by Max Cryer
In 1743 Broughton drafted a set of practices that became known as the London Prize Ring Rules. These were revised in 1838 and again in 1853, stipulating that biting, head butting, and hitting below the belt were “fouls.”
In 1867 John Graham Chambers revised the boxing rules under the patronage of the Marquess of Queensbury, who did not write them but under whose name they were published.
Be prepared
In his manual for Scouts, Scouting for Boys (1908), Lord Baden-Powell wrote:
The scouts’ motto is based on my initials, it is: Be Prepared.
Best thing since sliced bread
An effective bread-slicing machine had been developed by 1928 and within five years bakeries in America were producing more sliced bread than unsliced.
In February 1940 the Burlington Daily Times featured a quaint advertising campaign by the Southern Bread firm—an offer of two packs of wrapped sliced bread at a bargain price. And extolling the “Thrift Thrill Twin-Pack” was a cartoon figure representing Mother saying: “Greatest convenience since sliced bread!” The implication was that two loaves of sliced bread were better than one.
Thus the image of something being more convenient than sliced bread originated in the curious concept that the greatest convenience since sliced bread was more sliced bread!
Over time, and with some slight modifications (“greatest convenience” to “greatest thing” to “best thing”), the line came to be applied to any number of products: cell phones, Viagra, television remotes, Microsoft, Diet Coke ...
(It’s probably) better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in
President Lyndon B. Johnson had a somewhat clouded view of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. New York Times writer David Halberstam reported in October 1971 that Johnson’s opinion was:
Well, it’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.
Beyond the pale
The pale here refers to a designated area within a border, either real or theoretical, and under a different jurisdiction from the adjacent territory. The English Pale referred to the Calais area of France administered by England, and the Irish Pale was that section of Ireland under English control. Beyond the Pale simply meant past the border.
By the seventeenth century the image of a pale—an enclosure—had acquired a metaphorical meaning, often used by Christians referring to a defined and safe area of belief. Archbishop Bramwell said in 1654: “We acknowledge that there is no salvation to be expected ordinarily without the pale of the Church.”
Notwithstanding the limits placed on it by church adherents—only they themselves were within the pale—gradually the expression came to include wider areas of acceptable behavior and decency. Beyond the pale implied a general lack of propriety and possibly decency. With all due respect to Archbishop Bramwell, it was Charles Dickens who nailed the term into the modern vernacular in Pickwick Papers (1837). Mr. Pott tells Slurk:
I consider you a viper. I look upon you, sir, as a man who has placed himself beyond the pale of society, by his most audacious, disgraceful, and abominable public conduct.
(The) Big Apple
The first known connection between an apple and New York City came by way of a rather esoteric mention in Edward Sanford Martin’s book The Wayfarer in New York (1909). He referred to the perception that the people of the Midwest had of the big city and of the proportion of the nation’s wealth it attracted. An image was engendered of New York as a great tree, with its roots reaching to distant states and coasts. However, the tree’s fruit showed little affection for the source of its nourishment. New York could therefore be seen as the “big apple,” commandeering an unfair share of the national sap.
Referring to New York in connection with an apple is also believed to have occurred among jazz musicians referring to a booking at a prestigious venue, but “big apple” never really achieved public usage until it was heard by John J. Fitzgerald. He was a sports journalist who, when visiting racetracks in New Orleans, became aware not of musicians but of stable hands referring to New York as the big apple, meaning “the big time.” He found the phrase evocative and, when he got back to New York, decided to use it as the title of his Morning Telegraph sports column.
In February 1924 Fitzgerald wrote:
The Big Apple. The dream of every lad that ever threw a leg over a thoroughbred and the goal of all horsemen. There’s only one Big Apple. That’s New York.
The term gradually came into public usage—eventually such wide public usage that in 1971 “Big Apple” became the official advertising slogan of New York City. And in tribute to John J. Fitzgerald, who helped make the term famous, the corner of Broadway and 54th Street where he’d lived for thirty years was renamed Big Apple Corner in 1997.
Big Brother is watching you
In 1949, descriptions of such concepts as closed-circuit television, Google Earth, computer scans, DNA, airport computer checks, and global Internet communication would have been considered science fiction. That year, George Orwell depicted sinister overall surveillance in his novel 1984, with its alarming catchphrase “Big Brother is Watching You.”
Over time—not necessarily in 1984—much of Orwell’s projected government surveillance did eventuate. He also described government terminology and nomenclature which conveyed the opposite of the truth, and that too came to pass; the Ministry of Health, for instance, is concerned only with sickness.
(In 1999 a reality television series called Big Brother was launched in the Netherlands, showing a house full of people constantly being filmed.The format was copied in more than sixty countries.)
(The) bigger they are the harder they fall
The idea was put into (Latin) words as far back as the fourth century AD by Latin poet Claudian: “Men are raised on high in order that they may fall more heavily.”
According to Monte D. Cox, a member of the International Boxing Research Organization, the modern version was first proclaimed by boxer Joe Walcott (“The Barbados Demon”) who, although he was short, became the welterweight champion of the world in 1901.
The term became more widely known after Robert Fitzsimmons made a similar remark, much publicized after being reported in the National Police Gazette in 1902:
If I can get close enough, I’ll guarantee to stop almost anybody. The bigger the man, the heavier the fall.
Joe Walcott (“The Barbados Demon”) is not to be confused with Arnold Cream, who called himself Jersey Joe Walcott (in honor of “The Barbados Demon”) and was world heavyweight boxing champion in 1951.
Bitch goddess
The term refers to success and comes from a letter written to H.G. Wells by American philosopher and writer William James in 1906:
The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch goddess success is our national disease.
In 1928 D.H. Lawrence referred to the same matter in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. William James’s original success is sometimes misquoted as referring to fame.
Bite the dust
The idea wasn’t born with Western movies. Around 700 BC Homer wrote of such an image, but it took a while to make the transition to English. Various versions filtered through, the earliest perhaps being “lick the dust,” from the Book of Psalms. In 1720 Alexander Pope translated Homer’s words as “bit the ground,” and Cowper’s translation had “press’d the dust.”
But in 1748 Scottish author Tobias Smollett focused the varying versions of the already 2000-year-old expression in Gil Blas of Santillane, a novel he translated from the French:
We made two of them bite the dust, and the others betake themselves to flight.
From Homer’s original concept of sudden death, which it still describes, the term also came into usage in the wider contexts of defeat and failure. It can refer to political ideas, financial downturns or commercial disasters . . . even an expired romance or marriage.
(The) black dog
Referring to
depression (or melancholy) as a black dog is a concept that in English dates back to at least the 1700s. The same term can also be found used in the same way by the Roman poet Horace (around 50 BC).
Samuel Johnson frequently referred to his periods of melancholy as a black dog, as in this letter to Hester Thrale (1783):
The black dog I hope always to resist, and in time to drive . . . When I rise my breakfast is solitary, the black dog waits to share it, from breakfast to dinner he continues barking.
Both Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson used the same image, and in more recent times the term reached a wide audience through the many references associating it with Sir Winston Churchill, who is said to have called his periods of depression his black dog. However, only one instance appears to exist of Churchill’s directly mentioning his black dog; in a 1911 letter to his wife after a dinner with Lady Wimborne, Churchill wrote:
Alice interested me a great deal in her talk about her doctor in Germany, who completely cured her depression. I think this man might be useful to me—if my black dog returns. He seems quite away from me now—it is such a relief. All the colors come back into the picture.
This letter wasn’t published until 1998. Sir Winston’s last secretary, Anthony Montague Brown, in his book Long Sunset, expresses doubt that Sir Winston ever actually spoke of the black dog and reports that he never heard Churchill use the expression. Other people, however, claimed he had said it to them.
Nevertheless, whether or not he used it, linking the term with the iconic figure of Churchill brought it into wider common usage.
Blood is thicker than water
Expressions of this concept—strength of kinship—have surfaced over many centuries in various cultures and languages around the world. It appeared in English in 1412 in The Troy Book, where John Lydgate wrote:
For naturally blood will be of kind.
Drawn-to blood, where he may it find.
But the saying came into more common usage, on both sides of the Atlantic, in the nineteenth century. Sir Walter Scott in Guy Mannering (1815) recounts the reading of a will that leaves the contents of the deceased’s house to a young woman.The character of Dinmont, seeing his expectations disappear, exclaims in anger:
Weel, blude’s thicker than water; she’s welcome to the cheeses and the hams just the same.
And the New York Times, drawing on Harper’s magazine, reported that in 1860 the American commander Josiah Tattnall of the steamer Toey-wan, delivering an American consul to China, sailed into the Pei-ho River. At the time, allied British and French gunboats were attacking the Taku forts. The Chinese were returning fire vigorously, and many British ships were struck, commencing in 85 dead and 385 wounded.
Commander Tattnall ordered his own (neutral) craft into the fray to assist the wounded British admiral. Technically, this was a breach of international law.
When asked to explain his actions, Tattnall’s reply to the U.S. Naval Secretary referred to Anglo-American kinship, saying simply:
Blood is thicker than water.
His action was upheld.
The incident was much discussed in the United States, and as Tattnall became something of a folk hero, his use of the expression made it familiar to an American audience Sir Walter Scott might not have reached.
Bloody but unbowed
A line from the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley. Henley suffered tuberculosis of the bone and had one leg amputated when he was a teenager.The other leg was also targeted for amputation, but Henley wouldn’t allow this and remained in the hospital for three years, supervised and assisted by Joseph Lister. Henley wrote “Invictus” in the hospital, and it was published in the 1875, the year he was discharged. He went on to become a respected magazine editor.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed
The poem’s equally famous final line is: “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”
Robert Louis Stevenson became a close friend of Henley’s. His red beard, massive shoulders, jovial rolling laugh, and one-legged gait with his crutch was the inspiration for Stevenson’s character Long John Silver.
Bloody Mary
Widely known as a mixture of tomato juice, vodka, and something spicy, the drink became popular in the early 1900s but its name was first heard in Britain nearly 400 years earlier.
Queen Mary Tudor of England, an ardent Catholic, was firmly set against the Protestant religion approved by the two monarchs who preceded her, and she set out to force the English into Catholicism—on pain of death. During her five-year reign (1553 - 1558) she had some 280 people, with whose religious principles she disagreed, tortured and burned at the stake. Hence her nickname among the populace—Bloody Mary.
The appearance of the vodka-tomato drink may be reminiscent of blood, but a Bloody Mary is a great deal less dangerous than the woman after whom it is named. (Incidentally, Mary Tudor, the original Bloody Mary, is not to be confused with Mary Queen of Scots, who never ruled England.)
Blot on the landscape
The first known use of the expression in print was in Punch (vol. 153, July 1917), in a somewhat unkind context. Writer Crosbie Garstin described the Reverend Paul Grayne, sometime curate of Thorpington Parva, as:
. . . a blot on the landscape; among all the heroes I have met I never saw anything less heroically moulded. He stood about five feet nought and tipped the beam at seven stone nothing. He had a mild chinless face and his long beaky nose, round large spectacles, and trick of cocking his head sideways when conversing, gave him the appearance of an intelligent little dicky-bird.
Novelist Tom Sharpe used the expression as the basis of a 1975 comic novel about a gardener called Blott. In 1985, Blott on the Landscape became a successful BBC television series.
Blow the gaff
An old meaning of blow was to display something otherwise not easily seen, to expose, while gab has long referred to talk. Thus “blow the gab” referred to information being brought into the open. It has been suggested that an old meaning of gaff—a hook—came to signify a trick, a cheat, or even a device to help fake something (as, for instance, in corrupting a game of cards).
Either way, blowing the gab faded from use, and blowing the gaff became common usage and was well settled in by 1833 when it was used by Frederick Marryat in Peter Simple:
One of the French officers, after he was taken prisoner, axed (sic) me how we had managed to get the gun up there; but I wasn’t going to blow the gaff, so I told him, as a great secret, that we got it up with a kite, upon which he opened all his eyes, and crying “sacre bleu!” walked away, believing all I said was true . . .
Boredom
The expression “to be a bore” has been used in the sense of “to be tiresome or dull” since 1768. But until 1852 the word boredom did not exist in English.
The gap was filled by Charles Dickens in Bleak House, where we are told that Lady Dedlock:
. . . whose chronic malady of boredom has been sadly aggravated by Volumnia this evening, glances wearily towards the candlesticks and heaves a noiseless sigh.
Born-again Christian
Belief in undergoing a spiritual rather than an actual rebirth—being “born again”—and thus following the edict of Jesus (John 3:3 and Peter 1:23) had surfaced among some branches of Christianity by the 1960s. It was also sometimes referred to as being “born anew.”
But the term “born-again Christian” gained wide international coverage and comment during the lead-up to the 1976 American presidential election.
Watergate conspirator Charles Colson’s book Born Again had raised awareness of the term, and a reporter who’d read it asked the devout and clean-living presidential candidate Jimmy Carter if he believed in the concept of being born again.
The reply—“I am born again”—drew major attention: Colson’s book went int
o a two-million print run, and journalist Robert Scheer interviewed Jimmy Carter for Playboy. The interview (in the November 1976 issue) discussed with Carter how being born again affected his life. It was the only time a presidential candidate had been interviewed by Playboy, and more copies were sold than of any previous issue.
Carter, who went on to become President, laid no claim to having originated the term but his use of it brought it to much wider notice than had previously been the case.
(The) boys in the back room
During the nineteenth century in both Britain and America, the term “back room” had an association with card-playing, sometimes illegally, and thus carried a faint connotation of something clandestine. It is briefly mentioned in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895).
In 1978, in the New York Times Magazine, American humorist Sidney Perelman wrote an appreciation of the cartoonist Tad Dorgan who had died in 1929. Dorgan had been cartoonist on the New York Journal—and had a gift for witty captions—one of which, Perelman pointed out, was “See what the boys in the backroom will have.”
This intriguing line traveled beyond its New York audience in 1939 when it became the title of a song by Frank Loesser. In the movie Destry Rides Again, Marlene Dietrich sang Loesser’s song “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have,” and it became a memorable moment in movie history. However, it was never clear from the song just exactly who the boys in the back room were.
