Time is money
It sounds like twenty-first century business mantra, but in fact recognition of the concept dates back to several centuries BC in ancient Greece.
In English, Sir Thomas Wilson hinted at it in A discourse upon Usuary (1572): “They saye tyme is precious.” Francis Bacon came closer in his Essays, writing “Of Dispatch” (1625): “Time is the measure of business as money is of wares; and business is bought at a dear hand.”
But the tidiest phrasing came from American journalist and diplomat Benjamin Franklin in Advice to a Young Tradesman—Written by an Old One (1748):
Remember that TIME is Money. He that can earn Ten Shillings a Day by his Labor, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that Day, tho’ he spends but Sixpence during his Diversion or Idleness, ought not to reckon That the only Expence; he has really spent or rather thrown away Five Shillings besides.
Tin pan alley
During the early part of the twentieth century, the premises of New York music publishers, writers and lyricists were mainly to be found on West 28th Street, between Broadway and Sixth Avenue.
Monroe Rosenfeld was a lyric writer who turned journalist for a series of articles he wrote in the New York Herald about the burgeoning music business. As Mr. Rosenfeld moved along the street among music publishing offices, the sound of pianos and singers demonstrating songs to publishers was inescapable—and disconcertingly discordant. The comparison Mr. Rosenfeld made was to the noise of many tin pans being clanged together. He described the area as: Tin Pan Alley.
To a T
It means eminently suitable, or “exactly.” The expression may have arisen from an old term—to a tittle—meaning a miniscule amount, and some see it as referring to the exact neatness achieved by the draughtsman’s T-square.
Neither explanation has a firm provenance, but what we do know is that the term first appeared in print during the 1600s, which makes the T-square connection unlikely.
James Wright was the author of a satire called The Humours and conversations of the town, Expos’d in Two Dialogues. The First of the men. The Second of the Women. (1693). In this book we find:
All the under Villages and Towns-men come to him for Redress; which he does to a T.
Today is the first day of the rest of your life
The line originated in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the peak activity of a community activist theater group called The Diggers. They were named after a seventeenth-century group of British radicals who initiated an early form of belief in the communal ownership of land.
Starting in 1966, the San Francisco group sought to enhance freedom through anarchic street theater, handing out food to those who needed it, giving free concerts, organising street parades with radical themes (e.g., “The Death of Money”), and the publication of papers reminiscent of early English pamphlets and broadsheets. These pamphlets launched various slogans that became catchphrases, including “Do Your Own Thing.”
In 1967 a Diggers pamphlet published this advice:
Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
An occasional alternative version developed—that tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life.
Toe rag
Known to both tramps and prison inhabitants during the 19th century, the term reached print in 1864.
J.F. Mortlock was twice sentenced for offences in England, twice transported to Australia as a convict, and twice returned to England. His book Experiences of a Convict explained that since socks were generally unavailable to prisoners, they would wrap their feet in strips from an old shirt, called “in language more expressive than elegant—a toe rag.”
After long service, the condition of these strips of cloth may well explain why the expression toe rag had become a term of contempt within a decade of Mortlock’s book being published.
To err is human, to forgive divine
The idea was in circulation both in Latin and in English during the 1500s and 1600s. But Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism in 1711 captured the meaning in the epigrammatic form in which it is best remembered.
Tom and Jerry
It seems an unlikely leap from the streets of early nineteenth-century London to the cartoon drawing boards of Hanna Barbera. Nevertheless the urban sketches of English sportswriter Pierce Egan, collected and published in 1821 as Life in London, or Days and Nights of Jerry Hawthorne and His Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom, are the first known teaming of the names Tom and Jerry.
Pierce Egan’s Tom and Jerry were roistering bucks, constantly encountering trouble on “rambles” and “sprees,” and the book was a great success, engendering a stage adaptation and a drink devised to represent the pair of rakes. The Tom and Jerry drink—a kind of eggnog with both brandy and rum—survived long after the book had faded. Damon Runyon mentions it in “Dancing Dan’s Christmas” over 100 years later, and the drink’s name is believed to have inspired the names of the Oscar-winning cartoon cat and mouse.
(There would seem even less connection between Egan’s London dandies and Simon and Garfunkel, but that duo’s original name in 1957 was Tom and Jerry.)
See also Bunch of fives
Tomorrow is another day
An ordinary enough remark, but it didn’t really enter the vernacular until 1936 when Margaret Mitchell wrote it as the last line of Gone With The Wind—Scarlett O’Hara resolving that on the following day she would start planning her campaign to get Rhett Butler back, and saying determinedly:
After all—tomorrow is another day.
The 1939 blockbuster movie ended with Vivien Leigh announcing the same line, making the phrase even more familiar to thousands who hadn’t already read the book.
Tongue in cheek
It is difficult to know why “tongue in cheek” signifies irony and that something being said is not to be taken seriously. Actually doing it—putting the tongue in the cheek—is virtually unknown, besides being rather awkward to achieve (especially when speaking).
Nevertheless the term is freely used to indicate doubtful integrity, having been launched by Sir Walter Scott in The Fair Maid of Perth (1828). A pompous and ridiculous looking little man is perched atop a very large horse when:
. . . some wag of the lower class had gravity enough to cry out, without laughing outright “There goes the pride of Perth” . . . It is true, the fellow who gave this all-hail thrust his tongue in his cheek . . .
Too clever by half
Sheridan gives the first hint in School for Scandal (1771) when Charles Surface tells Sir Peter that Joseph is “too moral by half.” But the true ancestor of the contemporary expression came from British poet, author and soldier George Whyte-Melville, a former cavalry officer in the Crimean war, who used the term “too clever by half ” when writing of Crimea and the siege of Sebastopol in his novel The Interpreter (1858).
(A jocular version—“too clever by three quarters”—has occasionally been used to describe Stephen Fry, Clive James, Jonathan Miller, Tom Stoppard, and others of similarly impressive breadth of mind.)
Took to my heels
The ancient Roman comedy playwright Publius Terentius Afer wrote about taking to his heels in the second century BC.
The move into English came with a few variations. Shakespeare in Henry IV, Part 1 offers:“ . . . play the coward with thy indenture, and sh
ow it a fair pair of heels . . .”
By the 1800s taking to one’s heels can be found in R.L. Stevenson, John Buchan, Conan Doyle, Daniel Defoe, Captain Frederick Marryat, and many others, having settled into popular usage.
To the victor the spoils
Bearing in mind that in this context “spoils” means trophies, prizes, and profits, rather than spoiled things, the phrase is often used in reportage of sports events or election results.
It is a condensed version of a statement put into circulation in 1832 by the Governor of New York William Learned Marcy when he addressed the Senate concerning the attitudes of the Jackson administration. Marcy said:
They see nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.
(Ninety years later F. Scott Fitzgerald deliberately reordered the term in The Beautiful and the Damned (1922): “The victor belongs to the spoils.”)
Touch and go
The origin of the touching and going referred to has several claimants. Land lubbers say it refers to the horse and carriage era, when if two carriages brushed against each other even momentarily there could be danger. But Admiral Smyth’s Sailor’s Word Book (1867) places the image firmly at sea, as in “rounding a ship very narrowly to escape rocks, or when under sail she rubs against the ground with her keel.” In any case (including later frequent use by airplane pilots) the element of accidental danger can be present.