Common Phrases
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Yadda Yadda
There has been quite a long line of verbal replacements for “etc., etc.,” such as yackkety yak, blah-blah-blah and yap yap yap.
The development of Yadda Yadda came through a complex series of “filler” words thought to imitate many people talking (yatata yatata), plus an influence from Yiddish (yatta yatta; yaddega yaddega).
The Yadda Yadda version was established in American vaudeville routines as early as the 1940s. It was introduced to a wider number of show business audiences twenty years later by comic Lenny Bruce in a monologue featuring the character of a prison riot leader, who answers “Yadda yadda” to every question put to him. Indeed, Lenny Bruce is regarded as the “father” of Yadda yadda.
But to be fair, the launch into international recognition came in April 1997 when scriptwriters Peter Mehlman and Jill Franklyn included Lenny Bruce’s “Yadda yadda” expression in an episode of the Seinfeld show, in which the term became a comic fixture for some time afterward.
Yahoo
Scholars have agonized over the derivation of this word. Is it from Sanskrit? Australian aboriginal? Chinese? Hebrew? Burmese? Russian? But there is no strong evidence for any of them.
Jonathan Swift simply made up a new word himself when he wrote Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The yahoos were a brutish race—loutish, violent and ugly—who had a bad smell and slept in mud.
In 1994 two electrical engineering students at Stanford University, David Filo and Jerry Yang, created a list of favorite Internet links, which as it grew had to be divided into many categories. It became Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web. Seeking a new name, they created the slightly comic Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle, then wisely checked if it happened to be a real word.
Their dictionary told them that yahoo—the initials of their new name—was a widely used slang term referring to a rude unsophisticated youth. Filo and Yang were sufficiently intrigued to abandon their complex title and settle for just YAHOO.
Within a year they had a million-hit day, and then a torrent. By 1996 they had forty-nine employees. In 2005 Yahoo services were in use by over 345 million individuals per month. Which makes the two enterprising men quite the opposite of Jonathan Swift’s initial concept of a yahoo!
Yes man
He who unfailingly agrees with whomever he wishes to please, was first noticed in print at the hand of Thomas Aloysius Dorgan (known as “TAD”), American sports writer, prolific cartoonist, and purveyor of colorful and sometimes new language.
In 1913 a published drawing of his showed a number of newspaper employees, each one labeled “Yes man,” all eagerly agreeing with their editor. After this the term went into wide usage.
You ain’t heard nothing yet
The expression was often used by entertainer Al Jolson in his stage appearances—once notably when he was scheduled to sing in a concert straight after Enrico Caruso. The audience gave the opera star’s item a huge ovation, then Jolson came onstage and boldly announced, “You ain’t heard nothing yet.” Classical music fans were not pleased about this, but Caruso was reportedly quite amused.
In 1926 when Vitaphone started experimenting with sound dics playing in sync. with a movie screen, Al Jolson was “filmed with sound” singing three songs that same year.
But the turning point for sound movies—and Jolson’s favorite expression—came in 1927. By then, movies with sound had played music or effects such as trains rumbling or swords clashing. Spoken words were still being treated ultra-cautiously, and only a very few had been heard coming from a movie screen. As was normal at the time, The Jazz Singer, the first full-length movie-with-sound-andsongs, would have dialogue only as printout title-sequences telling the story.
When the studio set-up was ready for the movie’s big musical number and the microphones already switched on, Jolson—the diehard vaudeville performer—completely against the moviemaker’s plans, suddenly burst into a spoken introduction to his song:
Wait a minute, wait a minute I tell yer, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!
The spoken lines had been accidentally recorded on the film’s “soundtrack,” and the director made a bold decision and added another scene where the characters talked.
The result changed the movie-making industry overnight. The Jazz Singer launched a new word into the language—talkies—and Al Jolson’s line became a catchphrase for the rapid output of movies in which people actually spoke dialogue.
You are what you eat
The phrase owes a lot to French gastronomist Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (of sufficient status that a French cheese is named after him), who in his 1825 book The Physiology of Taste wrote:
Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es.
(Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.)
The expression made a somewhat unconventional entrance into English through an American newspaper, the Bridgeport Telegraph, in an advertisement in 1923 (with unattributed translation, and a strange misspelling) for the United Meet (sic) Markets:
Ninety per cent of the diseases known to man are caused by cheap foodstuffs.You are what you eat.
This policy is believed to have arisen through the enthusiasm of nutritionist Victor Lindlahr who at the time was paying great attention to health and diet, and in 1942 published his book You Are What You Eat.
You can’t be serious . . . you cannot be serious
American professional tennis player John McEnroe won seven Grand Slam singles titles—three at Wimbledon, four in the U.S. Open, and was World No. 1. Not a shrinking violet, his behavior was often seen to be rebellious.
In 1981 during a match at Wimbledon he disagreed with an umpire’s opinion and made this clear with the shouted remark, “You can’t be serious,” followed immediately by the slightly more formal, “You cannot be serious.”
This much publicized mini-tirade became the title of his 2002 biography (co-written with James Kaplan), which went to the top of the NewYork Times bestseller list. McEnroe was inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame in 1999.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too
This came into print in 1546 as part of a collection by dramatist and balladeer to King Henry VII’s court, John Heywood, of sayings that were already known to him:
Wolde ye both eate your cake and have your cake?
A sixteenth-century reading audience would be small compared with a more literate nation over 200 years later when Keats wrote his poem “On Fame” (1816).
He placed the “cake” line simply as a heading to Verse 2. One has to acknowledge that his literary standing makes John Keats a stronger candidate for launching the expression into wider recognition:
On Fame
“You cannot eat your cake and have it too”—Proverb
How fevered is the man who cannot look
Upon his mortal days with temperate blood,
Who vexes all the leaves of his life’s book,
And robs his fair name of its maidenhood;
It is as if the rose should pluck herself,
Or the ripe plum finger its misty bloom …
You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs
This image exists in just about every language in Europe and probably beyond.
It was first introduced in English by Major-General Thompson, MP for Bradford in Audi Alteram Partem (Hear the other side)—Letters of a Representative to his Constituents (1859):
The conclusion is that we are walking upon eggs, and whether we tread East or tread West the omelette will not be made without the breaking of some.
Nearly forty years later, Robert Louis Stevenson in St. Ives, Being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England (1897) when the narrator shows his damaged hands to a young woman, the expression settles into the form it has retained:
My dear Miss Flora, you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs—and it is no bagatelle to escape from Edinburgh Castle.
You can’t take it with you
Masterman was a bachelor, of nearly sixty years, without any near relations. It is true, that he was very fond of money; but that, they said, was all the better, as he could not take it away with him when he died.
But the clear and neat contemporary version came when American writers George Kaufman and Moss Hart (leaning more on the Book of Timothy than on Marryat as inspiration) opened their play You Can’t Take It WithYou in New York. The play won a Pulitzer Prize the following year and its title became part of everyday speech.
You get what you pay for
Reputedly said in a firm tone of voice by actress Elizabeth Taylor when queried about her astronomical fees for movie appearances. But the expression was nearly 500 years old by then.
It is first seen in the Exposito Canonis (c.1495) of German philosopher Gabriel Biel:
Pro tali numismate tales merces.
(You get what you pay for.)
You’ll never work in this town again
It sounds very Hollywood, but in fact first arose among nineteenth-century straight-talking English industrialists.
In 1882, the committee of the Guild of Preston was awaiting Queen Victoria’s son, His Royal Highness Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany who was due to arrive for a visit. But a message arrived from the Royal Household saying that the Prince had “a slight indisposition” and was not able to attend.
The Committee chairman remarked:
Reet. He’ll never work in this town again.
(They were a bit tough—and might not have known that Prince Leopold was a haemophilia sufferer.)
You pay your money and you take your choice
Believed to be a slogan of London market stallholders, the saying came before the general public when the term was first seen in print in 1846.There had been a Prime Ministerial crisis in Britain when Robert Peel resigned, followed by a time of government indecision, and the new leadership was unclear but hovering over several possible starters.
On January 3, 1846, a Punch cartoonist drew a picture showing a young girl standing with her father, watching a group of important-looking men go by.
She asks: ‘Which is the Prime Minister?’
His reply: ‘Whichever you please my little dear. You pays your money and you takes your choice.’
Your country needs you
In July 1914 and aware of the approaching signs of war, Britain’s Field Marshall Lord Kitchener initiated confidential preparations for a campaign to alert the public and recruit more soldiery. Advertising writer Eric Field quietly created an image of the Royal coat of arms, and the slogan “Your King and Country Need You,” and put his work on standby.
It was ready to publish on August 5, 1914, the day after war was declared, as the Government’s official recruitment poster.
Three months later artist Alfred Leete revised Field’s design and created a slightly parodied version showing a fierce-looking Lord Kitchener glaring out. Leete also shortened Eric Field’s original slogan to “Your Country Needs You.” This simplified version was so much more effective than the original that Leete’s version was accepted by the Government as the flagship of its recruitment campaign, which encouraged three million men to volunteer for service.
Leete’s design and its crisp slogan became famous internationally, and was frequently copied, most notably by America with Uncle Sam announcing “I want YOU for the U.S. Army,” which first appeared in 1916 two years after the British version, and was revised in America for World War II.
The last word
Shakespeare
by Bernard Levin
If you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me,”
you are quoting Shakespeare;
if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning,
you are quoting Shakespeare;
if you recall your salad days,
you are quoting Shakespeare;
if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air,
you are quoting Shakespeare;
if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from greeneyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool’s paradise—why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that
you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare;
if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then—to give the devil his due—if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head)
you are quoting Shakespeare;
even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloodyminded or a blinking idiot, then—by Jove! O Lord! Tut, tut! for goodness’ sake! what the dickens! but me no buts—it is all one to me, for
you are quoting Shakespeare.
Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd London on behalf of the Estate of Bernard Levin. Copyright © Bernard Levin 1983.
Sources
Wherever possible, the source and context of examined expressions have been included within the text of their entries. The following list is not comprehensive, but refers to the main sources which provided further information:
Ammer, Christine, The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1997
Apperson, G.L. ed., The Wordsworth Dictionary of Proverbs, Wordsworth Editions, Hertfordshire, 1993
Ayto and Green, Don’t Quote Me, Hamlyn Paperbacks, Middlesex, 1981
Ayto and Simpson, Stone the Crows, Oxford University Press, 2008
Ayto, J., Twentieth Century Words, Oxford University Press, 1999
Benet, William Rose, The Reader’s Encyclopedia, A & C Black, London,1973
Brown, Lesley ed., The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1993
Burnam, Tom, Dictionary of Misinformation, Ballantine Books, New York,1980
Chambers, James, Charlotte and Leopold—The True Story of the Original “People’s Princess,” Old Street Publishing, London, 2007
Chapman Robert L. and Kipfer, Barbara Ann, American Slang, Harper Perennial, 1998
Coxe, William, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford, Cadell & Davies, 1798
Fleming, Tom, Voices Out Of The Air, Heinemann, London, 1981
Fraser, Antonia ed., The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1975
Freedland, Michael, Al Jolson, W.H. Allen, 1972
Harper, Joseph ed., The Ultimate Book of Notes and Queries, Atlantic Books, London, 2002
Hendrickson, Robert, The Facts on File Encyclopaedia of Word and Phrase Origins, FOF Publications, New York, 1987
Hole, Georgia, The Real McCoy, Oxford University Press, 2005
Jack, Albert, Red Herrings and White Elephants, Metro Publishing, London, 2004
Jackman, S.W., The People’s Princess, Kensal, 1984
Longford, Elizabeth, Queen Victoria, Sutton Publishing, Phoenix Mill, 1999
McCann, Liam, The Sledger’s Handbook: How t
o Deliver the Perfect Cricketing Insult, AAPPL Publishers, 2006
Mort, Simon ed., Longman Guardian New Words, Longman, Essex, 1986
Muir, Frank, The Frank Muir Book, William Heinemann, London, 1976
Partridge, Eric, A Dictionary of Catch Phrases, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977
Pickering, David, Isaacs, Alan and Martin, Elizabeth eds., Brewer’s Twentieth Century Phrase and Fable, Cassell, London, 1991
Richards, Kel, Wordwatching, ABC Books, 2006