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cabbage-looking See I’M NOT SO.

Cabbage Patch Kids Millions of soft, ugly dolls with this name were sold in 1983–4. Created by American entrepreneur Xavier Roberts, they became a craze around the world. People did not purchase them but, tweely, ‘adopted’ them. Whereas, in Britain, babies that are not delivered by the stork are found under a gooseberry bush, in the USA, they are found in ‘cabbage patches’. The ‘stork’ and ‘cabbage-patch’ theories of childbirth were known by 1923; the ‘gooseberry-bush’ by 1903. Compare Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1901), the title of a US children’s novel by Alice Hegan Rice.

cabbages and kings Phrase from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Walrus and the Carpenter’ episode in Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, Chap. 4 (1871): ‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, / ‘To talk of many things: / Of shoes – and ships – and sealing-wax – / Of cabbages and kings…’ The American writer O. Henry took Cabbages and Kings as the title of his first collection of short stories (1904), and there is a book, Of Kennedys and Kings: making sense of the Sixties by Harris Wofford (1980). However, the alliterative conjunction of ‘cabbages’ and ‘kings’ predates Carroll. In Hesketh Pearson’s Smith of Smiths, a biography of the Reverend Sydney Smith (d. 1845), he quotes Smith as saying about a certain Mrs George Groce: ‘She had innumerable hobbies, among them horticulture and democracy, defined by Sydney as “the most approved methods of growing cabbages and destroying kings”.’

cads See PLAY THE GAME.

Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion An example of this phrase occurs in Lord Chesterfield’s letters (circa 1740): ‘Your moral character must be not only pure, but, like Caesar’s wife, unsuspected.’ Originally, it was Julius Caesar himself who said this of his wife, Pompeia, when he divorced her in 62 BC. In North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives – which is how the saying came into English in 1570 – Caesar is quoted thus: ‘I will not, sayd he, that my wife be so much as suspected.’ Pompeia was Caesar’s second wife, and, according to Suetonius, in 61 BC she took part in the women-only rites of the Feast of the Great Goddess. But it was rumoured that a profligate called Publius Clodius attended, wearing women’s clothes, and that he committed adultery with Pompeia. Caesar divorced Pompeia and at the subsequent inquiry into the desecration was asked why he had done so. ‘Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion,’ he replied. He later married Calphurnia.

ça ira…à la lanterne ‘Ah! Ah! ça ira, ça ira / Les aristocrates à la lanterne’ is the refrain of the French revolutionary song, first heard when the Parisians marched on Versailles (5–6 October 1789). Ça ira, though almost impossible to translate, means something like ‘That will certainly happen’, ‘It will go’, ‘Things will work out.’ À la lanterne is the equivalent of the modern ‘string ‘em up’ (lanterne being a street lamp in Paris useful for hanging aristocrats from). The inspiration for the first line of the refrain may have been Benjamin Franklin’s recent use of the phrase in connection with the American Revolution of 1776. After the French Revolution, the phrase Ça ira caught on in Britain.

cakes and ale A synonym for ‘enjoyment’, as in the expression ‘life isn’t all cakes and ale’. On 4 May 1876, the Reverend Francis Kilvert wrote in his diary: ‘The clerk’s wife brought out some cakes and ale and pressed me to eat and drink. I was to have returned to Llysdinam to luncheon…but as I wanted to see more of the country and the people I decided to let the train go by, accept the hospitality of my hostess and the cakes and ale which life offered, and walk home quietly in the course of the afternoon’ – a neat demonstration of the literal and metaphorical uses of the phrase. Cakes and Ale is the title of a novel (1930) by W. Somerset Maugham. The phrase comes from Sir Toby Belch’s remark to Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, II.iii.114 (1600): ‘Does thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’. The Arden edition comments that cakes and ale were ‘traditionally associated with festivity, and disliked by Puritans both on this account and because of their association with weddings, saints’ days, and holy days’.

Calcutta See BLACK HOLE; OH!

call See ANSWER THE; DON’T CALL US.

(to) call a spade a spade To speak bluntly, to call things by their proper names without resorting to euphemisms. But why a spade? Said to have arisen when Erasmus mistranslated a passage in Plutarch’s Apophthegmata where the object that ‘Macedonians had not the wit to call a spade by any other name than a spade’ was rather a trough, basin, bowl or boat in the original Greek. The phrase was in the English language, however, by 1539.

calling all cars, calling all cars! What the police controller says over the radio to patrolmen in American cop films and TV series of the 1950s. For some reason, it is the archetypal cop phrase of the period, and evocative. However, the formula had obviously been known before this if the British film titles Calling All Stars (1937), Calling All Ma’s (1937) and Calling All Cars (1954) are anything to go by. Indeed, the phrase appears in an American advertisement for Western Electric radio equipment, dated 1936.

call me madam When Frances Perkins was appointed Secretary of Labor by President Roosevelt in 1933, she became the first American woman to hold Cabinet rank. It was told that when she had been asked in Cabinet how she wished to be addressed, she had replied: ‘Call me Madam.’ She denied that she had done this, however. It was after her first Cabinet meeting when reporters asked how they should address her. The Speaker-elect of the House of Representatives, Henry T. Rainey, answered for her: ‘When the Secretary of Labor is a lady, she should be addressed with the same general formalities as the Secretary of Labor who is a gentleman. You call him “Mr Secretary”. You will call her “Madam Secretary”. You gentlemen know that when a lady is presiding over a meeting, she is referred to as “Madam Chairman” when you rise to address the chair’ – quoted in George Martin, Madam Secretary – Frances Perkins (1976). Some of the reporters put this ruling into Perkins’s own mouth and that presumably is how the misquotation occurred. Irving Berlin’s musical Call Me Madam was first performed on Broadway in 1950, starring Ethel Merman as a woman ambassador appointed to represent the USA in a tiny European state. It was inspired by the case of Pearl Mesta, the society hostess whom Harry Truman had appointed as US Ambassador to Luxembourg.

(the) call of the unknown (or challenge…) Not recorded in OED2. Found in the speech that the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen gave when he was installed as Rector of the University of Aberdeen in November 1926: ‘We will find in the lives of men who have done anything, of those whom we call great men, that it is this spirit of adventure, the call of the unknown, that has lured and urged them along on their course…’

(a) callow youth An immature, inexperienced young person (in slightly archaic use). ‘One overhears a callow youth of twenty address a still fascinating belle of forty’ – A. M. Binstead, More Gal’s Gossip (1901); ‘There is a slightly awkward father-and-son relationship here between the gullible, disapproving, callow youth who lived and the sophisticated man who writes, and it is the open unresolvability of this tension which makes the book so recognisable and so true’ – The Guardian (17 May 1994); ‘On his first ever visit to the regal ski resort of St Moritz, King Farouk of Egypt, then a callow youth, felt a sartorial fool. He had arrived at the Suvretta House Hotel wearing a black morning suit and nervelessly flicked back the tails as he helped his mother’ – Daily Mail (24 December 1994).

(the) camera cannot lie (or does not lie or never lies) A 20th-century proverb, though its origins have not been recorded. In the script for the commentary of a film (‘Six Commissioned Texts’, I., 1962), W. H. Auden wrote: ‘The camera’s eye / Does not lie, / But it cannot show / The life within.’ ‘The camera cannot lie. But it can be an accessory to the untruth’ – Harold Evans, Pictures on a Page (1978).

camel See EYE OF.

came the dawn (or comes the dawn) A stock phrase of romantic fiction in the early 20th century – also reported to have been a subtitle or inter-title from the early days of cinema. C. A. Lejeune wrote that it was one of the screen title captions illustrated by Alfred Hitchcock in his early days in the cinema, ‘in black letters on a white ground.’ This is confirmed by François Truffaut’s Hitchcock (English version, 1968) in which Hitchcock refers to it as ‘narrative title’. He also mentions a similar title phrase: ‘The next morning…’ ‘Came the Dawn’ was the title of a P. G. Wodehouse short story reprinted in Mulliner Omnibus (1927). The phrase is spoken by Tony Cavendish in the George S. Kaufman/Edna Ferber play The Royal Family (1927), in which he is a swashbuckling silent film actor, given to speaking in the clichés of screen titling. Again, the line is spoken in the film The Bad and the Beautiful (US 1952) to describe the change of scene the morning after a party and a gambling loss. It is quoted as ‘Comes the Dawn’ in Flexner (1982). Before the coming of film sound, it was possible for a catchphrase to emerge from this kind of use. In A Fool There Was (US 1914), Theda Bara ‘spoke’ the inter-title kiss me, my fool, and this was taken up as a fad expression. Similarly, Jacqueline Logan ‘said’ harness my zebras in Cecil B. De Mille’s King of Kings (US 1925). This became a fad expression for ‘let’s leave’ or as a way of expressing amazement – ‘Well, harness my zebras!’

(as) camp as a row of tents Extremely affected, outrageous, over the top. A pun on the word ‘camp’, which came into general use in the 1960s to describe the manner and behaviour of (especially) one type of homosexual male. As it happens, one of the suggested origins for the word ‘camp’ in this sense is that it derives from ‘camp followers’, the female prostitutes who would accompany an army on its journeyings to service the troops in or adjacent to their tents.

can a (bloody) duck swim! (sometimes does/will a fish swim!) This is said by way of meaning ‘You bet!’, ‘Of course, I will’. ODP has ‘Will a duck swim?’ in 1842. Winston Churchill claimed he said the ‘can’ version to Stanley Baldwin when the Prime Minister asked if he would accept the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1924 government. Lady Violet Bonham Carter spoke the phrase to Churchill when he asked her to serve as a Governor of the BBC in 1941. After this, he referred to her as his ‘Bloody Duck’, and she had to sign her letters to him, ‘Your BD’.

(he/she) can dish it out but can’t take it in Said of people who are unable to accept the kind of criticism they dispense to others. A reader’s letter to Time Magazine (4 January 1988) remarked of comedienne Joan Rivers’s action in suing a magazine for misquoting her about her late husband: ‘For years she has made big money at the expense of others with her caustic remarks. Obviously Rivers can dish it out but can’t take it in.’ The idiomatic phrase was established by the 1930s. In the film Little Caesar (US 1931), Edward G. Robinson says, ‘He could dish it out but he couldn’t take it in.’ In the film 49th Parallel (1941), Raymond Massey, as a Canadian soldier, apparently plays with the phrase when he says to a Nazi, ‘When things go wrong, we can take it. We can dish it out, too.’

candle See CARE OF; HOLD A.

(a) candle in the wind The song ‘Candle in the Wind’ (1973) has words by Bernie Taupin and music by Elton John. The opening words ‘Goodbye Norma Jean’ refer to Marilyn Monroe (who was born Norma Jean Mortenson/Baker): ‘It seems to me you lived your life / Like a candle in the wind. / Never knowing who to cling to / When the rain set in. / And I would have liked to have known you / But I was just a kid / That candle burned out long before / Your legend ever did.’ Elton John sang a revised version of the song at the funeral of Princess Diana (7 September 1997): ‘Goodbye England’s rose; / May you ever grow in our hearts…/ And it seems to me you lived your life / Like a candle in the wind; / Never fading with the sunset / When the rain set in.’ But where did the original title phrase come from? Mencken (1942) gives ‘Man’s life is like a candle in the wind’ as a ‘Chinese proverb’. A French dictionary of proverbs lists ‘La vie de l’homme est comme une chandelle dans le vent’ as Chinese. A Dutch collection of Oriental quotations has: ‘What is the life of Man? A candle in the wind, hoar frost on the roof, the spasm of a fish in the frying pan.’ A poem by the Chinese poet Bai Juyi (772–846) describing the illusory character of reality contains the phrase ‘a candle’s flame in the wind.’ A Latin emblem book by the French author Denis Lebey de Batilly (1596 edn) has a picture of a man seated at a table amidst classicist architecture. On the table is not a candle but a classical oil-lamp with burning wick. Big clouds with faces and puffed-up cheeks blow at the flame. The Latin motto is (in corrected form): ‘QUID EST HOMO SICVT LVCERNA IN VENTO POSITA [what is Man but a lamp in the wind].’ The four-line Latin commentary says, in translation (from German): ‘Man is like a small lamp, which in the dark night is exposed to the winds blowing from all sides. His flame of life feeds on such meagre, such unreliable oil – it is extinguished when the gale of Death grabs it.’ The English novelist George Meredith later majored in wind-blown candle images in several of his novels. ‘The light of every soul burns upward. Of course, most of them are candles in the wind. Let us allow for atmospheric disturbance’ is from his novel, Diana of the Crossways, Chap. 39 (1885), where it is spoken by the heroine. Charles Joaquin Quirk, an American Catholic priest and a professor at Loyola University, published a book with the title Candles in the Wind in 1931. There is also a book with the same title by Maud Diver (1909). Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote a play entitled Candle in the Wind (1960) about moral choices in any society, either communist or capitalist. The original Russian title was Svecha na vetru: (svet kotoryj v tebe) [(A) candle in the wind: (the light which is in thee)], which refers to Luke 11:35. Of course, Taupin may not have been aware of any of these earlier uses. Indeed, according to Philip Norman’s biography of Elton John, Elton (1991), Taupin heard that someone had applied the phrase to the singer Janis Joplin (1943–70), ‘also doomed to early death from drugs’, and took it on from there.

can do! ‘Yes, I can do it!’ in a sort of Pidgin English, popular in the Royal Navy before the First World War. The opposite no can do was established by the time of the Second World War.

can I do you now, sir? From ITMA, and one of the two greatest catchphrases from the BBC radio show (1939–49). It was spoken by Mrs Mopp (Dorothy Summers), the hoarse-voiced charlady or ‘Corporation Cleanser’, when entering the office of Tommy Handley, as the Mayor. Curiously, the first time Mrs Mopp used the phrase, on 10 October 1940, she said, ‘Can I do for you now, sir?’ This was soon replaced by the familiar emphases of ‘Can I do you now, sir?’ that people could still be heard using decades later. Bob Monkhouse recalled (1979) that Dorothy Summers said: ‘Oh, I do wish people wouldn’t expect me to be only Mrs Mopp. That awful char. I never wanted to say it in the first place. I think it was rather distasteful.’ She seems to have been the only person to detect any double meaning in it.

can I phone a friend? Contestant to host (Chris Tarrant) in the original British version of the TV quiz Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? (1999– ). Before answering questions, contestants were encouraged to firm up their resolve by consulting the studio audience or by phoning a friend who had been lined up in advance.

cannon fodder Soldiers regarded as people whose only purpose is to get killed in battle. This may be seen as a translation of the German Kanonenfutter (known by the 1840s) or the French chair à canon (current at about the same time). However, a letter from Captain Richard Pope, describing Marlborough’s cavalry in 1703, uses the phrase with confidence, suggesting that it was an established concept even then: ‘Such a set of ruffians and imbeciles you never beheld, you may call them cannon fodder, but never soldiers.’ Indeed, Shakespeare has the phrase ‘food for powder’, meaning the same thing, in Henry IV, Part 1, IV.ii.65 (1597).

(a) can of worms An unpleasantly complicated problem, as in such phrases as ‘that’s another can of worms’, ‘let’s not open that can of worms’. The image is that of opening a can of tinned food only to find that it is full of writhing maggots. So the implication is that it would be better not to look into something in case it presents unexpected problems. Probably of American origin, by the late 1940s. ‘Mr Berger has opened, in an old American phrase, a fine can of worms. He is suggesting that an impeached President, should he be found guilty, could appeal to the Supreme Court’ – The Times (22 May 1973).

can snakes do push-ups? See IS THE POPE.

can’t be bad! Congratulatory response to good news, popular in Britain in the 1970s – ‘I’ve made a date with that well-stacked blonde in the typing pool’ – ‘Can’t be bad!’ Possibly linked to the usage in the Beatles’ song ‘She Loves You’ (1963): ‘Because she loves you / And you know that can’t be bad…’ ‘Further up the pecking order is the 27-ish woman who left to set up a gilt-trading operation at a rival for £300,000. “She’s nothing special, but she’ll stay three years and do an okay job for them, and from her point of view it can’t be bad”’ – The Independent (13 May 1994); ‘Colin Montgomerie three-putted for the first time in the week as he shot a 72 for 279, but he insisted: “After taking four weeks off and tying for 17th place in America, that can’t be bad”’ – Daily Record (6 March 1995); ‘Uncomfortable parallels between Dracula and Nicolae Ceausescu, the former Stalinist dictator, meant that such a gathering was impossible in the Communist era. But now Europe’s second poorest country after Albania can cash in on the legend. Can’t be bad for garlic growers either’ – Financial Times (22 May 1995).

(he) can’t chew gum and fart at the same time He is really stupid and incapable. The most notable use of this (presumably traditional American) jibe was by President Lyndon Johnson about the man who was eventually to turn into another US President: ‘That Gerald Ford. He can’t fart and chew gum at the same time’ – quoted in Richard Reeves, A Ford Not a Lincoln (1975), and in J. K. Galbraith, A Life in Our Times (1981). This is the correct version of the euphemistic: ‘He couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time.’

can’t pay, won’t pay Slogan adopted by those objecting to the British government’s Community Charge or ‘poll tax’ in 1990 and by other similar protest groups. Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay was the English title of the play Non Si Paga! Non Si Paga! (1974) by Dario Fo, as translated by Lino Pertile (1981).

(you) can’t throw a brick without hitting…It is very easy to do something because you can’t miss. ‘Combe Regis is just the place for you. Perfect hotbed of golf. Full of the finest players. Can’t throw a brick without hitting an amateur champion’ – P. G. Wodehouse, Love Among the Chickens, Chap. 2 (1906/1921). ‘In a Lancashire cotton-town you could probably go for months on end without once hearing an “educated” accent, whereas there can hardly be a town in the South of England where you could throw a brick without hitting the niece of a bishop – George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Obviously, this is a development of what appears in Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, Chap. 37 (1869): ‘I could throw a rock here without hitting a captain…You’d fetch the captain of the watch, maybe.’

can we talk? Stock phrase of Joan Rivers, the American comedienne and TV chatshow host, by 1984.

(the) canyons of your mind Title phrase of Vivian Stanshall’s 1968 hit song ‘Canyons of Your Mind’ (with the Bonzo Dog Band): ‘In the canyons of your mind / I will wander through your brain / To the ventricles of your heart, my dear / I’m in love with you again.’ Curiously, the phrase was taken from the 1966 Val Doonican hit ‘Elusive Butterfly’ (written by Bob Lind, who had recorded it himself in 1965): ‘You might have heard my footsteps / Echo softly through the distance / In the canyons of your mind.’

can you hear me, mother? The British comedian Sandy Powell (1900–82) recalled in 1979: ‘It was in about 1932/3, when I was doing an hour’s show on the radio, live, from Broadcasting House in London. I was doing a sketch called “Sandy at the North Pole”. I was supposed to be broadcasting home and wanting to speak to my mother. When I got to the line, “Can you hear me, mother?” I dropped my script on the studio floor. While I was picking up the sheets all I could do was repeat the phrase over and over. Well, that was on a Saturday night. The following week I was appearing at the Hippodrome, Coventry, and the manager came to me at the band rehearsal with a request: “You’ll say that, tonight, won’t you?” I said, “What?” He said, “‘Can you hear me, mother?’ Everybody’s saying it. Say it and see.” So I did and the whole audience joined in and I’ve been stuck with it ever since. Even abroad – New Zealand, South Africa, Rhodesia, they’ve all heard it. I’m not saying it was the first radio catchphrase – they were all trying them out – but it was the first to catch on.’

can you tell Stork from butter? Slogan for Stork margarine in the UK from circa 1956. One of the earliest slogans on British commercial TV, it was invariably alluded to in parodies of TV advertising. In the original ads, housewives were shown taking part in comparative tests and tasting pieces of bread spread with either real butter or with Stork.

captains courageous The phrase comes from a ballad, ‘Mary Ambree’, included in Thomas Percy’s Reliques (1765): ‘When captains courageous whom death could not daunt, / Did march to the siege of the city of Gaunt, / They mustered their soldiers by two and by three, / And the foremost in battle was Mary Ambree.’ Hence, Captains Courageous, title of a novel (1897) by Rudyard Kipling.

captains of industry Prominent figures in business and commerce. ‘Captains of Industry’ was a heading in Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843). ‘A hardnosed captain of industry who wanted a pretty mannequin from tidewater aristocracy’ – D. Anthony, Long Hard Cure (1979); ‘So where are the captains of industry, the entrepreneurs and knights of yesteryear – the modern equivalents of those Victorian worthies who steered the once-great civic authorities?’ – Independent on Sunday (1 May 1994); ‘He has created his own brand of lobbying where prospective clients are wooed by conversation littered with the names of MPs and ministers, captains of industry and mandarins and the endless parties and lunches which they all attend’ – Daily Telegraph (21 October 1994).

caravan See DOGS BARK.

carbon-copy murders Killings that replicate other recent crimes and may have been inspired by them. Journalistic cliché by the 1950s/60s. Listed by Keith Waterhouse as a cliché to be avoided in Daily Mirror Style (1981). But who knows what carbon paper is nowadays? ‘Victim of the week-old “carbon copy” murder’ – Daily Telegraph (3 April 1961); ‘Detectives probing that crime revealed they are checking for possible links with the “carbon copy” murder of housewife Wendy Speakes at Wakefield, Yorkshire, a year ago…A spokesman for Lincolnshire police said last night: “We have requested the file on the Wakefield case because of the similarities with our inquiry. It appears to be a carbon copy murder”’ – Daily Mirror (12 October 1994).

carcase See HABEAS.

card-carrying Paid-up, committed members of any movement (but mostly political or social). ‘The most dangerous Communists in the nation today are not the open, avowed, card-carrying party members’ – Bert Andrews, Washington Witch Hunt, Chap. 2 (1948).

cared See AS IF I.

Cardew do! See HOW DO YOU DO.

careful See BE GOOD AND.

careless talk costs lives Security slogan, during the war, in the UK, from mid-1940. This became the most enduring of security slogans, especially when accompanied by Fougasse cartoons – showing two men in a club, for example, one saying to the other ‘…strictly between four walls’ (behind them is a painting through which Hitler’s head is peeping), or two women gossiping in front of Hitler wallpaper. Compare loose talk costs lives – security slogan (USA only) from the same war.

care of candle ends Proverbial expression for making petty economies. It is possible to melt the stubs of candles down and make new candles from the wax. The OED2 has a citation from 1668, referring to filching candle ends and laying them away, which is not conclusive. But the following citation from 1732 is quite clearly an allusion: ‘When Hopkins dies, a thousand lights attend / Who living, sav’d a candle’s end” – Alexander Pope Moral Essays – Epistle III to Allen Lord Bathhurst (1732). In the days when candles were a major expense in grand houses, the candle ends were a perquisite of certain servants, to be re-used or sold. British Prime Ministers W. E. Gladstone and John Major seem to have defended themselves from accusations of ‘saving candle ends’ by arguing that ‘many a mickle maks a muckle’. ‘There were scenes of wild enthusiasm, bordering on delirium, in the streets of London yesterday as [Prime Minister] John Major spoke out once more – with all the passion at his command – on the topic of the Citizen’s Charter. Oh, yes. It has been criticised for dealing with a lot of little things. But, said Mr Major, quoting the less colourful Mr Gladstone, “…if you add the candle ends together you get a whole candle”’ – The Guardian (4 December 1992).

caring and sharing The word ‘caring’ – to describe official ‘care’ of the disadvantaged – was stretched almost to breaking point during the 1980s to embrace almost anybody concerned with social and welfare services, in all sorts of combinations that sought to manipulate the hearer. Marginally worse was the facile rhyme of ‘caring and sharing’ used, for example, to promote a Telethon-type fund-raiser in Melbourne, Australia (November 1981). The phrase is probably of American origin: ‘The love I feel for our adopted children is in no way less strong than the love I feel for the three children in our family who were born to us…It is the caring and sharing that count’ – Claudia L. Jewett, Adopting the Older Child (1978); ‘Jeffrey, a very famous model, was walking along a sandy beach, the salt wind ruffling his hair, a small boy on his shoulders. “Caring and sharing, you see,” murmured Geary’ – Daily Telegraph (11 June 1994).

carpe diem Motto meaning ‘enjoy the day while you have the chance’ or ‘make the most of the present time, seize the opportunity.’ From the Odes of the Roman poet Horace. Another translation of the relevant passage is: ‘While we’re talking, envious time is fleeing: / Seize the day, put no trust in the future.’

(to) carry a torch for (someone) To love someone who does not reciprocate. Since the 1920s. Perhaps because Venus is sometimes depicted as carrying a torch. ‘When a fellow “carries the torch” it doesn’t simply imply that he is “lit up” or drunk, but girl-less. His steady has quit him for another or he is lonesome for her’ – Vanity Fair (NY) (November 1927).

carry on—It is fitting that the injunction to ‘carry on’, a staple part of several catch – and stock phrases, should have been celebrated in the more than thirty titles of British film comedies in the Carry On series. The very first of the films showed the origin: Carry On, Sergeant (1958) was about a sergeant attempting to discipline a platoon of extremely raw recruits. ‘Carry on, sergeant’ is what an officer would say, having addressed some homily to the ranks before walking off and leaving the sergeant to get on with his drill, or whatever. The actual services origin of the phrase is, however, nautical. From the Daily Chronicle (24 July 1909): ‘“Carry on!” is a word they have in the Navy. It is the “great word” of the service…To-morrow the workaday life of the Fleet begins again and the word will be, “Carry on!”’ Other citings: Carry On, Jeeves – as the title of P. G. Wodehouse’s collection of strories (1925); in 1936, when President F. D. Roosevelt was seeking reelection, a Democratic slogan was ‘Carry on, Roosevelt’. A cable from the Caribbean was received in Whitehall during the summer of 1940: ‘Carry on, Britain! Barbados is behind you!’ When Sub-Lieutenant Eric Barker (1912–90) starred in the Royal Navy version of the BBC radio show Merry Go Round (circa 1945), his favourite command to others was, ‘Carry on, smokin’!’ Jimmy Jewel (1912–95) of the double-act Jewel and Warriss would refer to Ben Warriss (d. 1993) as ‘Harry Boy’ and say ‘Carry on, ‘Arry Boy! Tell ‘em, boy. Has Harry Boy been up to something naughty?’ When some dreadful tale had been unfolded, Jewel would cap it with ‘What a carry on!’ This last phrase became the title of a film the two comedians made in 1949. In his autobiography (1982), Jewel remarked that Tommy Trinder ‘stole’ the line ‘and later we almost came to blows over it’.

carry on, London! At the end of the BBC radio topical interview show In Town Tonight (1933–60), a stentorian voice would bellow this to get the traffic moving again. Various people were ‘The Voice’, but Freddie Grisewood may have been the first. See also ONCE AGAIN WE STOP THE MIGHTY ROAR…

(to) carry the can To bear responsibility; take the blame; become a scapegoat. This is possibly a military term, referring to the duties of the man chosen to get beer for a group. He would have to carry a container of beer to the group and then carry it back when it was empty. Some consider it to be precisely naval in origin; no example before 1936. Alternatively, it could refer to the man who had to remove ‘night soil’ from earth closets – literally, carrying the can – and leave an empty can in its place. Or then again, it could have to do with the ‘custom of miners carrying explosives to the coal face in a tin can (hence everyone’s reluctance to “carry the can”)’ – Street Talk (1986).

cart See IN THE.

carved See ALL JOINTS.

casbah See COME WITH ME.

case continues See DEBATE CONTINUES.

(a) case of the tail wagging the dog Phrase suggesting that the proper roles in a situation have been reversed. Known by 1907. ‘The tail wagged the dog in this case and it still often does’ – William Hollingsworth Whyte, The Organization Man (1956); ‘This film came with a seal of approval, from Peter Benchley, the man who wrote Jaws, which is a bit like Michael Crichton rubber-stamping a scientist’s findings on the stegosaurus. Given that the novelist whose thrills are drawn from the natural world is reliant on the knowledge of experts, this was a particularly implausible case of the tail wagging the dog’ – The Independent (15 April 1995).

(the) case is altered Sometimes ‘“The case is altered”, quoth Plowden’ – a proverbial expression derived from a law case in which the lawyer Edmund Plowden himself featured. A Roman Catholic, Plowden was arrested some time after 1570 for the treasonable offence of attending a surreptitious mass. He defended himself and was able to prove that the priest who had presided over the mass in question was an agent provocateur. Accordingly, he argued that a true mass could not be celebrated by an impostor – so ‘the case is altered’ – and was acquitted. Another, less likely, origin is given by Henry G. Bohn in A Hand-Book of Proverbs (1855): ‘Plowden being asked by a neighbour of his, what remedy there was in law against his neighbour for some hogs that had trespassed his ground, answered, he might have very good remedy; but the other replying, that they were his [i.e. Plowden’s] hogs, Nay then, neighbour, (quoth he), the case is altered.’ The phrase was much quoted. In Shakespeare’s King Henry VI, Part 3, IV.iii.30 (1590–1) there occurs the following exchange: King Edward: ‘Why, Warwick, when we parted, / Thou call’dst me King.’ / Warwick: ‘Ay, but the case is alter’d: / When you disgrac’d me in my embassade, / Then I degraded you from being King, / And come now to create you Duke of York.’ It occurs in Thomas Kyd, Soliman and Perseda, II.i.292 (1592), and Ben Jonson’s play with the title The Case Is Altered (1598–9). The dying Queen Elizabeth I is sometimes quoted as having said in 1603: ‘I am tied, I am tied, and the case is altered with me’ – Elizabeth Jenkins, Elizabeth the Great (1958). From all this, The Case Is Altered is also the name given to a number of public houses in Britain though it is sometimes erroneously said to be a corruption of the Spanish casa alta (high house). In addition, ‘The Case is Altered’ was the provisional title of J. M. Barrie’s play The Admirable Crichton (1902) – an allusion surviving in the line ‘Circumstances might alter cases’ (Act 1, Sc. 1). It is also the title of a book (1932) by William Plomer.

(to) cash/throw in one’s chips/checks Meaning, originally, ‘to stop gambling’ but then ‘to die’ and, as DOAS has it: ‘to terminate a business transaction, sell one’s share of, or stock in, a business, or the like, in order to realize one’s cash profits’. It also may mean ‘to make a final gesture’. Tom Mangold wrote in The Listener (8 September 1983) concerning the US arms race in space: ‘Under malign command, a technological guarantee of invulnerability could induce the holder to cash his chips and go for a pre-emptive first strike.’

cast adrift in an open boat This is listed as a film cliché by Leslie Halliwell in The Filmgoer’s Book of Quotes (1978 edition), though it is not one really. It cannot have been used sufficiently for it to become a worn-out phrase even though the combination of words does have a certain inevitability. The words are used in the film Mutiny on the Bounty (US 1935) concerning the fate of Captain Bligh. The phrase recurs in the BBC radio Goon Show, ‘Drums Along the Mersey’ (11 October 1956).

(with a) cast of thousands Now only used jokingly and ironically, this type of film promotion line may have made its first appearance in connection with the 1927 version of Ben Hur where the boast was, ‘Cast of 125,000’!

(to) cast one’s bread upon the waters Meaning ‘to reap as you shall sow’, after Ecclesiastes 11:1: ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.’ Oddly expressed, the idea is that if you sow seed or corn in a generous fashion now, you will reap the benefits in due course. The New English Bible translates this passage more straightforwardly as, ‘Send your grain across the seas, and in time you will get a return’.

cat See BEE’S KNEES; BRING BACK THE; DOG’S BREAKFAST; LIKE SOMETHING THE.

(to) catch a falling star To perform something miraculous. After John Donne, ‘Go, and catch a falling star / Get with child a mandrake root, / Tell me, where all past years are. / Or who cleft the Devil’s foot’ – ‘Song’ in Songs and Sonnets (1611). Since at least 1563 a ‘falling star’ has been another name for a meteor or shooting star. Here, the catching is clearly just one of four impossible tasks. ‘Catch a falling star’ was also the title of a 1958 song popularized by Perry Como: ‘Catch a falling star / And put it in your pocket, / Never let it fade away.’

catch as catch can Another alliterative phrase, one of many that expresses the getting hold of things in any way you can. These have been around since the 14th century (compare ‘by hook or by crook’). Compare ‘catch me who can’ (in a steam engine advert, 1803) and the film titles Catch Us If You Can (UK 1965) and Catch Me If You Can (about a confidence trickster) (US 2002).

(a/the) catcher in the rye The Catcher in the Rye is the title of a novel (1951) by J. D. Salinger, about the emergent seventeen-year-old Holden Caulfield. As explained in Chapter 22, it comes from a vision he has of standing in a field of rye below a cliff where he will catch any children who fall off. He wishes to protect innocent children from disillusionment with the world of grown-ups. The phrase comes from a misreading of the song ‘Comin’ Thro’ the Rye’ by Robert Burns that contains the lines: ‘Gin a body meet a body / Comin’ thro’ the rye.’

Catch-22 Phrase encapsulating the popular view that ‘there’s always a catch’ – some underlying law that defeats people by its brutal, ubiquitous logic. Catch-22 was the title of a novel (1961; film US 1970) by Joseph Heller about a group of US fliers in the Second World War. ‘It was a Catch-22 situation,’ people will say, as if resorting to a quasi-proverbial expression like ‘Heads you win, tails I lose’ or ‘Damned if you do, damned if you don’t’. Oddly, though, Heller had originally numbered it 18 (apparently Catch-18 was dropped to avoid confusion with Leon Uris’s novel Mila-18). In the book, the idea is explored several times. Captain Yossarian, a US Air Force bombardier, does not wish to fly any more missions. He goes to see the group’s MO, Doc Daneeka, about getting grounded on the grounds that he is crazy: Daneeka: ‘There’s a rule saying I have to ground anyone who’s crazy.’ Yossarian: ‘Then why can’t you ground me? I’m crazy.’ Daneeka: ‘Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.’ ‘This is the catch – Catch-22.’

(a) categorical denial An inevitable pairing, date of origin unknown. A cliché by the 1970s in public relations, political and journalistic use. ‘Mr Weisfeld said he had “reason to believe” that Philip Green, the former chairman of Amber Day, was connected with the Pepkor bid. This is despite a categorical denial of such a link from Pepkor…He had asked Pepkor if Mr Green was linked with its bid. The reply was a categorical denial. And a categorical denial from a man like Pepkor’s chairman, Christo Wiese, has to be taken seriously’ – The Independent (10 May 1994); ‘But Price Waterhouse in London issued a categorical denial. A spokesman said the firm was “extremely upset” about the reports’ – The Sunday Telegraph (12 March 1995).

(has the) cat got your tongue? Question put to a person (usually young) who is not saying anything, presumably through guilt. Since the mid-19th century and a prime example of nanny-speak, as in Casson/ Grenfell. A challenge to the mute. The OED2’s earliest citation is H. H. Harper, Bob Chadwick (1911): ‘I was so angry at her that I…made no answer…Presently she said, “Has the cat got your tongue?”’

(a) cat has nine lives A proverbial saying (known by 1546). But why so many? While cats have an obvious capacity for getting out of scrapes – literally ‘landing on their feet’ in most cases – in ancient Egypt, they were venerated for ridding the country of a plague of rats and were linked to the trinity of Mother, Father and Son. ‘To figure out how many extra lives the cat had, the Egyptians multiplied the sacred number three, three times, and arrived at nine’ – Robert L. Shook, The Book of Why (1983).

catholic See IS THE POPE.

(a) cat house A brothel. In Catwatching (1986), Desmond Morris traces this term (mostly US use) from the fact that prostitutes have been called ‘cats’ since the 15th century, ‘for the simple reason that the urban female cat attracts many toms when it is on heat and mates with them one after the other’. As early as 1401, Morris adds, men were warned of the risk of chasing ‘cat’s tail’ – women. Hence the slang word ‘tail’ to denote the female genitals (and compare ‘pussy’).

(not to have a) cat in Hell’s chance Meaning, ‘to have no chance whatsoever’ – the full expression makes the phrase clear: ‘No more chance than a cat in hell without claws’ – which is recorded in Grose (1796).

cat on a hot tin roof From the (mostly US) expression ‘as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof’ that derives from the common English expression ‘like a cat on hot bricks’, meaning ‘ill-at-ease, jumpy’. John Ray in his Collection of English Proverbs (1670–8) has ‘to go like a cat upon a hot bake stone’. Another English proverbial expression (known by 1903) is ‘Nervous as cats’. In the play Cat On a Hot Tin Roof (1955; film US 1958) by Tennessee Williams, the ‘cat’ is Maggie, Brick’s wife, ‘whose frayed vivacity’, wrote Kenneth Tynan, ‘derives from the fact that she is sexually ignored by her husband’.

cat’s eyes Lines of light-reflecting studs placed to demarcate traffic lanes at night. Known as such by 1940. Hence, ‘Cat’s Eyes’ Cunningham, nickname of Group Capt. John Cunningham (1917–2002), distinguished RAF night fighter pilot in the Second World War. Even when navigational aids were not available he managed to shoot down twelve German aircraft.

(a) cat’s paw Meaning ‘someone used as a tool by another’, this term was known in Britain by 1657 and chiefly derives from one of La Fontaine’s fables, ‘The Monkey and the Cat’, in which a monkey persuades a cat to pick up chestnuts off a hot stove. ‘The Cat’s Paw’ is the title of a painting (1824) by Sir Edwin Landseer, illustrating the story. In nautical use, a ‘cat’s paw’ is the mark made by a puff or gust of wind on an otherwise calm sea – possibly an allusion to cats dabbing at the surface of fish ponds.

(a) cat that walks alone A self-possessed, independent person. ‘I am the cat that walks alone’ was a favourite expression of the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook (1879–1964). He was alluding to ‘The Cat That Walked By Himself’ in The Just-So Stories (1902) by Rudyard Kipling.

caught in the act Caught in the very act for which retribution will be forthcoming. Known by 1655. In Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion (1818), there is rather ‘caught in the fact’. Compare caught red-handed, where a murderer still has blood on his hands.

caught up in a sinister maze (or web) of plot and double-cross Publishing and book-reviewing cliché (in various combinations) when promoting and discussing (usually) spy fiction and thrillers. ‘A sinister web of power, lust and perversion binds the psychotic killer hunting him down to the traumatic childhood murder of his mother’ – The Times (19 November 1994); ‘Turow and Grisham are often lumped together as operators in the same territory, but separately they tend very different gardens: where Turow lures the reader into an intricate and sinister maze, with Grisham you never get beyond raking and hoeing and pulling up the weeds’ – Sunday Times (22 January 1995); ‘Giorgio Ambrosoli, the young Milanese lawyer whose sleuthing, begun in 1974, brought down the Sicilian banking tycoon Michele Sindona. The latter’s sinister web linked the Vatican, the Mafia, the Christian Democrat Party, and the secret P2 masonic lodge’ – The European (7 April 1995); ‘Niamh went for one more session. “They promised me the sun, moon and stars. They said I’d be put in touch with other women and that, they would pass on information as it became available.” She heard nothing. “They left me in darkness and in fear.” By the time the results of the virus test arrived, the sense of being in a sinister maze had deepened’ – The Irish Times (8 April 1995); ‘Secret government papers released today at the Public Record Office in Kew reveal a web of intrigue and deceit by state and monarchy that has remained hidden for 66 years’ – The Independent (30 January 2003).

causing grave concern Journalistic and official cliché – when warning of some imminent unpleasantness, especially a person’s death. ‘While neither of the men involved in either of the Bishops Avenue deals is in any way crooked, the astonishing scale of the Eastern bloc spending spree is causing grave concern among the capital’s most senior crime fighters, who fear it signals the arrival of the Russian mafia, or the Organizatsiya, as it is known and feared on the violent streets of Moscow’ – Evening Standard (London) (6 May 1994); ‘As air traffic within Europe is predicted to rise by around 60 per cent over the next ten years, the potential for future problems is still a grave concern’ – The European (10 June 1994); ‘The Glasgow women’s rights campaigner Sheena Duncan said the sheriff’s remarks had caused grave concern. She added: “It is a simplistic analysis of the problem, particularly when you think about what women suffer”’ – The Scotsman (24 June 1994); ‘A public meeting in Bansha, Co Tipperary, resolved on June 26th, 1926: “That we the citizens desire to express our grave concern at the circulation of undesirable literature, which constitutes a grave danger to the moral and national welfare of the country, and we urge upon the Government the need for immediate legislation on the lines recommended by the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, or on other equally adequate lines” – The Irish Times (2 January 1995); ‘Listen, for instance, to Father Diarmuid Connolly, chairman of the board of management of St Brigid’s School (which has 930 children on the roll) and parish priest of Castleknock, who says: “The current use of the land as playing pitches has been a real safety valve and the proposal to sell them for housing is causing us grave concern”’ – The Irish Times (28 January 1995).

caviare to the general A famously misunderstood phrase meaning ‘of no interest to common folk’. It has nothing to do with giving expensive presents of caviare to unappreciative military gentlemen. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, II.ii.434, the Prince refers to a play which, he recalls, ‘pleased not the million, ‘twas caviare to the general’ (the general public, in other words). The Arden edition notes that in circa 1600, when the play was written, caviare was a novel delicacy. It was probably inedible to those who had not yet acquired a taste for it.

Cecil See AFTER YOU.

(the) centre of the universe Label applied to a place where it’s all happening though, originally, applied to the Almighty: ‘God is the centre of the universe’ – Bailey, Centration (1730–6). Compare HUB OF THE UNIVERSE.

(the) century of the common man Label applied to the 20th century (not entirely successfully) by Henry Wallace (1888–1965), American Democratic Vice-President. ‘The century on which we are entering – the century which will come out of this war – can be and must be the century of the common man’ – speech (8 May 1942).

certain substances A police euphemism for drugs, chiefly used in the UK where restrictions are placed on the reporting of criminal activity before a charge has been made. Starting in the 1960s, newspapers would report raids on pop stars’ houses and conclude: ‘Certain substances were taken away for analysis.’ From the episode of BBC TV’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus broadcast on 16 November 1969: Policeman: ‘I must warn you, sir, that outside I have police dog Josephine, who is not only armed, and trained to sniff out certain substances, but is also a junkie.’

(a) chain reaction A series of linked events, a self-maintaining process. Originally scientific: ‘a chemical or nuclear reaction forming intermediate products which react with the original substance and are repeatedly renewed’. Known by the 1930s. ‘If you publish a candid article about any community, giving actual names of people…you are…braving a chain reaction of lawsuits, riots and civil commotion’ – Saturday Evening Post (22 March 1947); ‘If we think they can be helped by exercise, we prescribe it. As a result, they are often encouraged to improve their diet and lifestyle and give up smoking. They can also improve their self-image. It’s a chain reaction’ – The Independent (3 May 1994); ‘Scotsman John Cleland was the unluckiest man of the day after powering his Vauxhall Cavalier into the lead, passing Radisich and Soper from the standing start. Four cars were involved in a chain reaction accident which led to the red flag being brought out to halt the race’ – Daily Telegraph (17 October 1994).

chalk See AS DIFFERENT.

(to) chalk something up to experience (or put down to…) What you are advised to do when a mistake has been made that cannot be rectified and a situation has been created that cannot be redeemed. Possibly since the 19th century and deriving from the slate in a public house upon which a drinker’s credit or debit is displayed.

challenge See ARE YOU READY.

—challenged PHRASES. A suffix designed to convey a personal problem or disadvantage in a more positive light. Originating in the USA, the first such coinage would appear to have been ‘physically challenged’ in the sense of disabled: ‘This bestselling author [Richard Simmons] of The Never Say Diet Book creates a comprehensive fitness program for the physically challenged’ – Publishers Weekly (10 January 1986). Actual ‘—challenged’ coinages are now far outnumbered by jocular inventions, many aimed at discrediting the proponents of politically correct terminology. Among the many suggested in Britain and the USA are: ‘aesthetically challenged’ for ‘ugly’; ‘chronologically challenged’ for ‘old’; and, ‘follicularly challenged’ for ‘bald’.

champagne corks will be popping Journalistic cliché to denote celebration. ‘On Tuesday, when the industry reports on the amount of business it handled last year, the champagne corks will be popping in the City’ – The Observer (18 June 1995); ‘When Hong Kong’s last British financial secretary takes his leave of the colony next week the traditional popping of Champagne corks will be missing’ – The Independent (1 September 1995); ‘After a gap of almost 100 years, the champagne corks have been popping again in the Budapest underground railway’ – The Independent (2 October 1995).

champagne socialism The holding of socialist beliefs by people who are conspicuous consumers of the good things in life. The most obvious example of a champagne socialist is (Sir) John Mortimer, the prolific British playwright, novelist and lawyer (b. 1923), who may indeed have used it about himself. The earliest use of the term appears to have been in connection with ‘Robert Maxwell, Daily Mirror newspaper tycoon and possibly the best known Czech in Britain after Ivan Lendl, [who] has long been renowned for his champagne socialist beliefs’ – The Times (2 July 1987). However, a similar appellation was earlier applied to the Labour politician Aneurin Bevan. Randolph Churchill (who was, rather, a champagne Conservative) recalled how Brendan Bracken once attacked Bevan: ‘“You Bollinger Bolshevik, you ritzy Robespierre, you lounge-lizard Lenin,” he roared at Bevan one night, gesturing, as he went on, somewhat in the manner of a domesticated orang-utang. “Look at you, swilling Max [Beaverbrook]’s champagne and calling yourself a socialist”’ – Evening Standard (London) (8 August 1958).

champions See BREAKFAST OF.

(to) chance one’s arm Meaning, ‘to perform an action in the face of probable failure; to take one’s chance of doing something successfully’ – OED2 (which finds it first in an 1889 slang dictionary and in some unspecified tailoring context). In January 1997, the Bishop of Swindon’s newsletter carried this account of how the phrase may have come about: ‘In 1492 there was a bitter feud between two Dublin families, and the leader of one fled for his life and with his followers took refuge in the Cathedral chapter house. As the siege wore on, the leader of the other family began to realise the foolishness of their quarrel. He called to those behind the bolted door, to come and no harm would befall them. His enemies didn’t believe him, and stayed put. Getting no response he seized his spear, cut a hole in the door, and thrust his arm through – no sword, no clenched fist, just hand which the others could have cut off. It was grasped by another hand on the other side, the door was opened, the two leaders embraced, and the feud was brought to an end.’ This would appear to be one of those retrospectively imposed origins on a phrase that hardly requires such explaining. Other suggestions include, that it refers to risking a court-martial where all the stripes could be taken off a soldier’s sleeve, and something to do with boxing (that’s Eric Partridge’s guess).

chance would be a fine thing! Self-consolatory (or -deceiving) remark made when people are examining the prospect of enjoying an opportunity that is unlikely to come their way. Certainly in use by the 1900s and probably much older, especially in the sexual sense. Also used as a putdown: a woman might say disapprovingly of a man that she wouldn’t sleep with him even if he asked. Then another might respond, ‘Chance’d be a fine thing!’ – that is, ‘You can say that, given that you won’t ever get the opportunity.’ ‘How many of us have said something not particularly amusing, only to have it turned into a joke of sorts by someone else saying, “Chance would be a fine thing”’ – Miles Kington, The Independent (2 May 2000).

change and decay A phrase from the hymn ‘Abide With Me’ (circa 1847) by H. F. Lyte, the English clergyman and hymn writer (1793–1847): ‘Change and decay in all around I see; / O Thou, who changest not, abide with me.’ (The title phrase

abide with me was possibly inspired by Luke 24:29: ‘Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.’) Hence, Change and Decay In All Around I See, the title of a novel (1978) by Allan Massie.

Channel See CONTINENT ISOLATED.

(a) chapter of accidents A series of unforeseen happenings or misfortunes. The 4th Earl of Chesterfield used the phrase in a letter to his son in 1753. In 1837, John Wilkes was quoted by Southey as saying: ‘The chapter of accidents is the longest chapter in the book’. ‘A Chapter of Accidents’ is the heading of Pt 1, Chap. 9 of Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). A Chapter of Accidents was the title of the autobiography (1972) of Goronwy Rees, the writer.

chariots of fire Chariots of Fire was the title given to a film (UK 1981) about the inner drives of two athletes (one a future missionary) in the 1924 Olympics. Appropriately for a film whose basic themes included Englishness, Christianity and Judaism, the title comes from William Blake’s poem, which is sung in Parry’s setting ‘Jerusalem’ at the climax of the film. Note the singular ‘chariot’ in the original: ‘Bring me my bow of burning gold, / Bring me my arrow of desire / Bring me my spear! Oh, clouds unfold / Bring me my chariot of fire.’ ‘Chariots of fire’ in the plural occurs in 2 Kings 6:17: ‘And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.’

(a) charisma bypass (operation) An expression at one time in general joke use, especially in show business and politics, to describe the reason why someone is unimpressive at self-projection. Originally rather a good joke. The earliest use found in the press is in The Washington Post (2 May 1986) concerning a Texas gubernatorial primary: ‘When Loeffler started the campaign, his name recognition was well under 10%…Part of the problem, according to one Republican consultant, is his rather plodding nature. “The guy is in desperate need of a charisma bypass,” said the consultant. “But if he gets into the runoff against Clements, he might get some charisma in a hurry”.’ ‘Politicians fall victim to a quick swipe with a well-turned phrase, such as the “charisma bypass”, which the unfortunate Premier of New South Wales is said to have undergone’ – The Daily Telegraph (14 February 1987); ‘When Betty Ford slipped quietly into hospital for a heart operation, the surgeon told her he had carried out Richard Nixon’s charisma bypass’ – Today (25 November 1987); ‘[Of Steve Davis, snooker player] “Oh yes, we say he had a charisma bypass when he was 17,” said Barry Hearn [manager] last week, without bothering to get involved in any defence of his protégé’ – The Sunday Times (11 December 1988).

charity begins at home The idea behind this proverb is expressed by Wyclif, circa 1383, but may also be traced back to Theocritus and Terence. The meaning was originally, ‘Set an example of charity in your home and spread it out from there’ – it does not end there – but nowadays it is sometimes used as an excuse for not giving to causes farther afield. From Sheridan, The School for Scandal, Act 5, Sc. 1 (1777): ‘Yet he has a string of charitable sentiments, I suppose, at his fingers’ ends.’ ‘Or, rather, at his tongue’s end…for I believe there is no sentiment he has such faith in as that “Charity begins at home”.’

Charley See CLAP HANDS.

Charlie See COME TO; HOLD MY HAND.

Charlie! / ‘Allo, what do you want, Ingrid? An exchange between Pat Hayes and Fred Yule from the BBC radio show, Ray’s a Laugh (1949–60). ‘Charlie’ was pronounced ‘Char–har–lie’.

Charlie Farnsbarns A foolish person whose name one cannot remember or does not care to. Although this moderately well-known expression escaped Eric Partridge and his reviser, Paul Beale, in Partridge/Slang, Beale commented (1985): ‘Charlie Farnsbarns was a very popular equivalent of e.g. “Mrs Thing” or “Old Ooja”, i.e. “Old whatsisname”. Much play was made with the name in [the BBC radio show] Much Binding In the Marsh, but whether Murdoch and Horne actually invented it, or whether they borrowed it “out of the air”, I’m afraid I don’t know. They would mention especially, I remember, a magnificent motorcar called a “Farnsbarns Special” or something like, say, a “Farnsbarns Straight Eight”. This was in the period, roughly, 1945–50, while I was at school – I recall a very jolly aunt of mine who was vastly amused by the name and used it a lot.’ Of course, a ‘Charlie’ (as in CHASE ME CHARLIE, PROPER CHARLIE and RIGHT CHARLIE) has long been a slightly derogative name to apply to an ordinary bloke. In Australia, it may also be a shortening of ‘Charlie Wheeler’, rhyming slang for ‘Sheila’, a girl (recorded in Sydney Baker, The Australian Language, 1945). ‘Farnsbarns’ has the numbing assonance needed to describe a bit of a nonentity. The phrase probably came out of the services (possibly RAF) in the Second World War.

Charlie’s dead Cry indicating that a woman’s slip or petticoat is showing below the hem of her dress. Known by the 1940s at least. Could it be that it looks like a flag flying at half-mast because Charlie is dead?

(a) charmed life A life in which luck and ease are in full measure. ‘Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crests; / I bear a charmed life’ – Shakespeare, Macbeth, V.viii.12 (1606). Charmed Life – title of a book by Mary McCarthy (1956). ‘“Actually, the goaltender led a charmed life. Most of the danger was involved with the fellow who played between point and cover-point’ – The Globe and Mail (Toronto) (16 May 1967); ‘The sport remains intensely and inherently dangerous. There have been narrow escapes in recent years. But there is little doubt that Formula One had begun to think it led a charmed life. The trouble with the charmed life was that it coincided with the sport becoming more boring’ – The Guardian (2 May 1994); ‘They were married the following year and lived happily ever after. “I think they had a charmed life,” says Hagerty. “They were both passionate about photography and the landscape”’ – The Guardian (9 July 1994).

(a) charm offensive A happy coinage (along the lines of ‘peace offensive’) for the gregarious and open tactics towards the West of the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, around 1986. These tactics contrasted greatly with the frosty style of his predecessors. Later used to describe glad-handing by anybody, especially if this marks a change of tactics. ‘Now enraged beyond all reason, the furious drummer launches a widespread charm offensive and appears on all daytime chat shows to promote his rotten new record’ – The Spectator (7 December 2002).

chase See CUT TO THE.

chase me, (Charlie) ‘Chase me’ has been the catchphrase of the camp British comedian Duncan Norvelle since before 1986. ‘Chase me, Charlie’, as the title of a song from Noël Coward’s Ace of Clubs (1950) was not original. It had also been the title of a popular song current in 1900.

(the) chattering classes A term for those newspaper journalists and broadcasters who are paid to discuss topics of current interest, the opinion-formers, but also those – usually of a liberal bent – who simply like to talk about them. The phrase first registered when Alan Watkins used it in The Observer (4 August 1985): ‘At the beginning of the week the Daily Mail published, over several days, a mélange of popular attitudes towards Mrs Thatcher. Even though it contained little that was surprising or new, it was much discussed among the chattering classes.’ Subsequently, Watkins described (in The Guardian, 25 November 1989) how the phrase had been coined by the rightish political commentator Frank Johnson in conversation with Watkins in the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministership (i.e. circa 1980). Johnson believes he first used the phrase in Now! Magazine in 1981.

cheap and cheerful A self-deprecatingly compensatory phrase in middle-class British use since the 1950s. Used when showing clothes or furniture or home when these are not of the high standards that one would like. ‘Do you like my new flat? It’s cheap and cheerful – but it’s home!’

(it would be) cheap at half the price Cheap, very reasonable. Not a totally sensible phrase, dating probably from the 19th century. Presumably what it means is that the purchase in question would still be cheap and a bargain if it was twice the price that was being asked. Some consider that the expression does make sense if ‘cheap’ is taken as meaning ‘of poor quality’, in other words, ‘it would still be a poor bargain if it was only half the price.’ Another interpretation is that the market trader means that his product is ‘cheap, at half the price it ought to be.’ The rest of us are not convinced by such arguments. In his Memoirs (1991), Kingsley Amis comments on phrases like this that perform semantic somersaults and manage to convey meanings quite the reverse of their literal ones. He cites from a soldier: ‘I’d rather sleep with her with no clothes on than you in your best suit.’

check and double check See I’SE REGUSTED.

checkmate See END GAME.

(the) Cheeky Chappie See HERE’S A FUNNY THING.

cheeky monkey! See RIGHT MONKEY!

cheerful Charlie See PROPER CHARLIE.

cheese See AS DIFFERENT; HELLISH DARK.

(to be) cheesed off (or browned off) ‘To be fed up’ – both terms known since 1941. ‘Cheese’ and ‘off-ness’ rather go together, so one might think of cheese as having an undesirable quality. Also, when cheese is subjected to heat, it goes brown, or gets ‘browned off’. On the other hand, the phrase could derive from ‘cheese off’, an expression like ‘fuck off’, designed to make a person go away. ‘Cheesed off’ may just be a state of rejection, like ‘pissed off’.

(a) chequered career A working life that is full of ups and downs. Book title: A Chequered Career, or Fifteen Years in Australia and New Zealand by H. W. Nesfield (1881). ‘My career with 20th Century Fox was somewhat chequered’ – The Listener (17 August 1967); ‘It is the latest blow to Mr Tapie’s much chequered career. This year he has been prosecuted by Customs over his yacht, been accused of match rigging and seen Olympique Marseille relegated to the second division’ – The Daily Telegraph (21 May 1994); ‘Myers has spent two episodes of his chequered career with Widnes, but he rarely enjoyed the freedom in their colours that he discovered playing against their sadly depleted current line-up yesterday’ – The Independent (12 September 1994).

cherchez la femme [look for the woman]! The key to a problem, the answer to some mystery, is the involvement of a woman. Attributed in this form to Joseph Fouché, the French revolutionary and politician (1763–1820). The first citation, however, is ‘cherchons la femme [let us look for the woman]’, from Alexandre Dumas (père) in his novel Les Mohicans de Paris (1854–5). ‘There’s a quarrel – a scandal – cherchez la femme – always a woman at the bottom of it’ – Bernard Shaw, The Philanderer (1898).

(a) cherished belief A belief that one holds dear. Date of origin unknown. ‘I brought him up to think for himself and to challenge things if I said something was true. I wanted him to say what he felt even if it was against my most cherished belief’ – The Daily Telegraph (12 July 1994); ‘The dream is for the duvet-cover or the pillow-case to spring to life – “I want Mark’s baby,” said one girl with shocking candour. The most cherished belief is that if the object of desire could just single out her face from the crowd, then she would be the one he would choose’ – The Daily Telegraph (29 August 1994).

che sera sera The proverbial saying ‘What must be, must be’ can be found as far back as Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ (circa 1390): ‘When a thyng is shapen, it shal be.’ But what of this foreign version, as sung, for example, by Doris Day in her 1956 hit song ‘Whatever Will Be Will Be’? She also sang it in the remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much in the same year. Ten years later, Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band had a hit with a song entitled ‘Que Sera Sera’. So is it che or que? There is no such phrase as che sera sera in modern Spanish or Italian, though che is an Italian word and será is a Spanish one. What we have here is an Old French or Old Italian spelling of what would be, in modern Italian, che sara, sara. This is the form in which the Duke of Bedford’s motto has always been written.

(to grin like a) Cheshire Cat To smile very broadly. The Cheshire Cat is most famous from its appearances in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) – where it has the ability to disappear, leaving only its grin behind – but the beast had been known since about 1770. Carroll, who was born in Cheshire, probably knew that Cheshire cheeses were at one time moulded in the shape of a grinning cat. ‘British power was slowly disappearing during the Churchillian Era, leaving, like the Cheshire Cat, only a wide smile behind’ – Andrew Roberts, Eminent Churchillians (1994).

chew See HE CAN’T.

(to) chew the cud Meaning, ‘to think deeply about something, especially the past’. This figurative expression (in use by 1382) refers to the ruminative look cows have when they chew their ‘cud’ – that is, bring back food from their first stomachs and chew it in their mouths again. ‘Cud’ comes from Old English cwidu, meaning ‘what is chewed’.

(to) chew the rag ‘To chew something over; to grouse or grumble over something at length, to discuss matters with a degree of thoroughness’ (compare ‘to chew the fat’). Known by 1885. As in the expression ‘to chew something over’, the word ‘chew’ here means simply ‘to say’ – that is, it is something carried on in the mouth like eating. The ‘rag’ part relates to an old meaning of that word, in the sense ‘to scold’ or ‘reprove severely’. ‘Rag’ was also once a slang word for ‘the tongue’ (from ‘red rag’, probably).

chicken à la King Cooked chicken breast served in a cream sauce with mushrooms and peppers. No royal origin – rather, it is said to have been named after E. Clark King, a hotel proprietor in New York, where the dish was introduced in the 1880s. Another story is that it was dreamed up at Delmonico’s restaurant by Foxhall Keene, son of the Wall Street operator and sportsman J. R. Keene, and served as chicken à la Keene. Yet another version is that the dish was created at Claridge’s in London for J. R. Keene himself after his horse won the Grand Prix.

(a) chicken and egg situation A problem where cause and effect are in dispute, from the ancient question ‘Which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ The construction was known by 1959. ‘The chicken-and-egg attitude towards the home background of addicts’ – The Guardian (24 February 1967); ‘She sees no problem in finding enough readers; she sees the problem as a general lack of left-wing publishing in this country. “If you want a good read, you don’t think of buying a left magazine,” she says. “It is a chicken-and-egg situation. New Statesman is the only other independent around and they have welcomed Red Pepper. They think we will help to open up the market’ – The Guardian (4 May 1994); ‘The other members objected to this formula because, as a rule, UN member states will not volunteer troops unless there is a definite Security Council mandate. “It was a chicken and egg situation,” said one diplomat’ – The Independent (18 May 1994).

(the) chief cook and bottle-washer (sometimes head cook…) ‘A person put in charge of running something; a factotum’ (known by 1887). What may be an early form of the phrase occurs in Schikaneder’s libretto for Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, II.xix. (1791). Papageno says: ‘Here’s to the head cook and the head butler [Der Herr Koch und der Herr Kellermeister sollen leben]!’

(appeals to the) child in all of us A cringe-making assertion made about certain types of entertainment or about occasions like Christmas. Noticed with some frequency in the 1980s. ‘In Back to the Future, [Robert Zemeckis] scores by adhering to the first rule of [Steven] Spielbergism: appeal to the child in all of us’ – The Sunday Times (18 August 1985); ‘The Wind in the Willows appeals to the child in all of us, so we adults have accorded it the status of “a children’s classic”’ – The Sunday Times (22 June 1986); ‘Growing up tends to hurt. And the child in all of us wants a Daddy/Mummy figure to rub our legs and give us aspirin when growing pains become acute’ – The Guardian (28 July 1986).

children should be seen and not heard This proverbial expression was, according to CODP, originally applied to young women. ‘A mayde schuld be seen, but not herd’ was described as an ‘old’ saying in circa 1400. It was not until the 19th century that a general application to children of both sexes became common, though Thackeray in Roundabout Papers (1860–3) still has: ‘Little boys should not loll on chairs…Little girls should be seen and not heard.’

(the) children’s hour When the long-running and fondly remembered BBC radio programme Children’s Hour began in 1922, it was known as ‘The Children’s Hour’, which suggests that it ultimately derived from the title of a poem by Longfellow (1863): ‘Between the dark and the daylight, / When the night is beginning to lower, / Comes a pause in the day’s occupations, / That is known as the Children’s Hour.’ This became the name for the period between afternoon tea and dressing for dinner, particularly in Edwardian England. Lillian Hellman also wrote a play called The Children’s Hour (1934), variously filmed, about a schoolgirl’s allegations of her teachers’ lesbianism.

children’s shoes have far to go Slogan for Start-Rite children’s shoes in the UK, current by 1946. The idea of the boy and girl ‘twins’ walking up the middle of a road between rows of beech trees came to the company’s advertising agent as he drove back to London from a meeting at Start-Rite’s Norwich offices. He was reminded of the illustration in Kipling’s Just So Stories of ‘the cat who walked by himself’ and developed the idea from there – despite many subsequent suggestions from the public that walking down the middle of the road would not enable children, or their shoes, to get very far.

chill out! Calm down, act cool. Originally US black person’s slang of the 1970s. Latterly used by both black persons and whites. Whoopi Goldberg says it in the film Ghost (US 1990).

(to apply for the) Chiltern Hundreds Originally, a hundred was a division of a shire and long ago a steward was appointed to deal with robbers in three hundreds of the Chiltern Hills in southern England. Then, in the days when to hold an office of profit under the crown involved having to resign from the House of Commons, the process of applying for the stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds was used as a way of resigning from parliament because this had become necessary for some other reason – a scandal, for example. William Douglas-Home’s play entitled The Chiltern Hundreds (1947) was set on the day the Conservative Party lost the 1945 British General Election to Labour.

Chinese See DAMNED CLEVER.

Chinese whispers ‘Inaccurate gossip’ – a phrase deriving from the name of a children’s party game. Seated in a circle, the children whisper a message to each other until it arrives back at the person who started, usually with the meaning changed out of all recognition. An alternative name for the game is ‘Russian Scandal’, which OED2 finds in 1873, (or ‘Russian Gossip’ or ‘Russian Rumour(s)’). Presumably, Chinese and Russian are mentioned because of their exotic 19th-century connotations, the difficulty of both languages, and because the process of whispering might sound reminiscent of both the languages when spoken. ‘The words “Air Red, Air Red,” had become confused as they were passed down the line, and by the time they reached the end had been changed to “Galtieri dead, Galtieri dead”…It was later pointed out that a message had been similarly misjudged in an earlier war. “Send reinforcements, the regiment is going to advance,” had been received as “Send three and four pence, the regiment is going to a dance”’ – McGowan & Hands, Don’t Cry for Me, Sergeant-Major (1983) (about the Falklands war).

(a) chip of(f) the old block (or same block) Referring to a child having the same qualities as its parent, this expression’s use was established by the 1620s. Edmund Burke said of the first speech in the House of Commons by William Pitt the Younger (in 1781): ‘Not merely a chip of the old “block”, but the old block itself’ (that is, William Pitt the Elder, 1st Earl of Chatham).

(to have a) chip on one’s shoulder Meaning ‘to bear a grudge in a defensive manner’, the expression originated in the USA where it was known by the early 19th century. The Long Island Telegraph explained in 1830: ‘When two churlish boys were determined to fight, a chip [of wood] would be placed on the shoulder of one, and the other [was] demanded to knock it off at his peril.’

chips See CASH IN ONE’S.

(when the) chips are down Meaning ‘at a crucial stage in a situation’, this phrase alludes to the chips used in betting games. The bets are placed when they are down, but the outcome is still unknown. ‘If when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation…acts like a pitiful helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world’ – Richard M. Nixon, TV speech (30 April 1970); ‘There is a substantial body of opinion in Britain – and in Chobham – that holds that Lloyd’s Names deserve all the suffering they have got. In a sense, it is this factor that has turned their calamity into a tragedy. Now that the chips are down, communities aren’t rallying round’ – Independent on Sunday (19 March 1995).

chips with everything Phrase descriptive of British working-class life and used as the title of a play (1962) by Arnold Wesker about class attitudes in the RAF during National Service. Alluding to the belief that the working classes tend to have chips (potatoes) as the accompaniment to almost every dish at mealtimes. Indeed, the play contains the line: ‘You breed babies and you eat chips with everything.’ Earlier, in an essay published as part of Declaration (1957), the film director Lindsay Anderson had written: ‘Coming back to Britain is always something of an ordeal. It ought not to be, but it is. And you don’t have to be a snob to feel it. It isn’t just the food, the sauce bottles on the cafe tables, and the chips with everything. It isn’t just saying goodbye to wine, goodbye to sunshine…’

chivalry See AGE OF.

(a) chocolate soldier Bernard Shaw’s play Arms and the Man (1894) was turned into a musical in Germany, Der Tapfere Soldat [Brave Soldier] (1908). The title of the English version of this musical (New York, 1909) was The Chocolate Soldier. The story concerns Captain Bluntschli, a Swiss officer, who gets the better of a professional cavalry soldier. Shaw’s phrase for Bluntschli was, rather, ‘the chocolate cream soldier’. Later, during the First World War, ‘chocolate soldier’ seems to have become a term of abuse about a certain type of recruit who complained of the conditions. This was not how Shaw viewed Bluntschli. The character was not a coward but an admirable, realistic soldier who saw the sense of keeping alive. That was why he carried chocolate creams, not bullets. Subsequently, the Australian Army of the Second World War, the Militia (who volunteered to serve only within Australia) were known as the Chocolate Soldiers because of their chocolate-coloured shoulder patches. Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was nicknamed the ‘chocolate sailor’ during the Second World War because, though a Commander of the RNVR, he never actually went to sea. In 2002, during a court case, the model Naomi Campbell mistakenly sensed that a journalist who had described her as a ‘chocolate soldier’ was indulging in racist abuse. As someone commented at the time, the reference was more probably to the expression ‘as much use as a chocolate teapot/kettle’, i.e. useless. In 1943, there was an American song ‘Chocolate Soldier from the USA’ that did describe a black soldier fighting for his country and so was not considered derogatory.

Christmas See ALL DRESSED; BY CHRISTMAS; DO THEY KNOW. ’Christmas comes but once a year’ – thank God! The allusion is to a 16th-century rhyme (’…and when it comes it brings good cheer’); the sour comment – presumably from someone objecting to the commercialization of the season or the exhaustion of having to organize the festivities – was known by the 1940s.

Christmas has come early this year Meaning, ‘We have had some good fortune or welcome [usually financial] news’. Beginning a report in The Guardian (8 April 1988), Michael Smith wrote of the Volvo purchase of the Leyland Bus operation: ‘Christmas has come early for management and staff at Leyland Bus, the sole UK manufacturers of buses which changed hands last week’ – they stood to enjoy a windfall of £19 million. The previous week, Lord Williams had said of another sale – that of Rover to British Aerospace: ‘Christmas has come rather early this year.’ From McGowan & Hands’s Don’t Cry for Me, Sergeant-Major (1983) (about the Falklands war): ‘De-briefings afterwards…related that the SAS “thought Christmas had come early”. They couldn’t believe their luck. There were at least eleven Argentine aircraft virtually unguarded.’

Christmasses See ALL OF.

chuck it—! Meaning, ‘Abandon that line of reasoning, that posturing’. An example from the BBC’s World at One radio programme in May 1983 during the run-up to the General Election: Roy Hattersley complained that he was being questioned only on the ten per cent of the Labour Party manifesto with which he disagreed. Robin Day, the interviewer, replied: ‘Chuck it, Hattersley!’ This format was used earlier and notably by G. K. Chesterton. In his ‘Antichrist, or the Reunion of Christendom’ (1912), he satirized the pontificating of F. E. Smith (later 1st Earl of Birkenhead) on the Welsh Disestablishment Bill: ‘Talk about the pews and steeples / And the cash that goes therewith! / But the souls of Christian peoples…/ Chuck it, Smith!’

cigar See END OF ME; GIVE THE MAN.

cigarette See AH, WOODBINE.

Cinderella See COULD MAKE ANY.

circumstances See DUE TO.

circuses See BREAD AND.

(a) citizen of the world Cicero has this phrase as ‘civem totius mundi’, meaning ‘one who is cosmopolitan, at home anywhere’. Similarly, Socrates said, ‘I am a citizen, not of Athens or Greece, but of the world.’ The OED2 finds the English phrase in Caxton (1474) and, ‘If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world’ in Francis Bacon’s ‘Goodness, and Goodness of Nature’ (1625). The Citizen of the World was the title of a collection of letters by Oliver Goldsmith purporting to be those of Lien Chi Altangi, a philosophic Chinaman living in London and commenting on English life and characters. They were first published as ‘Chinese Letters’ in the Public Ledger (1760–1), and then again under this title in 1762. James Boswell, not untypically, in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1786) reflects: ‘I am, I flatter myself, completely a citizen of the world…In my travels through Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, France, I never felt myself from home; and I sincerely love “every kindred and tongue and people and nation”.’

—City PHRASES. The suffix ‘—City’, applied since the 1960s, is a way of elevating a place or situation, concrete or abstract, to a higher status. ‘Fat City’, meaning ‘an ideal situation’ or ‘wealth’ (often illegally gained), however, may have been around since the 1940s. Fat City was the title of a film with a boxing theme (US 1972). ‘Nose City’ featured in the BBC Radio show The Burkiss Way (20 December 1977). ‘Cardboard city’ was the name applied to an area on London’s South Bank where homeless people would shelter in cardboard boxes (1980s). ‘Depression City – one of a number of wholly imaginary localities invented in the early 1980s, as the symbolic dwelling places of people in certain states of mind. It originated as the obverse of “Fun City”, as New York was christened in 1966 by a Herald Tribune journalist at the start of Mayor John V. Lindsay’s tenure in office. In the same vicinity you may find the ironically named Thrill Central, the neighbouring state of Dullsville, Arizona, and the inhabitants of Loser’s Lane’ – John Walsh in The Independent (2 December 2000).

civilisation See END OF.

clanger See DROP.

clap hands, here comes Charley This apparently nonsensical catchphrase, popular at one time in Britain, appears to derive from a song used as the signature tune of Charlie Kunz (1896–1958). Born in the USA, Kunz became a feathery-fingered, insistently rhythmic pianist popular on British radio in the 1930s/40s. The song went, ‘Clap hands, here comes Charley…here comes Charley now.’ With lyrics by Billy Rose and Ballard MacDonald, and music by Joseph Meyer, it was first recorded in the USA in 1925. According to The Book of Sex Lists, the song was written ‘in honour of a local chorine, first-named Charline, who had given many of the music publishers’ contact men (song pluggers) cases of gonorrhoea – a venereal disease commonly known as “the clap”.’ Partridge/Slang adds that ‘to do a clap hands Charlie’ was 1940s’ RAF slang for flying an aircraft in such a way as to make its wings seem to meet overhead.

Claude See AFTER YOU.

clay See BALL OF.

cleanliness is next to godliness Although this phrase appears within quotation marks in Sermon 88 ‘On Dress’ by John Wesley, the Methodist evangelist (1703–91), it is without attribution. Brewer (1989) claims that it is to be found in the writings of Phinehas ben Yair, a rabbi (circa 150–200). In fact, the inspiration appears to be the Talmud: ‘The doctrines of religion are resolved into carefulness…abstemiousness into cleanliness; cleanliness into godliness.’ So the saying is not from the Bible, as might be supposed. Wesley might have found it, however, in Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Bk 2 (1605): ‘Cleanliness of body was ever deemed to proceed from due reverence to God.’ Thomas J. Barratt, one of the fathers of modern advertising, seized upon the phrase to promote Pears’ Soap, chiefly in the UK. On a visit to the USA in the 1880s, he sought a testimonial from a man of distinction. Shrinking from an approach to President Grant, he ensnared the eminent divine Henry Ward Beecher. Beecher happily complied with Barratt’s request and wrote a short text beginning: ‘If cleanliness is next to godliness…’ and received no more for his pains than Barratt’s ‘hearty thanks’.

cleans round the bend Harpic lavatory cleaner used this slogan in the UK from the 1930s onwards, but it is not the origin of the idiom ‘round the bend’, meaning ‘mad’. The OED2 cites F. C. Bowen in Sea Slang (1929) as defining that, thus: ‘An old naval term for anybody who is mad’.

clear and present danger A phrase taken from a ruling by the US Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr in the case of Schenk v. United States (1919). This concerned free speech and included Holmes’s claim that the most stringent protection of same would not protect a man who falsely shouted fire in a theatre and caused panic: ‘The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the evils that Congress has a right to prevent.’ A film with the title Clear and Present Danger (US 1994) was about a CIA agent in conflict with his political masters in Washington.

(as) clear as mud I.e. not clear at all. Current since the early 19th century.

(in a) cleft stick In a position from which it is impossible to advance or retreat – in a dilemma, fix or jam. ‘We are squeezed to death, between the two sides of that sort of alternative which is commonly called a cleft stick’ – in a letter from the poet William Cowper (1782). The word ‘cleft’ is of the same derivation as ‘cleave’ or ‘cloven’. A literal use of a ‘cleft stick’ – as a piece of wood with a hole chopped out – in which an African bearer might carry messages famously occurs in Evelyn Waugh, Scoop, Bk 2, Chap. 2, Pt 4, (1938): ‘She went over to the pile of cleft sticks. “How do you use these?” “They are for sending messages.”…Lord Copper said I was to send my messages with them”.’

clerk See ALL DRESSED.

clever See DAMNED.

(a) clever clogs (or clever boots) An overly clever person. Since the 1940s. It is not clear what the footware has to do with the cleverness. ‘Clever clogs fly BIA to Amsterdam’ – British Island Airways advertisement (mid-1970s).

(the) cleverest young man in England An unofficial title bestowed semi-humorously from time to time. In 1976, the recipient was Peter Jay (b. 1937), then an economics journalist on The Times. He was called this in an article so headed (with the saving grace of a question mark) by The Sunday Times Magazine (2 May). Two years earlier he had been included in Time Magazine’s list of the 150 people ‘most likely to achieve leadership in Europe’. He became Britain’s Ambassador to Washington at the age of 40, at which point people stopped calling him one of the most promising of his generation. In September 1938, at the League of Nations, Chips Channon had written in his diary of: ‘John Foster, that dark handsome young intellectual…Fellow of All Souls, prospective candidate, and altogether one of the cleverest young men in England.’ This was presumably the person who became Sir John Foster QC, a Tory MP. Punch (12 September 1874), in a cartoon caption, has: ‘Now look at Gladstone, the cleverest man in all England!’ Compare also Gladstone’s remark that Mary Sedgwick, mother of the fabulous Benson brothers – A. C., E. F. and so on – was ‘the cleverest woman in Europe’.

(the) climate of opinion The prevailing view that may dictate public decisions and actions. A phrase since 1661. ‘To us he [Freud] is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion’ – W. H. Auden, poem ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ in Another Time (1940); ‘He likes saving causes…he’s brilliant at forming what they call now “climates of opinion”’ – Angus Wilson, Hemlock and After (1952); ‘Mrs Thatcher as premier was more made by the anti-statist climate of opinion in the 1970s and 1980s than vice versa. It is a truth about her often overlooked, not least by her admirers’ – The Daily Telegraph (4 May 1994); ‘But the public can look, learn, comment, write and agitate if it feels like it, make its input as the project moves from winning entry to final design, and help create a climate of opinion that will affect future competitions’ – The Sunday Times (4 December 1994).

(to) climb aboard the gravy train To gain access to a money-spinning scheme. This was an American expression originally – DOAS suggests that it started in sporting circles. An alternative version is ‘to climb aboard the gravy boat’, which is a bit easier to understand. Gravy boats exist for holding gravy in and take their name from their shape. So, if money is perceived as being like gravy, it is not hard to see how the expression arose. According to Webster’s Dictionary, the ‘train’ and ‘boat’ forms are equally popular in the USA (and have been since the 1920s). ‘Boat’ is probably less popular in the UK.

(to) climb on the bandwagon (or jump on the bandwagon) To join something that is already an established success. Principally in the USA, circuses had bandwagons. They had ‘high decks so that musicians could be seen and heard by street crowds’, according to Flexner (1982). Barnum and Bailey had an elaborately decorated one in 1855 for use in circus parades. Politicians in the USA also had bandwagons which would lead the procession when votes were being canvassed. Those who jumped, climbed or hopped aboard were those who were leading the support for the candidate. Since then, a slight shift in meaning has bandwagon-jumpers as people who give support once success has been assured.

clinging to the wreckage Clinging to the Wreckage was the title of the autobiography (1982) of the playwright, novelist and lawyer (Sir) John Mortimer. He explained its significance in an epigraphic paragraph or two: ‘A man with a bristling grey beard [a yachtsman, said:] “I made up my mind, when I bought my first boat, never to learn to swim…When you’re in a spot of trouble, if you can swim you try to strike out for the shore. You invariably drown. As I can’t swim, I cling to the wreckage and they send a helicopter out for me. That’s my tip, if you ever find yourself in trouble, cling to the wreckage!”’ Mortimer concludes: ‘It was advice that I thought I’d been taking for most of my life.’

close See GIVE THE MAN.

(a) close encounter of the—kind An expression derived from the title of Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (US 1977) that, in turn, is said to be taken from the categories used in the American forces to denote UFOs. A ‘close encounter 1’ would be a simple UFO sighting; a ‘close encounter 2’, evidence of an alien landing; and a ‘close encounter 3’, actual contact with aliens. The categories were devised by a UFO researcher called J. Allen Hynek – source: Rick Meyers, The Great Science Fiction Films. Used allusively to describe intimacy: ‘For a close encounter of the fourth kind, ring ****’; ‘Polanski’s new movie – Close Encounters with the Third Grade’ – graffiti, quoted 1982.

(a) closely knit community (or tightly knit community) Cliché phrase invariably invoked whenever a community is hit by trouble or tragedy. By the 1980s. ‘A local SDLP councillor, Ms Margaret Ritchie, also condemned the killing but said it would not shatter the community which had always been very closely knit’ – The Irish Times (9 August 1994); ‘When you have a community as closely knit as this one, what you do to one person affects everybody else. You can’t threaten to evict somebody and not expect to get everybody’s blood pressure up, but Schelly doesn’t seem to understand that’ – The Herald (Glasgow) (2 November 1994); ‘“Everyone will be touched by this [coach crash],” said Bill McLeod, 52, owner of a local guesthouse, “It’s such a tight-knit community…that everyone will know someone who was killed or injured”’ – The Independent (25 May 1995); ‘Relatives and friends of the Royal Welch Fusiliers held hostage in Bosnia anxiously awaited news of their fate yesterday. The 300-year-old regiment is based in the tightly knit community of Wrexham in Clwyd’ – The Independent (29 May 1995).

close-run See DAMN.

close your eyes and think of England The source that Partridge/Catch Phrases gives for this saying – in the sense of advice to women when confronted with the inevitability of sexual intercourse, or jocularly to either sex about doing anything unpalatable – is the Journal (1912) of Alice, Lady Hillingdon: ‘I am happy now that Charles calls on my bedchamber less frequently than of old. As it is, I now endure but two calls a week and when I hear his steps outside my door I lie down on my bed, close my eyes, open my legs and think of England.’ There was an Alice, Lady Hillingdon (1857–1940). She married the 2nd Baron in 1886. He was Conservative MP for West Kent (1885–92) and, according to Who’s Who, owned ‘about 4,500 acres’ when he died (in 1919). A portrait of Lady Hillingdon was painted by Sir Frank Dicksee PRA in 1904. The rose ‘Climbing Lady Hillingdon’ may also have been named after her. But where her journals are, if indeed they ever existed, is not known. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, repeating the quotation in The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny (1972), calls her Lady Hillingham, which only further makes one doubt that a woman with any such a name was coiner of the phrase. Salome Dear, Not In the Fridge (ed. Arthur Marshall, 1968) has it instead that the newly wedded Mrs Stanley Baldwin was supposed to have declared: ‘I shut my eyes tight and thought of the Empire.’ We may discount Bob Chieger’s assumption in Was It Good for You, Too? (1983) that ‘Close your eyes and think of England’ was advice given to Queen Victoria ‘on her wedding night’. Sometimes the phrase occurs in the form lie back and think of England, but this probably comes from confusion with SHE SHOULD LIE BACK AND ENJOY IT. In 1977, a long-running play by John Chapman and Anthony Marriott opened in London with the title Shut Your Eyes and Think of England.

cloth-eared Phrase used to describe someone who is somewhat deaf and thus, in a transferred sense, has no taste in matters musical. Known by 1912. It is not completely obvious why ‘cloth’ is used in this phrase – maybe in contrast with a richer material.

cloud See GET OFF MY.

(to live in) cloud-cuckoo land Meaning ‘to have impractical ideas’, the expression comes from the name Nephelococcygia, suggested for the capital city of the birds (in the air) in The Birds by Aristophanes. Listed as a current cliché in The Times (28 May 1984). ‘The decision to standardize the names of authors may be a big stride for the book world. But it is only a small step towards that cloud-cuckoo-land where everybody speaks and writes English according to the same rules’ – The Times (30 May 1994); ‘Fund managers have questioned RJB’s assessment of the market after 1998 when contracts with power generators, coal’s biggest customer, expire. One banker advising an under-bidder said the RJB predictions “were in cloud-cuckoo-land”’ – The Sunday Times (27 November 1994); ‘Mr Watkinson said that the RMT’s claim for 6 per cent [pay rise] meant that the [union’s] leadership was “living in cloud cuckoo land”’ – The Independent (27 May 1995).

(on) cloud nine (or cloud seven) Meaning, ‘in a euphoric state’. Both forms have existed since the 1950s. The derivation appears to be from terminology used by the US Weather Bureau. Cloud nine is the cumulonimbus, which may reach 30–40,000 feet. Morris notes, ‘If one is upon cloud nine, one is high indeed,’ and also records the reason for cloud nine being more memorable than cloud seven: ‘The popularity…may be credited to the Johnny Dollar radio show of the 1950s. There was one recurring episode…Every time the hero was knocked unconscious – which was often – he was transported to cloud nine. There Johnny could start talking again.’ ‘Nurse John McGuinness Shares Double Rollover Lottery Jackpot…“It still hasn’t sunk in and I’ve been on cloud nine since the draw”’ – Daily Mirror (29 January 1996); ‘Scotland’s rugby centre Scott Hastings is on cloud nine after becoming a father for the second time. The newest arrival to the Hastings clan, Kerry Anne, was not expected until later in the week but she was born on Sunday night, weighing in at 7lb 2oz’ – The Herald (Glasgow) (7 February 1996).

(a) cloud no bigger than a man’s hand When something is described as such, it is not yet very threatening – as though a man could obliterate a cloud in the sky by holding up a hand in front of his face. The phrase is biblical: ‘Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand’ (1 Kings 18:44). The Reverend Francis Kilvert, on 9 August 1871, has: ‘Not a cloud was in the sky as big as a man’s hand.’ In a letter to Winston Churchill on 14 December 1952, Bob Boothby MP wrote of a dinner at Chartwell: ‘It took me back to the old carefree days when I was your Parliamentary Private Secretary, and there seemed to be no cloud on the horizon; and on to the fateful days when the cloud was no bigger than a man’s hand, and there was still time to save the sum of things.’

club See IN THE.

clumsy clot! Catchphrase from the BBC radio show Take It From Here (1948–59). A hangover from wartime slang.

clunk, click, every trip Accompanied by the sound of a car door closing and of a seat belt being fastened, this was used as a slogan in British road safety ads featuring Jimmy Savile from 1971. In 1979, someone wrote the slogan on a museum cabinet containing a chastity belt.

c’mere, big boy! Stock phrase of Florence Halop as Hotbreath Houlihan, a sexpot in the American radio show The Camel Caravan (1943–7).

coach See DRIVE A COACH.

coat See GET YOUR COAT.

Coca-Cola PHRASES See PAUSE THAT REFRESHES.

cock See BIG CONK.

(a) cock-and-bull story A long, rambling, unbelievable tale, as used notably in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760–7). The last words of the novel are: ‘“L—d!” said my mother, “what is all this story about?” – “A cock and a bull,” said Yorick, “And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard”.’ Suggested origins are that the phrase comes from: old fables in general that have animals talking, going right back to Aesop – confirmed perhaps by the equivalent French phrase ‘coq à l’âne’ [literally ‘cock to donkey’]; Samuel Fisher’s 1660 story about a cock and a bull being transformed into a single animal – which people may have thought pretty improbable; somehow from the Cock and the Bull public houses, which are but a few doors apart in Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire. The OED2’s earliest citation in this precise form is from the Philadelphia Gazette of the United States (1795): ‘a long cock-and-bull story about the Columbianum’ (a proposed national college). Motteux’s 1700 translation of Cervantes, Don Quixote (Pt 1, Bk 3, Chap. 17), has: ‘don’t trouble me with your foolish stories of a cock and a bull’. Apperson trumps all with a 1608 citation – from John Day’s play, Law Trickes or who would have thought it, IV.ii: ‘What a tale of a cock and a bull he tolde my father.’

(to) cock a snook A snook is the derisive gesture made with thumb and hand held out from the nose (though the phrase is also used figuratively for a cheeky gesture). ‘To take a sight’ is an alternative phrase. Both were known by the mid-19th century; indeed, OED2 has ‘cock snooks’ in 1791. The game of snooker derives its name not from this but rather from the military nickname for a raw recruit.

cocked hat See KNOCK SOMETHING.

Cocker See ACCORDING TO.

(a) cock-up on the catering front Catchphrase from the BBC TV series The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976–9) written by David Nobbs. Reggie’s brother-in-law, Jimmy Anderson (played by Geoffrey Palmer) had a military background and, in civilian life, used military turns of phrase to explain things away. For example, ‘No food. Bit of a cock-up on the catering front…’ Really something of a format phrase.

(the) cocks may crow but it’s the hen that lays the egg Informal proverb. Uttered by Margaret Thatcher, when British Prime Minister, at a private dinner party in 1987 (according to Robert Skidelsky in The Sunday Times, Books (9 April 1989). A London News Radio phone-in (December 1994) had this version: ‘The cock does all the crowing but the hen lays all the eggs.’ ‘My grandmother’s all-embracing put down of males: “He’s a clever old cock, but he can’t lay eggs”’ – Margaret Rawles (2000). Apperson finds the obvious original, ‘The cock crows but the hen goes’, in use by 1659.

cocoa See GRATEFUL.

coconut See GIVE THE MAN.

coffin See DRIVE A NAIL.

coffin nails Derogatory name for cigarettes, from a 1957 British newsreel, but Partridge/Slang suggests an origin circa 1885 and in catchphrase form – ‘Another nail in your coffin!’ (said to someone lighting up). OED2 has it from Texas in 1888. Indeed, it is possibly American – Mieder & Co.’s Dictionary of American Proverbs (1992) has two (undated) entries of the ‘Every cigarette is a nail in your coffin’ type. The journal Proverbium (1992) also suggests that ‘Cigarettes are coffin nails’ may have originated in Kentucky.

cold See AS COLD; IN THE.

cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey The derivation of this phrase meaning ‘extremely cold’ (known by 1835) may have nothing to do with any animal. A brass monkey was the name given to the plate on a warship’s deck on which cannon balls (or other ammunition) were stacked. In cold weather the brass would contract, tending to cause the stack to fall down. ‘Monkey’ appears to have been a common slang word in gunnery days (and not just at sea) – there was a type of gun or cannon known as a ‘monkey’ and a ‘powder monkey’ was the name for a boy who carried powder to the guns. Philip Holberton challenged this theory (1998): ‘Why would anyone use an expensive metal like brass on which to stack cannon balls? If the stack is going to collapse in cold weather, what will happen to it in a seaway? In pictures I have seen, the bottom row of a stack of cannon balls fitted into a wooden grid or a series of hollows like an old-fashioned egg-rack.’ Brian J. Goggin (1999) said no evidence had been found of the phrase in any nautical writings from the era of warships with cannon.

cold hands, warm heart A forgiving little phrase, for when having shaken hands and found the other person’s to be cold. A proverb first recorded in 1903 (CODP).

(to give someone the) cold shoulder Meaning, ‘to be studiedly indifferent towards someone’. Known by 1820, this expression is said to have originated with the medieval French custom of serving guests a hot roast. When they had outstayed their welcome, the host would pointedly produce a cold shoulder of mutton to get them on their way.

(a) cold war Any tension between powers, short of all-out war, but specifically that between the Soviet Union and the West following the Second World War. This latter use was popularized by Bernard Baruch, the US financier and presidential adviser, in a speech in South Carolina (16 April 1947): ‘Let us not be deceived – we are today in the midst of a cold war.’ The phrase was suggested to him by the speechwriter Herbert Bayard Swope, who had been using it privately since 1940.

collapse of stout party A catchphrase that might be used as the tag-line to a story about the humbling of a pompous person. It has long been associated with Punch and was thought to have occurred in the wordy captions given to that magazine’s cartoons. But as Ronald Pearsall explains in his book with the title Collapse of Stout Party (1975): ‘To many people Victorian wit and humour is summed up by Punch when every joke is supposed to end with “Collapse of Stout Party”, though this phrase tends to be as elusive as “Elementary, my dear Watson” in the Sherlock Holmes sagas.’ At least OED2 manages to find a reference to a ‘Stout Party’ in the caption to a cartoon in the edition of Punch dated 25 August 1855.

colour See ANY COLOUR.

(a/the) colour bar Name given to the divisions, legal and social, between white people and ‘people of colour’ in the first half of the 20th century. Known by 1913.

Columbus and the egg A reference to the anecdote of Christopher Columbus’s egg. Someone, jealous of his success, pointed out that if he had not discovered the New World someone else would have done so. Columbus did not reply directly but asked the other people present if they could make an egg stand on its end. When they failed, he broke the end of the egg and stood it up that way. The moral was plain: once he had shown the way, anyone could do it. From Margery Allingham, Death of a Ghost, Chap. 1 (1934): ‘“Ah,” said Mr Potter, “remember Columbus and the egg. They could all make it stand up after he’d shown them how to crack it at one end. The secret was simple, you see, but Columbus thought of it first”.’

column See AGONY.

comb See FIGHT BETWEEN; FINE-TOOTH.

come See AND STILL THEY.

(to) come a cropper (or fall/get) To have a bad fall (physically) or, in a transferred sense, to run into major misfortune, particularly when things seem to be going well. Possibly from a horse-riding accident where the rider might fall with a crop (handle of a whip) in the hand. Also the phrase ‘neck and crop’ means ‘completely’. Known by the mid-19th century. R. S. Surtees, Ask Mamma, Chap. 53 (1858): ‘[He] rode at an impracticable fence, and got a cropper for his pains.’ Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1875): ‘He would “be coming a cropper rather”, were he to marry Melmotte’s daughter for her money, and then find that she had got none.’

come again? ‘Repeat what you have just said, please!’ Usually uttered, not when the speaker has failed to hear the foregoing but cannot believe or understand it. British and American use by the 1930s, at least.

(the) comedy is ended The last words of François Rabelais (who died about 1550) are supposed to have been: ‘Tirez le rideau, la farce est jouée [bring down the curtain, the farce is played out].’ The attribution is made, hedged about with disclaimers, in Jean Fleury’s Rabelais et ses oeuvres (1877) and also in the edition of Rabelais by Motteux (1693). In Lermontov’s novel A Hero of Our Time (1840), a character says: ‘Finita la commedia’. At the end of Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s opera Il Pagliacci [The Clowns] (1892), Canio exclaims: ‘La commedia è finita [the comedy is finished/over].’

come back, all is forgiven See WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

come hell and high water Meaning ‘come what may’, this phrase is mentioned in Partridge/Slang as a cliché but, as such phrases go, is curiously lacking in citations. OED2 finds no examples earlier than the 20th century. Come Hell or High Water was used as the title of a book by yachtswoman Clare Francis in 1977. She followed it in 1978 with Come Wind or Weather. Hell and High Water was the title of a US film in 1954. Graeme Donald in Today (26 April 1986) linked it to punishments meted out to witches in the Middle Ages: ‘Lesser transgressions only warranted the miscreant being obliged to stand in boiling water, the depth of which was directly proportional to the crime. Hence the expression “From Hell and high water, may the good Lord deliver us”.’ This is rather fanciful. Perhaps he was thinking of the so-called Thieves’ Litany from Hull, Hell and Halifax, good Lord deliver us (known by 1594, because the gibbet was much used in these places in the 16th and 17th centuries). ‘Charged him with caring only about conquering the Valley on 13,455ft Mount Kinabalu “come hell or high water”’ – Daily Record (21 September 1994); ‘The shares are then held, come hell or high water, for a year. Then the process is repeated and a new portfolio is bought’ – The Independent (1 April 1995).

come in, number—, your time is up! Mimicking the kind of thing the hirers of pleasure boats say, this is sometimes applied in other contexts to people who are overstaying their welcome. By the mid-20th century, at least.

come on down! In the American TV consumer game The Price is Right (from 1957), the host (Bill Cullen was the first) would appear to summon contestants from the studio audience by saying ‘[name], come on down!’ This procedure was reproduced when the quiz was broadcast on British ITV 1984 –8, with Leslie Crowther uttering the words.

comfortably See ARE YOU SITTING.

(to) come out fighting Not to take something lying down, responding to a challenge. Date of origin unknown. ‘We’ll get to the sea and we’re coming out fighting’ – film Retreat, Hell! (US 1952).

(to) come over on the last boat Phrase used in response to someone who has doubted your wisdom – ‘I didn’t come over on the last boat, you know.’ Partridge/Catch Phrases has ‘I didn’t come up with the last boat’ as a Royal Navy phrase from the mid-1940s, but also ‘I didn’t come up in the last bucket’ and ‘I didn’t just get off the boat, y’know’, for similar situations.

come the revolution…Introductory phrase to some prediction (often ironic) of what life would hold when (usually Communist) revolution swept the world. Second half of the 20th century. Compare the joke ascribed to the American comedian Willis Howard: ‘Come the revolution, everyone will eat strawberries and cream’ – ‘But, Comrade, I don’t like strawberries and cream’ – ‘Come the revolution, everyone will eat strawberries and cream!’

cometh the hour, cometh the man An expression that appears from a survey of ten British newspapers in recent years to be a weapon (or cliché), especially in the sportswriter’s armoury. From Today (22 June 1986): ‘Beating England may not be winning the World Cup, but, for obvious reasons, it would come a pretty close second back in Buenos Aires. Cometh the hour, cometh the man? Destiny beckons. England beware.’ From The Times (13 August 1991): ‘“Graham [Gooch] is a very special guy,” [Ted] Dexter said. “It has been a case of ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man.’ I do not know anyone who would have taken the tough times in Australia harder than he did”.’ From the Scotsman (29 February 1992): ‘In the maxim of “Cometh the hour, cometh the man,” both the Scotland [Rugby Union] manager, Duncan Paterson, and forwards coach, Richie Dixon, indicated yesterday the need to look to the future.’ But where does the phrase come from? John 4:23 has ‘But the hour cometh, and now is’ and there is an English proverb ‘Opportunity makes the man’ (though originally, in the 14th century, it was ‘makes the thief’). Harriet Martineau entitled her biography of Toussaint L’Ouverture (1840) The Hour and the Man. An American, William Yancey, said about Jefferson Davis, President-elect of the Confederacy in 1861: ‘The man and the hour have met,’ which says the same thing in a different way. P. G. Wodehouse in Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen (1974) has: ‘And the hour…produced the man.’ Earlier, at the climax of Sir Walter Scott’s novel Guy Mannering, Chap. 54 (1815), Meg Merrilies says, ‘Because the Hour’s come, and the Man.’ In the first edition and in the magnum opus edition that Scott supervised in his last years, the phrase is emphasized by putting it in italics. Then, in 1818, Scott used ‘The hour’s come, but not [sic] the man’ as the fourth chapter heading in The Heart of Midlothian, adding in a footnote: ‘There is a tradition, that while a little stream was swollen into a torrent by recent showers, the discontented voice of the Water Spirit [or Kelpie] was heard to pronounce these words. At the same moment a man, urged on by his fate, or, in Scottish language, fey, arrived at a gallop, and prepared to cross the water. No remonstrance from the bystanders was of power to stop him – he plunged into the stream, and perished.’ Both these examples appear to be hinting at some earlier core saying that remains untraced.

(to) come to a grinding halt General use, meaning ‘to come to a sudden and spectacular stop’ – and not usually in a vehicular sense. Date of origin unknown. Perhaps from the sound made by a railway train stopping in an emergency? Identified as a current cliché in The Times (17 March 1995). ‘Unfortunately, things did not go quite according to plan. “We came to a grinding halt pretty quickly,” he admitted’ – The Herald (Glasgow) (15 December 1994); ‘So this is Christmas…Police had a field day, towing away 14 cars. Princes Street came grinding to a halt and the city’s car parks also did a roaring trade’ – Sunday Mail (18 December 1994).

come to Charlie! In about 1952, following the success of his BBC radio show Stand Easy, Charlie Chester (1914–97) had another programme with the title Come to Charlie – that grew out of his catchphrase. He recalled (1979): ‘I would talk to somebody from the stage and say, “Are you all right, Ada? Speak to Charlee–ee. Charlie spoke to you!”…You’d be surprised how many people still ask, “Say that phrase for me – say, “come to Charlee–ee!” It’s just one of those things they like to hear.’ In his later role as a BBC Radio 2 presenter, latterly on Sunday Soapbox, Chester developed an elaborate sign-off (from about 1970): there we are, dear friends, both home, overseas and over the borders.

come up and see me sometime Mae West (1892–1980) had a notable stage hit on Broadway with her play Diamond Lil (first performed 9 April 1928). When she appeared in the 1933 film version entitled She Done Him Wrong, what she said to a very young Cary Grant (playing a coy undercover policeman) was: ‘You know I always did like a man in uniform. And that one fits you grand. Why don’t you come up some time and see me? I’m home every evening.’ As a catchphrase, the words have been rearranged to make them easier to say. That is how W. C. Fields says them to Mae West in the film My Little Chickadee (1939), and she herself took to saying them in the re-arranged version. Even so, she was merely using an established expression. The American author Gelett Burgess in Are You a Bromide? (1907) lists among his ‘bromidioms’: ‘Come up and see us any time. You’ll have to take pot luck, but you’re always welcome.’

come up and see my etchings Nudging invitation from a man to a woman, as though he were an artist plotting to seduce her. By the 1920s, at least. A bit puzzling why he should choose ‘etchings’ rather than anything else? There is a James Thurber cartoon of a man and a woman in a hotel lobby, to which the caption is: ‘You wait here and I’ll bring the etchings down.’

come with me to the Casbah A line forever associated with the film Algiers (1938) and its star, Charles Boyer. He is supposed to have said it to Hedy Lamarr. Boyer impersonators used it, the film was laughed at because of it, but nowhere was it said in the film. It was simply a Hollywood legend that grew up. Boyer himself denied he had ever said it and thought it had been invented by a press agent. In Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989), Germaine Greer writes of the early 1940s: ‘Frightened and revolted the Australians fled for the nearest watering-hole [in the Middle East]. “Kem wiz me to ze Casbah,” Daddy used to say, in his Charles Boyer imitation. Poor Daddy. He was too frightened ever to go there.’

coming See BRITISH ARE.

(where one is) coming from Listed in The Complete Naff Guide, ‘Naff Expressions’ (1983), this means ‘the origin of one’s stance, one’s motivation in doing whatever it is one is doing’.

coming in on a wing and a prayer A popular US song of the Second World War (published in 1943) supposedly took its title from an alleged remark by an actual pilot who was coming in to land with a badly damaged plane. Harold Adamson’s lyrics include the lines: ‘Tho’ there’s one motor gone, we can still carry on / Comin’ In On A Wing And A Pray’r.’ A film about life on an aircraft carrier (US 1944) was called simply Wing and a Prayer.

(the) commanding heights of the economy In a speech to the Labour Party conference in November 1959, Aneurin Bevan said: ‘Yesterday, Barbara [Castle] quoted from a speech which I made some years ago, and she said that I believed that socialism in the context of modern society meant the conquest of the commanding heights of the economy…’ Alan Watkins in a throwaway line in his Observer column (28 September 1987) said ‘the phrase was originally Lenin’s’. At the Labour Party Conference in October 1989, Neil Kinnock revived the phrase in saying that education and training were ‘the commanding heights of every modern economy’. The true source remains untraced.

common See CENTURY OF THE.

common decency The accepted standard of propriety in behaviour and taste. A common pairing. ‘There is one branch of learning without which learning itself cannot be railed at with common decency, namely, spelling’ – S. T. Coleridge, The Friend (1809–10). ‘Even though he [E. M. Forster] never renounced the ideal which suffuses his novels, that of society being guided by a principle of common decency, he was undoubtedly cast adrift by the war and the end of England’ – The Scotsman (8 May 1993); ‘Now we know. How many more examples of deceit, immorality, financial impropriety and lack of common decency will have to pass before the bemused gaze of the electorate before this ragbag administration finally runs out of credit?’ – letter to the editor, The Observer (22 May 1994).

common or garden Common, ordinary. Since 1892. ‘I have – to use a common or garden expression – been “rushed” in this matter’ – Westminster Gazette (4 August 1897); ‘I wonder if it’s possible that I’m all wrong about our friend Victor Dean. Can it be that he was merely a common or garden blackmailer, intent on turning his colleague’s human weaknesses to his own advantage?’ –Dorothy L. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise, Chap. 13 (1933); ‘The APT is going to be the common or garden inter-city train of the future’ – New Scientist (10 June 1971).

(the) common pursuit ‘[The critic] must compose his differences with as many of his fellows as possible in the common pursuit of true judgement’ – T. S. Eliot, ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923). Hence, The Common Pursuit, title of a book of essays (1952) by the critic F. R. Leavis. In turn, it became the title of a play (1984) by Simon Gray about a group of Cambridge undergraduates and graduates who produce a literary magazine called The Common Pursuit.

communist See ARE YOU NOW.

compassion fatigue Reluctance to contribute further to charities and good causes because of the many demands made upon one’s compassion. A coinage of the 1980s when numerous fund-raising events, such as Live Aid for famine relief, led to instances of public withdrawal from giving. Originally used in the USA regarding refugee appeals. Derived from ‘metal fatigue’. A variant was donor fatigue. ‘Geldof, the Irish rock musician who conceived the event [Live Aid] and spearheaded its hasty implementation, said that he “wanted to get this done before compassion fatigue set in”’ – The New York Times (22 September 1985); ‘What the refugee workers call “compassion fatigue” has set in. Back in the 1970s, when the boat people were on the front page, the world was eager to help. But now the boat people are old news’ – The Listener (29 October 1987).

(a/the) competitive edge The quality that gives a product or service the ability to defeat its rivals. ‘Banks and securities firms lag behind their rivals elsewhere in innovation, and have lost what competitive edge Japan’s relatively low interest rates and strong currency gave them abroad a few years ago’ – The Economist (1 May 1993); ‘Over the coming months all Harris Semiconductors’ employees around the world – from managers to office cleaners – will play the game to experience for themselves the tough business decisions executives must make to maintain their competitive edge’ – The Daily Telegraph (6 May 1995).

concentrated cacophony! Catchphrase from the BBC radio show ITMA (1939–49). Deryck Guyler’s archetypical scouser, ‘Frisby Dyke’, found this a bit hard to understand. After a noisy burst of music, the show’s star, Tommy Handley might say, ‘Never in the whole of my three hundred ITMA’s have I ever heard such a piece of concentrated cacophony.’ Dyke: ‘What’s “concentrated cacophony”?’

(the) concrete jungle Deprived urban areas where the ‘law of the jungle’ may apply. Known by 1969. Compare the similar asphalt jungle and BLACKBOARD JUNGLE [i.e. the educational system]. The ‘asphalt’ phrase was in use by 1920 though it was further popularized by W. R. Burnett’s novel The Asphalt Jungle (1949). ‘The May sun beats down upon the Glasgow Deccan, the hot tarmac plains that stretch to the east, to the fringe of the steaming concrete jungle’ – The Scotsman (8 May 1994); ‘Sir: Roy Porter’s comments (“Frankly we don’t give a hoot for barn owls”, 19 October) might impress some fellow townies and lovers of the concrete jungle, but this anti-rural spleen does not fool those who better understand the countryside’ – letter to the editor, The Independent (21 October 1994).

(the) condemned man ate a hearty breakfast Meaning that someone in apparently deep trouble has managed to make an ostentatious display of not worrying about it. The tradition has been established that a condemned man can have anything he desires for his last meal. Boswell in his Life of Johnson (for 27 June 1784) has General Paoli saying: ‘There is a humane custom in Italy, by which persons [sentenced to death] are indulged with having whatever they like best to eat and drink, even with expensive delicacies’. This, presumably, was not then an English custom or Paoli would not have bothered to mention it, nor Boswell to repeat it. As to the origin of the cliché, it presumably lies in ghoulish newspaper reports of the events surrounding executions in the days of capital punishment in Britain. There was a vast amount of popular literature concerning prominent criminals and public executions, especially in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but so far citations of this date only from the 20th and tend to be of a metaphorical nature. A book of short stories about the Royal Navy by ‘Bartimeus’, called Naval Occasions and Some Traits of the Sailor (1914), has: ‘The Indiarubber Man opposite feigned breathless interest in his actions, and murmured something into his cup about condemned men partaking of hearty breakfasts.’ The tone of this suggests it was, indeed, getting on for a cliché even then. The Prisoner Ate a Hearty Breakfast is the title of a novel (1940) written by Jerome Ellison. In the film Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Louis Mazzini, on the evening of his supposed execution, disavows his intention of eating ‘the conventional hearty breakfast’. In No Chip on My Shoulder (1957), Eric Maschwitz writes: ‘Far from closing for ever, Balalaika [was merely to be] withdrawn for a fortnight during which time a revolving stage was to be installed at Her Majesty’s! It was almost ridiculously like an episode from fiction, the condemned man, in the midst of eating that famous “hearty breakfast”, suddenly restored to life and liberty.’ ‘As tradition would have it, the condemned man ate a hearty breakfast. Lennie Lawrence, the Charlton manager, tucked into his scrambled egg and sausages before the match at Maine Road and said that to lose against fellow regulation contenders Manchester City would leave him with a “massive, massive task”’ – The Sunday Times (25 February 1990).

conditions dat prevail See GOODNIGHT, MRS CALABASH.

conduct unbecoming The full phrase is ‘conduct unbecoming the character of an officer and a gentleman’ and seems to have appeared first in the (British) Naval Discipline Act, Article 24 (10 August 1860), though the notion has also been included in disciplinary regulations of other services, and in other countries, if not in quite these words. Conduct Unbecoming is the title of a play by Barry England (1969; film UK 1975) and obviously was drawn from this same source, as was the title of the film An Officer and a Gentleman (US 1982).

(a) confederacy of dunces A phrase that comes from Jonathan Swift: ‘Many a true genius appears in the world – you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him’ – Thoughts on Various Subjects (1706). Hence, A Confederacy of Dunces, the title of a novel (1980) by John Kennedy Toole.

confirmed bachelor See NOT THE MARRYING SORT.

confusion to his enemies British naval toast to the king, possibly first used in the 17th century. A schedule of naval toasts included: ‘Monday Night – Our Ships at sea; Thursday Night – Confusion to our enemies, or, A bloody war, or, more selectively, Death to the French!’ Other versions are ‘Confusion to the enemy’ and ‘Confusion to the French’ (perhaps the original form). From Tom Higgs, 300 Years of Mitcham Cricket: ‘Lord Nelson, when watching the cricket match on Mitcham Green before travelling to Portsmouth, his ship “Victory” and the Battle of Trafalgar (October 1805), gave John Bowyer (aged fifteen) a shilling: “To drink confusion to the French”. The traditional song ‘Here’s a Health unto His Majesty’, continues: ‘With a fal lal la la la la la! / Confusion to his enemies / With a fal lal la la la la la!’ A nautical dictionary, this definition of a Fire Ship: ‘A ship which has been deliberately set on fire to cause damage and confusion to the enemy.’ Compare the infrequently sung second verse of ‘God Save the King’: ‘O Lord our God, arise, / Scatter his enemies…

conk See ARE YOU LOOKING; BIG CONK.

conquer See ALEXANDER WEEPING.

consent See ADVISE AND.

(a) conspiracy theory A belief that a happening (usually political) is the result of a group of people conspiring together rather than the activity of a lone individual or the result of sheer chance or accident. The phrase arose in the mid-1960s when arguments raged over whether the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy was the work of one man – Lee Harvey Oswald – working on his own or was the result of a plot by organized crime, the Soviet Union, the FBI, or any number of bodies. Now inevitably invoked whenever causes of events are being investigated. Sometimes people say that they prefer the ‘cock-up theory’ of history rather than conspiracies. ‘Conspiracy theories are often framed after the deaths of famous people. Like a kaleidoscope, the conspiracy theory can create satisfying shapes and patterns from even the most random details…Others said Lincoln had been killed on the orders of his cabinet, or by Roman Catholics or Southerners’ – The Times (12 November 1991); Conspiracy Theory – title of film (US 1997).

(to) contain the seeds of (something’s) own destruction (sometimes germs…) An allusion to Karl Marx’s observation: ‘Not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians’ – The Communist Manifesto, Pt I (1848). Or to this from Vol. 1, Chap. 32 of Das Kapital: ‘The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation…’ Compare ‘He bears the seed of ruin in himself’ – Matthew Arnold, Merope (1858).

continent isolated In Maurice Bowra’s Memories 1898–1939 (1966) he recalls how Ernst Kantorowicz, a refugee from Germany in the 1930s, ‘liked the insularity of England and was much pleased by the newspaper headline, “Channel storms. Continent isolated”, just as he liked the imagery in, “Shepherd’s Bush combed for dead girl’s body”.’ As an indicator of English isolationism, the ‘Continent isolated’ headline does indeed seem to have surfaced in the 1930s. John Gunther, Inside Europe (1938 edn), has: ‘Two or three winters ago a heavy storm completely blocked traffic across the Channel. “CONTINENT ISOLATED,” the newspapers couldn’t help saying.’ The cartoonist Russell Brockbank drew a newspaper placard stating ‘FOG IN CHANNEL – CONTINENT ISOLATED’ (as shown in his book Round the Bend with Brockbank, published by Temple Press, 1948). By the 1960s and 1970s, and by the time of Britain’s attempts to join the European Community, the headline was more often invoked as: ‘FOG IN CHANNEL. EUROPE ISOLATED.’

continong See MORNING ALL.

contributions See ALL.

cookie See THAT’S THE WAY.

(to go on a) Cook’s tour To travel in an organized manner, possibly on a tour of rather greater extent than originally intended (compare MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR). Thomas Cook was the founder of the world’s original travel agency. His first tour was in 1841 when he took a party of fellow teetotallers on a railway trip in the British Midlands. Alas, there has always been a certain amount of prejudice against the organized tour. Amelia B. Edwards, the Victorian Egyptologist, is suitably caustic in A Thousand Miles Up the Nile (1877): ‘[The newcomer in Cairo soon] distinguishes at first sight between a Cook’s tourist and an independent traveller’.

cool as a cucumber (Of a person) very calm and collected, not nervous. The first recorded use is in a poem (1732) by John Gay: ‘I, cool as a cucumber, could see the rest of womankind.’

cool as a mountain stream A slogan for Consulate (menthol) cigarettes, in the UK from the early 1960s.

cool Britannia Britain’s Labour Government (elected in 1997) briefly flirted with this concept slogan during its first year in office, then ditched it (perhaps mindful of how its predecessor’s BACK TO BASICS’ cry ultimately did it more harm than good). The idea had been to promote a more up-to-date image of Britain and not one of a country stuck in the past, a heritage theme park of castles and villages. The origin of the pun on ‘Rule Britannia’ was quickly located in the title and lyrics of Vivian Stanshall’s song for the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band record album Gorilla (1968): ‘Cool Britannia, Britannia you are cool, take a trip…/ Britons ever, ever, ever shall be hip (hit me, hit me!)’ However, a more pertinent and more recent cue for the phrase may have come from the name of a strawberry and chocolate ice manufactured by Ben & Jerry’s.

(a) cool hundred/thousand/million OED2 says drily that the ‘cool’ gives emphasis to the (large) amount. Is this because a large amount of money is rather chilling, lacking in warmth, or because of the calm way the money is paid out? Perhaps the word ‘cool’ in this context anticipates its more modern connection with jazz, as something thrilling, to be admired and approved of. In Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), we read: ‘Watson rose from the table in some heat and declared he had lost a cool hundred…’ In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861): ‘She had wrote a little [codicil]…leaving a cool four thousand to Mr Mathew Pocket.’ A Cool Million is the title of a satire by Nathaniel West (1934), and in Anthony Powell’s Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975), Lord Widmerpool comments on a smoke bomb let off at a literary prize-giving: ‘I wouldn’t have missed that for a cool million.’

corn in Egypt See OIL FOR THE.

(the) corridors of power A phrase that had become established for the machinations of government, especially in Whitehall, by the time C. P. Snow chose it for the title of his novel Corridors of Power (1964). Earlier, Snow had written in Homecomings (1956): ‘The official world, the corridors of power, the dilemmas of conscience and egotism – she disliked them all.’ ‘Boffins at daggers drawn in corridors of power’ – headline in The Times (8 April 1965).

cor – strike a light! An exclamation now mainly used by way of parody of what a Cockney character might say. Brewer (1923) has ‘strike-a-light’ as a noun for the flint used in striking fire from a tinderbox and also as ‘an exclamation of surprise’. Partridge/Slang has it as a phrase meaning ’to commence work’ and says it comes from sheet metal workers’ language. Partridge also has ‘light’ as a slang word for ‘credit’ and ‘to strike a light’ as ‘to open an account’ of the small sort (as on a slate at a pub). Of the exclamation, Partridge just has it ‘probably from the imperative of the literal Standard English phrase’. The OED2 finds it as a ‘mild imprecation’ (mostly from Australia and New Zealand), with its earliest citation from 1936. A suggested origin is that it derives from the fact that if you strike a match in a lavatory (or outdoor privy) it kills any unpleasant odour (by burning off the methane).

così fan tutte Literally, ‘thus do all’ in Italian but understood to refer to women, specifically referring to their infidelity. Hence, the phrase is taken to mean ‘That’s what all women do’ or ‘Women are like that.’ Mozart’s opera with the title was first performed in 1790. The phrase had appeared earlier in Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto for Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (1778). In that opera, Don Basilio sings, ‘Così fan tutte le belle, non c’è alcuna novità [that’s what all beautiful women do, there’s nothing new in that].’

cost See ARM AND A LEG.

cotton See BLESS HIS LITTLE.

(a) couch potato Pejorative term for an addictive, uncritical (and possibly fat) TV viewer. Said to have been coined in the late 1970s by Tom Iacino in southern California. Sunday Today was only getting round to explaining the word to British readers on 27 July 1986. But why potato? Is it because of the shape of a fat person slouched on a couch? Or does it allude to the consumption of potato crisps, or to behaviour like that of a ‘vegetable’? It seems the phrase may be a complicated pun on the phrase ‘boob-tube’ (US slang for TV, not an article of clothing) and ‘tuber’, meaning a root vegetable.

coughin’ well tonight The British comedian George Formby Snr (1877–1921) used to make this tragically true remark about himself. He had a convulsive cough, the result of a tubercular condition, and it eventually killed him. He was ironically known as ‘The Wigan Nightingale’.

coughs and sneezes spread diseases A British Ministry of Health warning from about 1942, coupled with the line, ‘Trap the germs in your handkerchief’.

could it get any better than this? ‘A popular phrase with [TV] presenters this year; particularly those facing the unpredictable mobs who turn up for reality show live broadcasts’ – The Independent (1 January 2003). ‘The first night swung, the audience stood at the end, and we were home and I should be saying to myself “It doesn’t get any better than this,” but maybe it gets different’ – Richard Eyre, National Service (2003), diary entry for 20 December 1996. Compare as good as it gets (probably a contraction of the question ‘Is this as good as it gets?’). As Good As It Gets was the title of a film (US 1997); ‘David Aaronovitch regards the Government’s Sustainable Communities Plan as “about as good as it’s going to get”’ – The Observer (16 February 2003).

could make any ordinary girl feel like a princess (or could make you feel like Cinderella before the clock struck) Testaments to male prowess of one sort or another, though these are phrases likely to occur more to journalists than mere mortals. In February 1983, the Press Council reported on the curious case of Miss Carol Ann Jones and the News of the World. Miss Jones had been quoted as having said that Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, ‘could make any ordinary girl from a mill town feel like a princess. Even now I have a place in my heart for him’. The Press Council felt that ‘some words attributed to her as direct quotations were ones she was unlikely to have used’.

(you) couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding Said to a weak person or to a big-headed person. Partridge/Catch Phrases dates it from the First World War.

(you) couldn’t run a whelk-stall A way of describing incompetence, this appears to have originated with John Burns, the Labour MP: ‘From whom am I to take my marching orders? From men who fancy they are Admirable Crichtons…but who have not got sufficient brains and ability to run a whelk-stall?’ – South-Western Star (13 January 1894). Partridge/Slang has ‘no way to run a whelk-stall’ as the UK equivalent of the US ‘[that’s] a hell of a way to run a railroad’ and dates it from later, in the 20th century. The phrases couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery and couldn’t fight his/her way out of a paper bag are more likely to be employed nowadays.

(a) counter-factual proposition Meaning, ‘a lie’ – a joke coinage from The New York Times (22 March 1991) – though probably more to do with the art of bureaucratic euphemism than with mainstream political correctness.

(two) countries separated by a common language Referring to England and America, was this said by Shaw or Wilde? Wilde wrote: ‘We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language’ – The Canterville Ghost (1887). However, the 1951 Treasury of Humorous Quotations (eds Esar & Bentley), quotes Shaw as saying: ‘England and America are two countries separated by the same language,’ without giving a source. A radio talk prepared by Dylan Thomas shortly before his death (and published after it in The Listener, April 1954), contained an observation about European writers and scholars in America ‘up against the barrier of a common language’.

country See ANOTHER; FROM A FAR; IN THE.

country folk See EVERY DAY.

(a) country mile A long distance, from the fact that covering a mile in the country seems to take longer than it would in a built-up area. It is often to be observed that mileages given on signposts in the country seem to be underestimates of the distance it feels as though you are travelling. Probably since the late 1940s and of American origin. ‘South Africa normally the league leader by a country mile in the coins business…’ – The Herald (Glasgow) (4 June 1986); ‘Irish coach Dick Best had nothing but admiration for Northampton. “That was the best [Rugby Union] team we have played against this season by a country mile’ – Daily Mirror (27 January 2000).

courage, mon brave! Encouragement associated with French swashbuckling romances, though perhaps more to be found in film versions and parodies than in the originals. Nevertheless, Alexandre Dumas, Vingt ans après, Chap. 26 (1845), has: ‘D’Artagnan se tourna vers Porthos, et crut remarquer qu’il était agité d’un léger tremblement. Il sourit, et s’approchant de son oreille, il lui dit: – Bon courage, mon brave ami! ne soyez pas intimidé.’ Charles Nodier, Contes, Chapter 13 (1830–3), has it precisely: ‘Courage, mon brave, dit-il en me frappant sur l’épaule avec un air tout riant.’

course you can, Malcolm One of those advertising phrases that, for no accountable reason, caught on for a while. From British TV ads for Vick’s Sinex (nasal spray). In February 1994, after the ads had been relaunched, starring the original 1970s’ cast, the manufacturers released a dance single recording the adventures of Malcolm, the youth in the TV commercials.

courting See ARE YER.

(the) courts of the morning The somewhat obscure title of John Buchan’s adventure novel The Courts of the Morning (1929) is a translation of Los Patios de la Mañana, a geographical hill feature in the fictitious South-American republic of Olifa, where the book is set: ‘In the Courts of the Morning there was still peace. The brooding heats, the dust-storms, the steaming deluges of the lowlands were unknown.’

cow See ALL BEHIND; AS DARK; EVERYBODY TO THEIR.

cowabunga! This cry was re-popularized by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles phenomenon of the early 1990s but had been around since the 1950s when, in the American cartoon series The Howdy Doody Show, it was used as an expression of anger – ‘kowa-bunga’ or ‘Kawabonga’ – by Chief Thunderthud. In the 1960s it transferred to Gidget, the American TV series about a surfer, as a cry of exhilaration when cresting a wave and was taken into surfing slang. In the 1970s, the phrase graduated to TV’s Sesame Street.

cowardy, cowardy custard! One child’s taunt to another who is holding back from some activity or who runs away. First recorded in 1836. The original rhyme was, ‘Cowardy, cowardy custard / Can’t eat bread and mustard.’ ‘Costard’ was an old contemptuous name for a ‘head’, which may be relevant. Cowardice is often associated with the colour yellow, of course. A revue devoted to the songs of Noël Coward was presented in London with the title Cowardy Custard in 1972, with no reflection on his moral standing.

crack See AT THE CRACK.

(it’s a) cracker See IT’S THE WAY.

crackerjack! In the USA, this word has the meaning ‘excellent’ and has also been used as the name of a brand of popcorn and syrup. Crackerjack was the title of a BBC TV children’s programme (from 1955) which had a noisy studio audience of youngsters who had only to hear the word ‘Crackerjack’ for them to scream back ‘CRACKERJACK!’ It was probably not a word known to them before.

crafty as a wagon-load of monkeys Very cunning. Mid-20th century. Compare the (apparently unconnected) cry to a group of people waiting to depart in a bus or coach: ‘a cartload of monkeys and the wheel won’t turn’ – that Partridge/Catch Phrases suggests was current by 1890.

crazy like a fox I.e. ‘apparently crazy but with far more method than madness’ – Partridge/Catch Phrases. Craziness is hardly a quality one associates with foxes, so the expression was perhaps merely formed in parallel with the older ‘cunning as a fox’. The similar ‘crazy as a fox’, also of US origin, was known by the mid-1930s. Foxes always seem to get into expressions like these. In a 1980 radio interview, the actress Judy Carne was asked about Goldie Hawn, her one-time colleague on Laugh-In. Carne said: ‘She’s not a dizzy blonde. She’s about as dumb as a fox. She’s incredibly bright.’ Crazy Like a Fox was the title of a US TV series about a ‘sloppy old private eye’ and his ‘smart lawyer son’ (from 1984). Before that, it was used as the title of a book by S. J. Perelman (1945).

crazy, man, crazy See GO, MAN. GO.

(a) creaking gate hangs longest Of a (complaining) person in poor health who outlives an apparently healthier person. Apperson finds ‘a creaking gate (or door) hangs long’ by 1776. Other variants are: ‘A creaking cart goes long on the wheels’ (quoted as a common proverb in 1900) and ‘creaking carts go a long way.’

(the) cream of the crop The very best of anything. Date of origin unknown. And which crop produces cream, one wonders? ‘As a matter of opinion I think he’s the tops / My opinion is he’s the cream of the crop’ – song ‘My Guy’ by Smokey Robinson (1964); ‘Recipe: Cream of the crop – Edward Hardy on a sauce that’s so good for the sole’ – headline in The Guardian (16 July 1994); ‘Reporting on the Lincoln Center controversy, Greg Thomas in The Guardian said that to call the jazz programme racist was “patently ridiculous”. He also made the point that to discuss jazz musicians in this way should be unnecessary, since in jazz history, “like post-Fifties basketball, the cream of the crop have always risen”’ – The Times (16 July 1994); ‘Football: Cream Of The Crop: John Spencer Shows Off New Hairstyle’ – headline in The People (13 November 1994).

creative accountancy (or accounting) A term for ingenious manipulation of accounts that may or may not actually be illegal. An early example of the phrase occurs in the film The Producers (US 1968): ‘It’s simply a matter of creative accounting. Let’s assume for a moment that you are a dishonest man…It’s very easy. You simply raise more money than you need.’ The film’s subject is such accountancy applied to the world of the theatrical angel.

(a/the) credibility gap The difference between what is claimed as fact and what is actually fact. It dates from the time in the Vietnam war when, despite claims to the contrary by the Johnson administration, an escalation of US participation was taking place. ‘Dilemma in “Credibility Gap”’ was the headline over a report on the matter in The Washington Post (13 May 1965). (la) crème de la crème The elite; the very pick of any group in society. OED2 claims that this expression was first used of the Austrians by the actress and author Fanny Kemble in a letter of 22 January 1848. Another claim is that it was introduced by Fanny Trollope in her travel book Vienna and the Austrians (1838). ‘I am putting old heads on your young shoulders…and all my pupils are the crème de la crème’ – Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Chap. 1 (1961).

(a) crew cut A brush-like short haircut popular with the US military but apparently first adopted by oarsmen at Harvard and Yale Universities (hence the ‘crew’) and athletes who no doubt appreciated its aerodynamic qualities. Known since 1942.

Crichton See ADMIRABLE.

crime doesn’t pay A slogan used variously by the FBI and by the cartoon character Dick Tracy. Known by 1927. Crime Does Not Pay was the title of a series of two-reel cinema shorts made by MGM between 1935 and 1947. ‘You been reading a lot of stuff about “Crime don’t pay”. Don’t be a sucker. That’s for yaps and small-timers on shoestrings. Not for people like us’ – gangster Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney) in Angels With Dirty Faces (US 1938). ‘Crime never pays, not even life insurance benefits’ – Zelda Popkin, No Crime For a Lady (1942). ‘Crime doesn’t pay’ – Punch (22 August 1945).

crimes and misdemeanors A phrase from the Constitution of the United States, Article II, Sect. 4 (1787): ‘The President, Vice-President, and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.’ Hence, Crimes and Misdemeanors, the title of a Woody Allen film (US 1989).

criminal folly An inevitable pairing of words meaning ‘folly that has deeply serious implications or is sufficient to be likened to a criminal act’. Known in the 19th century. Listed in The Independent (24 December 1994) as a cliché of newspaper editorials. ‘Miners’ lamps…so convenient…that it would really seem to be nothing short of criminal folly to run the slightest risk with flame lamps’ – Daily News (10 May 1888); ‘He condemned the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon as a “criminal folly” and used the same words yesterday to describe the Israeli bombardment of the villages of southern Lebanon last July’ – The Independent (7 September 1993); ‘He also warned Unionists not to entertain ideas of an independent Ulster. “In Ulster, the greater number who may still have to contend with terrorism would be guilty of criminal folly if they opened up a second front with Britain as the other enemy”’ – The Sunday Telegraph (16 October 1994).

criminals return to the scene of the crime (sometimes murderers…) There is no obvious source for this proverbial saying. A French propaganda poster from the First World War has the slogan: ‘Les assassins reviennent toujours…sur les lieux de leur crime.’ In fiction, Raskolnikov does indeed return to the scene of his crime in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), though the phrase is not used. From H. B. Creswell, Thomas, Chap. 5 (1918): ‘I crept out of the house like a murderer fascinated by the scene of his crime’. From Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death, Chap. 6 (1927): ‘It is a well-established psychological fact that criminals…revisit the place of the crime.’ In The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case (US 1930), a policeman says: ‘I believe that the criminal always returns to the scene of his crime.’ From the BBC radio Goon Show (15 October 1954): ‘We all know that a criminal always returns to the scene of the crime.’ There may be a slight allusion to Proverbs 26:11: ‘As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly’.

crisis, what crisis? The British Prime Minister James Callaghan may be said to have been eased out of office by a phrase he did not (precisely) speak. Returning from a sunny summit meeting in Guadeloupe to Britain’s ‘winter of discontent’ on 10 January 1979, he was asked by a journalist at a London airport press conference: ‘What is your general approach and view of the mounting chaos in the country at the moment?’ Callaghan replied: ‘Well, that’s a judgement that you are making. I promise you that if you look at it from the outside (and perhaps you are taking rather a parochial view), I don’t think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos.’ Next day, The Sun carried the headline: ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ Callaghan lost the May 1979 General Election. The editor of The Sun was given a knighthood by the incoming Prime Minister. Some people insist on recalling that Callaghan said something much more like ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ on the TV news. When told that these words do not survive on film, these people begin to talk about conspiracy theories. But the impression he created was a strong one. In The Diaries of Kenneth Williams (1993), the comedian noted in his entry for 10 January 1979 (the day of Callaghan’s return and not of the Sun headline, which he would not have seen anyway): ‘Saw the news. Callaghan arrived back from Guadeloupe saying, “There is no chaos” which is a euphemistic way of talking about the lorry drivers ruining all production and work in the entire country, but one admires his phlegm.’

crocodile tears A false display of sorrow. The legend that crocodiles shed tears in order to lure victims to their deaths was established by the year 1400. In an account of a 1565 voyage by Sir John Hawkins (published by Richard Hakluyt, 1600), there is: ‘In this river we saw many crocodiles…His nature is ever when he would have his prey, to cry and sob like a Christian body, to provoke them to come to him, and then he snatcheth at them.’ Shakespeare makes reference to crocodile tears in Antony and Cleopatra, Othello and Henry VI.

crop See CREAM OF THE.

cropper See COME A.

(a) cross of gold William Jennings Bryan’s speech to the Democratic Convention in July 1896 contained an impassioned attack on supporters of the gold standard: ‘You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.’ Bryan had said virtually the same in a speech to the House of Representatives on 22 December 1894. He won the nomination and fought the presidential election against William J. McKinley, who supported the gold standard but lost. A ‘cross of gold’-type speech is sometimes called for when a politician (like Edward Kennedy in 1980) is required to sweep a convention with his eloquence.

crossroads See DIRTY WORK.

(to) cross the Rubicon To make a significant decision from which there is no turning back. An allusion to Julius Caesar’s crossing the stream of that name in 49 BC, which meant that he passed from Cisalpine Gaul into Italy and thus became an invader. Known by 1626. Hence also this limited application: ‘“I’ve been to Paris with Fulke Warwick…” “Talk about crossing the Rubicon.” “Crossing the Rubicon” was deb talk for going all the way’ – Christopher Ogden, Life of the Party (1994).

crow See AS THE.

(a) crowd pleaser Any form of art and entertainment that contains obviously popular elements inserted simply with the intention of ‘playing to the gallery’. Known by 1943 in North America. ‘George Eliot and Charles Dickens are the giants of the Victorian novel. Eliot was an uncompromising highbrow; Dickens a shameless crowd-pleaser. In the end, only the quality matters’ – Evening Standard (London) (30 June 1994); ‘The wish to increase the number of available third level places is a noble one and a sure fire crowd pleaser, but unless the Department of Education is willing to put its money where its mouth is by extending college facilities and employing more staff, the admission of yet more young hopefuls would be lunacy’ – The Irish Times (29 August 1994).

crown imperial ‘Crown Imperial’ was the title given to Sir William Walton’s march, which was composed for the coronation of King George VI in 1936. ‘Orb and Sceptre’ followed for that of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. In a television interview, Walton said that if he lived to write a march for a third coronation it would be called ‘Sword and Mace’. He was alluding to the passage from Shakespeare, Henry V, IV.i.266 (1599): ‘’Tis not the balm, the sceptre and the ball, / The sword, the mace, the crown imperial /…That beats upon the high shore of this world.’ Oddly enough, the orchestral parts of ‘Crown Imperial’ bear a different quotation: ‘In beauty bearing the crown imperial’ from the poem ‘In Honour of the City’ by William Dunbar. This is what Walton must have begun with, subsequently discovering the Shakespeare sequence.

(the) crowning glory Meaning, ‘whatever puts the final touches to a triumph or is the culmination of a series of triumphs or outstanding features’. Known by 1902. ‘Gerty’s crowning glory was her wealth of wonderful hair’ – James Joyce, Ulysses (1922). ‘Tennis…It is as though the subjects of the Queen of Eastbourne reached a collective decision at the beginning of the week to offer the 37-year-old a final crowning glory before she bids farewell to the place she has made her own’ – The Times (16 June 1994); ‘That was the era when Coney Island was billed as The Eighth Wonder Of The World. Brooklyn was the second largest city in America, and Coney was its crowning glory’ – The Sunday Times (4 September 1994).

(the) crown jewels Anything of great value, so named after the British Crown Jewels stored in the Tower of London. ‘Crown jewels…the male genitals’ – Julia P. Stanley, ‘Homosexual Slang’, American Speech, xlv (1970); ‘Material so sensitive that national security demands that the material is not exposed to the public…It was necessary for the jury to examine in detail the material – called “the Crown Jewels” – in order that it might understand the full facts’ – The Guardian (29 January 1985); ‘Move to safeguard TV “crown jewels” [important programmes]’ – headline in The Guardian (17 January 1996).

crucial A 1980s’ vogue word, used by the young to convey the same as ‘great’, ‘fantastic’. It came into British slang – from American hip hop, apparently – through its use as a catchphrase of Delbert Wilkins, a creation of the British comedian Lenny Henry (b. 1958). As presenter of a record programme on BBC Radio 1 in 1982, Henry portrayed ‘Wilkins’ as a garrulous DJ from a Brixton pirate radio station. ‘Well, basic, well, crucial, man!’ he would say. He also used the word wicked to mean ‘wonderful’, ‘splendid’, and this also passed into youth slang. His exclamation diamond! did not. Henry first came to notice as a 16-year-old on ITV’s New Faces. His send-up of a woolly-hatted Rastafarian – Algernon Winston Spencer Churchill Gladstone Disraeli Pitt the Younger Razzmatazz – gave the West Indian catchphrase Ooookaaay! to a generation of school-children. On ITV’s O.T.T. (1982), Henry introduced another black character, ‘Joshua Yarlog’, with the catchphrase Katanga! (which, as one paper commented, ‘half the population already seems to have taken up in an attempt to drive the other half mad’).

cruellest See IS THE.

(the) crux of the matter (or case or problem) The central or divisive point of interest, especially in argument or debate. Date of origin unknown. ‘The crux of the matter is that the behaviour under consideration must pass through the needle’s eye of social acceptance’ – Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (1934); ‘“Precisely,” answered the officer, “and that brings us to the crux of the matter. Namely, that the Eurocorps is a historical or political symbol, but remains a military nonentity’ – The European (22 July 1994); ‘The crux of the matter is that the Europeans believe that the Bosnians are almost certain to be the losers even if the arms embargo is lifted, while the Americans profess to believe that the Bosnians could beat the Serbs if there was equality in weaponry’ – The Guardian (29 November 1994).

(to) cry all the way to the bank Meaning ‘to be in a position to ignore criticism’, this expression was certainly popularized, if not actually invented, by the flamboyant pianist Liberace (1919–87). In his autobiography (1973), Liberace wrote: ‘When the reviews are bad I tell my staff that they can join me as I cry all the way to the bank.’ Liberace was using the expression by 1954. In Alfred Hitchcock’s film North by Northwest (US 1959), the Cary Grant character gets to say: ‘…while we cry about it all the way to the bank’. (A less pointed version is, ‘to laugh all the way to the bank’.) Liberace was as famous for his phrases in the 1950s as he was for his candelabra. He seemed to say ‘ladies and gentlemen’ between every sentence, frequently mentioned his ‘Mom’, and thanked audiences on behalf of my brother George.

(to) cry budget (or cry mum) To keep quiet. Compare the more common ‘keep mum’. In Ngaio Marsh’s A Wreath for Riviera (1949), Inspector Alleyn whispers, ‘You cry mum and I’ll cry budget’, when hiding from a villain. The allusion is to Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, V.ii.6 (1600–1), in which Slender’s ludicrous planned elopement with Anne Page is to be carried out by their finding each other in the crowd with the greeting ‘Mum’ to be answered by ‘Budget’ – ‘and by that we know one another’. The Arden edition of Shakespeare adds the gloss: ‘An appropriately childish greeting. “Mumbudget”…was used of an inability or a refusal to speak…OED conjectures, with convincing citations, that it was “the name of some children’s game in which silence was required”. Thomas Hardy later uses “to come mumbudgeting” in the sense of “to come secretly”.’

crystal clear This phrase is about as clear (in meaning) as it is possible to get. Known in connection with glass (Browning, 1845) and water (1859). Identified as a current cliché in The Times (17 March 1995). ‘The Administration was never crystal-clear on exactly how we would massively retaliate with nuclear weapons’ – The Listener (29 March 1962); ‘In this book we have the service itself and the crystal clear explanations of Raymond Chapman as to the meaning of various passages and who does what and why’ – advertisement for book Draw Near With Faith (1995).

(a/the) cultural cringe A belief that one’s own country’s culture is inferior to that of others. This phrase is probably Australian in origin and is certainly well known in that country. Arthur Angell Phillips wrote in 1950: ‘Above our writers – and other artists – looms the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon culture. Such a situation almost inevitably produces the characteristic Australian Cultural Cringe – appearing either as the Cringe Direct, or as the Cringe Inverted, in the attitude of the Blatant Blatherskite, the God’s-Own-Country and I’m-a-better-man-than-you-are Australian bore.’

(a) culture vulture Slightly mocking name for a person who gobbles up artistic experiences, especially as a tourist. DOAS has it by 1947 and, indeed, it is probably an American coinage.

cunning plan See I HAVE.

cupboard love Devotion to people because of the material things, notably food, that they can provide. Originally, perhaps, from the display of love by children towards the cook in a household – love that is based on this kind of self-interest. From the middle of the 18th century. Later also known as lump-love, where the real object of affection is a lump of food.

(my) cup runneth over Meaning ‘I’m overjoyed; my blessings are numerous’, the expression derives from Psalms 23:5: ‘Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.’ Shirley Polykoff, the advertising executive, recounts in her book Does She…Or Doesn’t She? (1975) that she once jestingly proposed ‘Her cup runneth over’ as a slogan for a corset manufacturer. ‘It took an hour to unsell him,’ she adds.

(the) cup that cheers The reference here is to tea (taken in preference to alcohol). The phrase originated in ‘The Winter Evening’ from William Cowper’s The Task (1783), where it is in the plural: ‘Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, / Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, / And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn / Throws up a steamy column, and the cups, / That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, / So let us welcome peaceful ev’ning in.’ Eric Partridge listed ‘cups that cheer but not inebriate’ in his Dictionary of Clichés (1940) and noted that earlier, in Siris (1744), Bishop Berkeley had said of tar water that it had a nature ‘so mild and benign and proportioned to the human constitution, as to warm without heating, to cheer but not inebriate’. In Three Men In a Boat, Chap. 2 (1889), Jerome K. Jerome puts the phrase into reverse: ‘Luckily you have a bottle of the stuff that cheers and inebriates, if taken in proper quantity, and this restores to you sufficient interest in life.’

(like a) curate’s egg Meaning, ‘patchy, good in parts, of unequal quality’, the phrase comes from the caption to a Punch cartoon entitled ‘TRUE HUMILITY’ (9 November 1895) in which a ‘Right Reverend Host’ (a bishop at the breakfast table) is saying: ‘I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr Jones!’ The nervous young curate, keen not to say anything critical, flannels the reply: ‘Oh no, my Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent.’ Hence the expression, although the point of the cartoon is rather that the egg is completely bad and the curate is seeking a way of softening any criticism implied by pointing this out in circumstances that are inexpedient. The cartoon was drawn by George Du Maurier, the French-born British artist and novelist (1834–96) during the last year of his life.

curlies See BY THE SHORT.

(the) curse of Scotland The nine of diamonds (playing card). As to why this should be, there are up to eight reasons advanced. The most popular of these is probably that which asserts that the Duke of Cumberland wrote his ‘no quarter’ command after the Battle of Culloden (1746) on the back of a nine of diamonds card. The slaughter of Jacobites at and after the battle by this ‘Butcher’ has never been forgotten in Scotland. However, the term for the playing card was already known by this date.

(a) curtain lecture (or Caudle lecture) Meaning ‘a private reproof given by a wife to her husband’, this phrase refers to the scolding that took place after the curtains round the bed (as on a four-poster) had been drawn. Known as such by 1633. The ‘Caudle’ variation derives from Douglas Jerrold’s Mrs Caudle’s Curtain Lectures, a series published by Punch in 1846 in which Mr Caudle suffered the naggings of his wife after they had gone to bed. Another early version of the idea is contained in the phrase ‘boulster lecture’ (1640). Lady Diana Cooper in a letter of 12 January 1944 wrote: ‘Clemmie has given him [Winston Churchill] a Caudle curtain lecture on the importance of not quarrelling with Wormwood.’

(the) customer is always right Gordon Selfridge (1856–1947) was an American who, after a spell with the Marshall Field store in Chicago came to Britain and introduced the idea of the monster department store to London. It appears that he was the first to assert that ‘the customer is always right’ and many other phrases now generally associated with the business of selling through stores. Punch had the phrase as a cartoon heading on 25 April 1934. However, the hotelier César Ritz was being credited with the saying ‘the customer is never wrong’ by 1908.

(a) custom more honour’d in the breach Usually taken to mean that whatever custom is under consideration has fallen into sad neglect. But in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I.iv.16 (1600–1), the Prince tells Horatio that the King’s drunken revelry is a custom that would be better ‘honour’d’ if it were not followed at all.

(to) cut and run Meaning, ‘to escape; run away’. The phrase has a nautical origin (recorded in 1704). In order to make a quick getaway, instead of the lengthy process of hauling up a ship’s anchor, the ship’s cable was simply cut. This was easy to do when the anchor was attached to a hemp rope rather than a chain. The figurative use was established by 1861.

(to) cut no ice with someone To make no impression whatsoever. Of American origin. Known by 1895. ‘Such speeches! Eloquence cut no ice at that dinner’ – J. S. Wood, Yale Yarns (1895).

(to) cut off at the pass Phrase from Western films, meaning ‘to intercept, ambush’ (sometimes in the form head ’em off at the pass). It resurfaced as one of the milder sayings in the transcripts of the Watergate tapes (published as The White House Transcripts, 1974). As used by President Nixon it meant simply, ‘We will use certain tactics to stop them’. The phrase occurred in a crucial exchange in the White House Oval Office on 21 March 1973 between the President and his Special Counsel, John Dean: Nixon: ‘You are a lawyer, you were a counsel…What would you go to jail for?’ Dean: ‘The obstruction of justice.’ Nixon: ‘The obstruction of justice?’ Dean: ‘That is the only one that bothers me.’ Nixon: ‘Well, I don’t know. I think that one…I feel it could be cut off at the pass, maybe, the obstruction of justice.’ Sometime after 1954, C. A. Lejeune wrote an article entitled ‘Head ’em off at Eagle Pass’ for Good Housekeeping in which she told a story about the actor Charles Bickford, a standard villain in many Westerns, who claimed to have been saying the line for fifteen years.

(to) cut off your nose to spite your face To perform a self-defeating action. The expression may have originated in 1593 when King Henry IV of France seemed willing to sacrifice the city of Paris because of its citizens’ objections to his being monarch. One of his own men had the temerity to suggest that destroying Paris would be like cutting off his nose to spite his face. The phrase seems not to have taken hold in English until the mid-19th century.

(to) cut the mustard To succeed, to have the ability to do what’s necessary. One might say of someone ‘He didn’t cut much mustard.’ An American phrase dating from about 1900 when ‘mustard’ was slang for the ‘real thing’, ‘the best’ or the ‘genuine article’, and this may have contributed to the coinage. Alternatively, as mustard is a notoriously difficult crop to harvest, if you can’t cut it or hack it, then your vigour has disappeared and you are not up to scratch. Another theory is that the phrase is a mishearing of ‘cut the muster’, a military phrase meaning ‘well-turned-out’ both in appearance and timeliness. Whether there is any connection with the phrase KEEN AS MUSTARD is unclear. ‘Boss Finley’s too old to cut the mustard [i.e. perform sexually]’ – Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth (1959); ‘So few now bother to attend the Church of England that the ancient title Defender of the Faith – so important in its historical context – cuts little mustard’ – Polly Toynbee in Radio Times (22 July 1995).

(the) cutting edge That which is considered to be at the centre of attention or activity. The term is derived from the ancient notion that the sharp edge is the most important part of a blade, but the earliest example in the OED2 is only from 1966. Before it had been watered down by overuse, Dr Jacob Bronowski used the phrase in his TV series The Ascent of Man (1973): ‘The hand is more important than the eye…The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.’ A cliché by the late 1980s. In its original sense (of the business end of a blade), it occurs in the first line of John Masefield’s poem ‘To-morrow’ (1921). ‘Yet something has changed. Sex – except perhaps, and necessarily, for lesbians and gay men – is no longer at the cutting edge of politics, especially for women’ – The Guardian (14 March 1989); ‘His apologists would no doubt claim Nyman as a cuttingedge post-modernist, knowingly subverting the traditional genre and exposing the hollowness within; but what is the difference?’ – Financial Times (19 April 1995); ‘Barbara Kohnstamm believes we may be at the cutting edge of mother-son relationships’ – The Irish Times (26 April 1995).

cutting room See FACE ON.

(to) cut to the chase Meaning ‘to cut out the unnecessary chit-chat and get to the point’, the phrase obviously comes from film editing but the transferred use became popular only in the 1990s. There is a literal first use of the phrase in a film editing context in Joseph Patrick McEvoy, Hollywood Girl (1929): ‘Jannings escapes…Cut to chase.’ But even the more recent allusive uses are either in films or bound up with them. The phrase occurs in William Goldman’s Hollywood novel Tinsel (1979); ‘Darryl Zanuck used to tell film makers, “If you’re in trouble, cut to the chase”’ – The New York Times (6 November 1981); in the film The Presidio (US 1988), Donna Caldwell (Meg Ryan) says seductively to a cop: ‘We can sit here and talk for a couple of hours and wonder what it would be like to be alone together…or…we could just cut to the chase’; from Madonna’s diary of filming Evita, published in Vanity Fair (November 1996): meeting President Menem to get permission for her to sing ‘Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina’ on the actual balcony of the Casa Rosada, Madonna evidently overturned diplomatic niceties and said, ‘Let’s cut to the chase here. Do we have the balcony or don’t we?’ Menem replied: ‘You can have the balcony.’