Читать книгу Bees Knees and Barmy Armies - Origins of the Words and Phrases we Use Every Day - Harry Oliver - Страница 26

To grin like a Cheshire cat is to smile broadly and without inhibition. We can thank Lewis Carroll for the popularity of this expression. In his 1865 classic book Alice in Wonderland, his fictional cat is most commonly remembered for its almost complete disappearance – save for its grin. While Carroll certainly boosted the saying’s currency, there are published instances of it in the work of the eighteenth-century English writer John Wolcot. Beyond this, the origins of the phrase are hard to pin down. To start with, the Cheshire cat isn’t a breed of cat, but one idea is that the cats in Cheshire were grinning with satisfaction at living in a dairy-farming county famous for its cheeses as well as producing plenty of cream. Another version of the cheese theory is that in Cheshire, cheese was once sold in a mould that looked like a grinning cat. Staying with Cheshire but forgetting the cheese, another school of thought is that the paintings of grinning lions that once graced the signs of various inns throughout the county gave birth to the ‘Cheshire cat’. Why grinning lions is another question.