Common Phrases

by Max Cryer

  Lou Reed had discussed the possibility of making a theater musical of Algren’s novel. Although he didn’t continue with the theater project, Reed did compose his own 1972 version of “A Walk on the Wild Side,” which bore no relation to the earlier two songs. Reed’s version became one of his longest-lasting hits, and took the expression into wider international recognition than ever before.

  Warts and all

  It was, and is, not uncommon for portraitists of celebrities to present their subject as attractively as possible. Long before airbrushing or photoshopping—or even photography—a royal personage would despatch a portrait of himself (or herself) to distant potential marriage partners, and expect the compliment to be returned. Sometimes the portraits proved more seductive than the reality.

  But when Oliver Cromwell took power in England as Lord Protector in 1653, a less obsequious atmosphere reigned. Cromwell sat for a portrait by Sir Peter Lely. It was reported some time afterward that Cromwell had told Lely:

  I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all the roughness, pimples, warts and everything, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.

  And indeed the Lely portrait shows Cromwell’s slight imperfections and at least one sizeable wart (verified by his death mask). Although his reported remark was “warts and everything” the shortened version has been attributed to Oliver Cromwell ever since.

  We are not amused

  She didn’t say it, though it’s often confidently attributed to Queen Victoria as evidence of her dour and restrictive attitude toward anyone else’s fun. But there is absolutely no evidence that she ever made that remark.

  In her 1999 biography of Queen Victoria, eminent historian Elizabeth, Countess Longford (who was given access to all Victoria’s letters and papers), says the legendary “We are not amused” is pure invention. On the contrary, Lady Longford points out that the Queen’s writings often contained the line “I was much amused.”

  Weasel words

  Substitute words to deprive a statement of its force, or avoid a direct commitment. The term first appeared in print in 1900, written by Stewart Chaplin in Century Magazine, in an article called “The Stained Glass Political Platform.” Chaplin was reporting on preparations being made by two young politicians, and explained:

  Weasel words are words which suck all the life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks an egg and leaves the shell. If you heft the egg afterwards it’s as light as a feather and not very filling when you’re hungry—but a basket full of them would make quite a show and bamboozle the unwary.

  Sixteen years later Theodore Roosevelt used it in a speech which made it famous, and it went into common use.

  Examples perceived as weasel words or phrases are: “restructuring” and “streamlining operations in response to market forces” (meaning people are going to be fired); “take out” (bomb or otherwise destroy); and “ethnic cleansing” (genocide).

  (A) week is a long time in politics

  The line is attributed to British Prime Minister Sir Harold Wilson and there is little doubt that he actually created it, although there is no certainty about when he said it. Even Sir Harold himself wasn’t sure.

  The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, while firmly allocating the expression as a Wilson original, skips the time factor with the notation that he “used it a number of times.”

  We have ways of making you talk

  Bringing an immediate image of ruthless German military questioning of prisoners of war, or James Bond when he’s really up against it, the line owes its origin to a 1930 novel by Major Francis Yeats-Brown: The Lives of a Bengal Lancer.

  Five years later the novel was used as the basis for a highly successful movie (seven Oscar nominations). The screenplay took liberties with the original book, and a string of screenwriters were credited with doing so: Grover Jones, William Slavens McNutt, Waldemar Young, John L. Balderston, Achmed Abdullah, and Yeats-Brown himself.

  Between them they conjured the line:

  We have ways of making men talk

  spoken by the character Mohammed Khan planning an Indian uprising against the British.

  Over time the line suffered a minor corruption through being inaccurately remembered and quoted as: “We have ways of making you talk.”

  Well he would, wouldn’t he?

  In 1963, during the trial of a man charged with “living off immoral earnings,” London-based model/dancer Mandy Rice-Davies gave evidence of having an affair with Lord Astor.

  When told by the prosecuting counsel that Lord Astor denied this, Rice-Davies replied: “Well he would, wouldn’t he,” a simple remark that then and since has been widely quoted (and sometimes adapted as, “Well he would (say that), wouldn’t he?”

  Wendy

  In the nineteenth century the girl’s name Wendy occurred only rarely in English, usually as a form of Guinevere, or as a shortened version of the Welsh name Gwendolyn. But famous author Sir James Barrie had a friendship with a little girl called Margaret Henley who had trouble pronouncing “r.” Legend has it that she referred to Barrie as her “fwendy” and sometimes her “fwendy wendy.” Margaret died when she was only six.

  It is believed that Barrie found her death greatly affecting, and also that her inability to say “r” helped engender the name of a character he was about to immortalize. The world was introduced to Peter Pan, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up in 1904, in which Peter met Wendy, the daughter of the Darling family, and took her to Never Land.

  From being uncommon, the name Wendy quickly became popular—a popularity that has always been attributed to the delightful character in Barrie’s play. (And little Margaret Henley’s father was the inspiration for R.L. Stevenson’s character Long John Silver.)

  Went phut

  We can thank Rudyard Kipling for introducing this useful word into English. Kipling’s Story of the Gadsbys (1888) says:

  I came out here, and the whole thing went phut. She wrote to say that there had been a mistake, and then she married.

  Nobody is entirely sure where Kipling found the word; a similar word appears in Hebrew and in Thai. But Kipling’s familiarity with things Indian makes it seem likely that it is a version of the Hindi word phatna, which means “burst.”

  (Kipling’s Gadsbys are not to be confused with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsbys.)

  Wham bam, thank you ma’am

  Familiar during World War II among men in the armed forces referring to brief and random sexual encounters, the term first went into the public arena when the song “Wham Bang Thank You Ma’am” composed by Hank Penny was recorded in 1950 by an upcoming young singer called Dean Martin (Capitol 6469-4).

  What you see is what you get

  Dreamed up by the Central Camera Co. in Chicago, the line first surfaced in May 1936 when the company ran an advertisement in the Chicago Tribune for a new Keystone 8 mm “natural color” movie camera:

  All you do is sight your subject through the telescopic finder and press the automatic button. That’s all there is to it. What you see is what you get.

  The catchphrase has since been used in dozens of contexts other than color photography, but without its wording being changed.

  (Many years after 1936, the abbreviation WYSIWYG has come to mean a system which allows the user of a computer to view something very similar to the end result while the document is still being created.)

  When in Rome, do as the Romans do

  Christianity remained fluid during the first 400 years of its existence, many of its customs and observances not having settled into an international pattern.

  St. Augustine was from Africa, and after having had a mistress for fifteen years (and a son), he moved to Rome in AD 383 to study philosophy. He became accustomed to the Christians in Rome fasting on a Saturday.

  Augustine was offered a job in Milan as a professor of philosophy and on arriving there he found that Christians did not fast on
Saturdays. He was curious, and Aurelius Ambrosius—Bishop Ambrose of Milan—advised him:

  Cum fueris Romae, Romano vivito more, cum fueris alibi, vivito sicut ibi.

  (When you’re in Rome, then live in Roman fashion; when you’re elsewhere, then live as there they live.)

  (Augustine gradually espoused Christianity and in AD 387 was baptized, together with his illegitimate son. He was canonized in 1298 and is the patron saint of theologians and brewers.)

  When the going gets tough the tough get going

  The Charleston Daily Mail in May 1954 quoted this line as being the favorite expression of football coach Frank Leahy (Francis William Leahy), who had resigned that year as coach for Notre Dame. His original wording is said to be:

  When the going gets tough, let the tough get going.

  Later, a slightly modified version was given much wider exposure when Joseph P. Kennedy (father of President John Kennedy) frequently used it.

  When you get what you want you don’t want it

  A link between Oscar Wilde and Marilyn Monroe at first seems unlikely, but a line from Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) was:

  In this world there are only two tragedies—one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

  Irving Berlin may or may not have known Wilde’s works, but in 1920 he came up with a song version with the same observation:

  After you get what you want you don’t want it.

  Its first recording by Van and Shenck in 1920 was an American hit, surpassed in 1946 by Nat King Cole. But Marilyn Monroe’s 1954 rendition in the movie There’s No Business Like Show Business put the song, and the concept of being beware of getting what you want, in front of a worldwide audience. Custom and usage resulted in the slight change from Berlin’s (and Wilde’s) words into “When you get what you want …”

  (The ancient Chinese maxim, “May you get what you wish for,” is regarded as a curse.)

  When you’ve got it—flaunt it!

  Written by Mel Brooks for the 1968 movie The Producers. Zero Mostel, playing the role of financially strapped Broadway producer Max Bialystock, sees from his office window someone arrive in the street below in a white Rolls Royce.

  In ironic desperation at his own plight, Bialystock shrieks at the unfortunate stranger:

  That’s it baby—when you’ve got it, flaunt it, flaunt it!

  While there’s life, there’s hope

  The expression appeared in a play with the unattractive title The Self Tormentor in Rome, c.163 BC. It was picked up over a millennium later by the Dutch scholar Desyderius Herasmus Roterodamus (Erasmus for short).

  The translation into English by Richard Taverner (1539) started out as:

  The sycke person whyle he hath lyfe, hath hope.

  A century later the saying had been whittled down to “While there’s life, there’s hope.”

  (The) whole shebang

  This expression can be used to describe the sum total of anything, without a thought to what a shebang actually is. Whatever its origin (possibly the Irish word shebeen), Walt Whitman made it clear what the word meant in nineteenth-century America in his Specimen Days (1862):

  Besides the hospitals, I also go occasionally on long tours through the camps, talking with the men, &c. Sometimes at night among the groups around the fires, in their shebang enclosures of bushes.

  Hence, a type of rustic dwelling. But its meaning had clearly widened ten years later. Mark Twain in Roughing It (1872) was using the word to mean a vehicle:

  You’re welcome to ride here as long as you please, but this shebang’s chartered, and we can’t let you pay a cent.

  By the end of the century shebang meant “anything and everything”—the whole lot.

  Who wants to be a millionaire?

  The title of a duet composed by Cole Porter and sung by Frank Sinatra and Celeste Holm in the 1956 movie High Society.The two characters are attending a wealthy socialite’s wedding, and they sing the duet surrounded by a display of extraordinarily lavish wedding presents brought to the young bride (played by Grace Kelly).

  The song’s lyrics emphasise that the couple singing is not impressed by the leisured lifestyle and luxury goods set out before them, since they are happy with each other.

  Curiously, when the song title was used as the name of an internationally successful television game show, it rapidly became clear that almost everyone else in the world does want to be a millionaire.

  Why should the devil have all the good tunes?

  Often mistakenly attributed to other prominent Christians, the statement was originated by a preacher in London. In 1782, the first stone was laid for an independent Methodist and Congregational church in Southwark. The building was designed to be round, in the belief that this prevented the devil from being able to hide in any corner.

  In 1783 the building opened as The Surrey Chapel (sometimes spelt Surry). The pastor of the chapel was the Rev. Rowland Hill, who took a close interest in the quality of church music. In his biography of Hill, E.W. Broome reports that the pastor saw no reason why “the devil should have all the good tunes,” and thus allowed some of them to be sung in his chapel.

  (The) wild blue yonder

  In 1937 a song competition was held in the U.S. to find a song that reflected the unique identity of their airmen. The magazine Liberty cooperated by offering $1,000 as a prize for the winning song. During a survey period of two years, over 700 entries came in, but were somewhat disappointing. At the last minute, a song arrived entitled “Army Air Corps Song,” with the opening lines:

  Off we go into the wild blue yonder,

  Climbing high into the sun.

  Composer-lyricist Captain Robert MacArthur Crawford was declared the winner.

  A slight change in the title came in 1947 when the U.S. Air Force was founded and the use of the term Army Air Corps ceased to exist as an entity. Accordingly, the name of the song became “U.S. Air Force Song.” The song became popularly referred to as “The Wild Blue Yonder,” and early printings of the sheet music advised that the line “Off with one hell of a roar” could be replaced with “Off with a terrible roar” to suit the broadcasting ethos of the time.

  In 1979 General Lew Allen Jr., Chief of Staff of the American Air Force, announced that the song was now the official service song.

  Window-shopping

  The first known public use of the term was in 1922, in Charlotte Rankin Aiken’s how-to-make book Millinery. Aiken was a director of the Lasalle and Koch Dry Goods department store in Toledo, Ohio and author of books on shop management.

  Her use of quote marks suggests that the term was already in use, though not yet regularly in print:

  The first step in making a hat at home, if one does not know exactly how one wishes to make it, is to leave home and go “window shopping” and also to look through the millinery departments in the stores.

  (A) woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle

  More than a decade prior to the feminist movement of the 1970s, American philosopher Charles S. Harris at Swarthmore College observed in a college publication that “A man without faith is like a fish without a bicycle” (1958).

  Some years later, and across the Pacific Ocean, Australian author, editor, and documentary film maker Irina Dunn was studying for an Honors degree in Language and Literature and happened to read Harris’s line. Being, as she later admitted to Time, “a bit of a smart-arse,” she paraphrased the line as “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

  In 1970 Irina Dunn boldly wrote the line inside two toilet doors—one at Sydney University, and the other in a Woolloomooloo wine bar. The expression spread widely and became a familiar part of the women’s liberation movement.

  (It was often attributed to Gloria Steinem, but the latter wrote to Time in 2000 to clarify that Irina Dunn was the true progenitor.)

  Word for word

  The noble art of understanding exactly what is meant. In his collection The Legend o
f Good Women (c.1385) Geoffrey Chaucer told his readers in the chapter on Dido, Queen of Carthage that he could understand Virgil precisely:

  I coude folwe, word for word, Virgile,

  But it wolde laste al to longe while.

  This noble queen, that cleped was Dido,

  That whilom was the wif of Sytheo,

  That fayrer was than is the bryghte sonne,

  This noble toun of Cartage hath bigonne …

  Would you buy a used car from this man?

  During the lead-up to the American presidential election in 1960 when rivalry between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon was a hot topic, Mort Saltzman was editor of the UCLA Daily Bruin newspaper, and tells:

  I published an editorial cartoon drawn by a free-lance cartoonist, Dennis Renault, an on-again, off-again student. It depicted Nixon with his famous 5 o’clock shadow and the caption said, “Would you buy a used car from this man?” The shit hit the fan.

  The original cartoon was made into a poster and displayed far and wide. Its caption quickly went into the language landscape, and was later adapted in many situations where doubt was being suggested about someone’s abilities—and trustworthiness.