Common Phrases
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(In later years many doubted that Crockett’s narratives were in fact his own work, and the assistance of ghost writer Richard Penn was revealed. This didn’t alter the fact that the term chicken feed first appeared under Crockett’s name.)
(A) chicken in every pot
Born in France in 1553, the Duke of Bourbon’s son was four places away from the French throne. Royal deaths moved him up the list to become King of Navarre and then Henry IV of France in 1589. A serious king, he supported agricultural development, had roads built, created more trade opportunities, and fostered the prosperity of all citizens. His concern for the welfare of the general populace made him one of France’s most popular monarchs. Historians report that his egalitarian attitude was summed up in his famous pronouncement in support of the working classes:
I want no peasant in my realm to be so poor that he not have a hen in his pot every Sunday (Je veux qu’il n’y ait si pauvre paysan en mon royaume qu’il n’ait tous les dimanches sa poule au pot).
King Henry’s egalitarian wish became widely quoted beyond France and, in later centuries, was appropriated by politicians elsewhere.
Chickens come home to roost
Because it is an observation of a natural happening, this fact has been universally noted and sometimes written about. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in The Parson’s Tale (c. 1390) of birds and nests:
Such cursing deprives a man of the Kingdom of God, as says Saint Paul. And oftentimes such cursing returns again upon the head of him that curses, like a bird that returns again to its own nest.
(And ofte tyme swich cursynge wrongfully retorneth agayn to hym that curseth, as a bryd that retorneth agayn to his owene nest.)
The neater version came from British historian, linguist, and poet Robert Southey as an inscription on the title page of his lengthy poem about the adventures of a Hindu rajah, “The Curse of Kehama” (1810):
Curses are like young chickens, they always come home to roost.
(A) chip off the old block
Fairly obviously, a chip of wood would retain the coloring, grain, texture, and even the smell of the parent block from which it had been chipped. The similarity between fathers and sons and chips off blocks had been noticed and commented on for centuries. And as a variation on the theme, the Greek Idylls of Theocritus in 300 BC mention a “chip -’o- the flint.”
The image appeared in English in 1621 when a sermon from Bishop Sanderson of Lincoln announced:
Am not I a child of the same Adam ... a chip of the same block, with him?
The expression has been with us ever since. It was used on one memorable occasion in 1781 in the British House of Commons when the Irish statesman and author Edmund Burke, after hearing Pitt the Younger’s maiden speech, opined that young Pitt was “not merely a chip off the old block, but the old block itself.”
Cleavage (formerly décolletage)
The word cleavage is a worry—it can mean rending things into separate parts and also exactly the opposite when referring to things which cling together. In terms of low-cut necklines, it somehow covers both possibilities: garments cut to show objects that are actually separate but also clinging together.
The Motion Picture Production Code was set up by Will Hays in 1930 to maintain decency in movies and was known as “the Hays code.” Nudity was, of course, out of the question in movies, but décolletage must have remained modest enough to escape attention until 1945.
In that year, a British movie called The Wicked Lady starred two very glamorous actresses—Margaret Lockwood and Patricia Roc—as Restoration-period beauties. The two women were costumed in a style based on easily accessible contemporary depictions of Restoration fashion, including low-cut necklines: Too low for the Hollywood censors. Joseph I. Breen, the administrator of the Hays code, considered the necklines contravened standards of decency and invoked the previously unknown word “cleavage,” defined as “the shadowed depression dividing an actress’s bosom into two distinct sections.”
The movie’s makers were informed that the movie could not be screened to American audiences because the stars were showing more cleavage than Mr. Breen would allow. So the leading ladies were brought back to re-film several critical scenes, no doubt at great expense.
In 1946 Time magazine published a detailed account of the situation, bringing the word cleavage into public scrutiny for the first time (“Cleavage and the Code,” August 1946). Almost overnight, the world décolletage vanished and cleavage became the norm.
Close encounters of the third kind
The well-known movie title was based on a genuine classification. Professor of Astronomy at Northwestern University in Illinois J. Allen Hynek was consultant to the United States Air Force for “ufology”—the official study of unidentified flying objects.
When an alien object had been sighted, Hynek was called upon to identify whether or not it was actually an astronomical body. His 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry introduced for the first time the concept of close encounters with aliens. These were graded as:
(1) Close Encounters of the First Kind—witnessing an unexplained object in the air, no more than 200 yards from a witness.
(2) Close Encounters of the Second Kind—in which the UFO leaves some kind of evidence of its visit remaining.
(3) Close Encounters of the Third Kind—in which any occupants of the flying object can actually be seen.
Cold feet
In the face of major uncertainty or threat, it is common to claim cold feet. There is evidence that an analogous concept existed in old Italy, and British playwright Ben Jonson uses a similar expression in Volpone (1607), but referring there to being short of money.
The first known depiction of coldness in the feet in conjunction with losing one’s nerve came in 1862 from the German writer Fritz Reuter. He depicted a card-playing scenario in which one player is at a high point, consistently winning, but thinks nervously that his luck cannot last, so decides to leave the table. His offered explanation is that his feet are cold and he must excuse himself to find some way of warming them.
The other players interpret his explanation of cold feet as actually referring to his wavering courage . . . and so has everyone else since.
(The) cold shoulder
There has been little change in the way this expression has been used since it first appeared in print. Sir Walter Scott’s 1816 novel The Antiquary offered the term publicly for the first time, amid a tangle of lost nobility, supposed illegitimacy, rescues, drownings, and haughty aristocracy.
The character of Elspeth Cheyne reports to Lord William on the behavior of his mother, Countess Glenallen:
Ye may mind that the Countess’s dislike didna gang farther at first than just showing o’ the cauld shouther—at least it wasna seen farther.
The term may possibly have been known before 1816, but Scott’s use of it here—indicating disdainful and aloof body language—cropped up again in his later writings and then spread very quickly into wider use (Dickens, Galsworthy, the Brontë sisters, Louisa May Alcott, Trollope, and Mark Twain). It remains in the vernacular, occasionally extending to more metaphorical references, such as a bank giving a cold shoulder to an application for a loan.
Cold turkey
The expression’s origin is not clear. It may have grown out of the fact that cold, cooked turkey is something which can be served immediately, without further preparation. From there it acquired the meaning of simply stopping a dangerous habit without any slow lead-up. It may also refer to the pinched appearance that apparently characterizes the skin of someone in serious drug withdrawal trauma—something like the skin of a turkey.
Whatever its origin, for some time the expression was known only among those to whom it was relevant. But in 1949 a novel was published which led to the term gaining a much wider international audience. Nelson Algren’s brilliantly written dark story of drugs and crime, The Man with the Golden Arm, set in the Chicago underworld, was a critical success and won th
e National Book Award in 1950.
The first time “cold turkey” is mentioned in the story, the character known as Doc Dominowski lays down the law:
I’m talkin’ cold turkey to you now.
Later in the story, more is made of the principal character, Frankie Machine, undergoing a gruelling cold-turkey withdrawal.
Five years later, the movie was a sensation. It took liberties with the story and softened the original book a good deal, but its focus on illegal drugs was sufficiently scandalous that a Production Code Seal of Approval was withheld.
Frankie Machine’s drug-taking and spectacular withdrawal became the most talked-about feature of the movie. Screenwriters Walter Newman and Lewis Meltzer added an extra line to Frankie Machine’s horrified reaction when he was confronted with the need to clear himself of his drug habit:
You mean just stop? Cold turkey? You don’t understand! The pain . . .
The movie’s most harrowing scene showed the drug-addled man locked in a dark room for three days, tossing, turning, and sweating in the agonising procedure of self-exorcism. The searing cinematic images had more impact than the book.
The Motion Picture Association of America refused to certify The Man with the Golden Arm because it showed drug addiction. Nevertheless, the movie earned three Academy Award nominations, including one for Frank Sinatra (as Frankie Machine) for best actor in a leading role. Through Nelson Algren and the subsequent screenwriters, even the most conservative of the world’s cinema-goers were introduced to the term “cold turkey.”
Cold war
Now defined by Collins English Dictionary as “a state of political hostility and military tension between two countries or power blocs involving propaganda, subversion, threats, economic sanctions, and other measures short of open warfare.”
The term “cold war” originated with George Orwell in a 1945 Tribune article, “You and the Atom Bomb.” But its first publicly spoken airing as a description of post-World War II tensions between the United States and the USSR came in April 1947, when American politician Bernard Baruch used it in a speech to the South Carolina Legislature. Mr. Baruch acknowledged that the term had been provided by his speechwriter Herbert Swope, who had been editor of the New York World and had used the term in private beforehand.
Comes to the crunch
In 1939 Sir Winston Churchill introduced the idea of the crunch as a noun and a metaphor when he referred to political troubles in Spain depending “upon the general adjustment or outcome of the European crunch.”
The image caught on and underwent a slight development with “comes to the crunch,” and with alliterations like “credit crunch” and substitute synonyms such as “pinch,” “clutch” and “squeeze.”
Comparisons are odious
To be fair, John Lydgate in his Debate between the Horse, the Sheep and the Goose (c.1440) first brought the matter to attention in English, but in a structural style not perpetuated:
Odyous of olde been comparisonis . . .
By 1583, the Elizabethan writer Robert Greene in Mamillia used the expression in a form closer to modern usage:
I will not make comparisons, because they be odious.
Conventional wisdom
The phrase dates from 1838, introduced by prominent New York lawyer Henry Whiting Warner in his Inquiry into the Moral and Religious Character of the American Government:
. . . facts and principles universally known and acknowledged among us; and it will be seen that we appeal in such a case, neither to the records of legislation, nor yet to the conventional wisdom of our forefathers.
The expression re-occurred at later intervals over more than one hundred years. Its widest international exposure came in 1958 when John Kenneth Galbraith used it in his book The Affluent Society.
Cooking the books
The OED has cooking as: “to prepare food for eating by the application of heat.” In this conventional sense, cooking changes something from its original condition into a state normally considered more desirable. The metaphorical usage—that information could be cooked in order to make it seem more desirable—must have occurred to Thomas, Viscount Wentworth in 1636 when he wrote:
The proof was once clear, however they have cook’d it since.
The use of cooked, referring to surreptitiously altered information, quickly became common parlance.
See also Creative accounting
(The) corridors of power
In 1956 British writer C.P. Snow created the term “corridors of power” in his book Homecomings. Sometime afterward a magazine article analyzing Snow’s work plucked the term from the book and made it the article’s headline.
When Snow’s subsequent novel, actually called Corridors of Power, was about to be released, memories of the previous magazine headline somehow caused a feeling to arise that Snow had borrowed an existing term. But as Snow explained in the new book’s preface:
The title of this novel seems to have passed into circulation during the time the book itself was being written. I have watched the phenomenon with mild consternation. The phrase (corridors of power) was first used, so far as I know, in Homecomings.
In other words, he was being accused of borrowing a term he had himself invented.
Couch potato
When television began to be popular in America, journalists started to refer to it by the cute name “boob tube” (whereas in Britain a boob tube was a tight knitted top worn by young women), and eventually some smart alec called a person who watched a lot of TV, a “boob tuber.” The Potato Museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico reports that Mr. Tom Iacino first made the connection between tuber and potato, and remarked that people watching too much TV were couch potatoes.
Illustrator Robert Armstrong introduced the term to a wider public when in 1976 he published an iconic cartoon that simply showed a large indolent potato lying on a couch watching a television set. Armstrong enlarged the term’s exposure by registering the name Couch Potato as a trademark for his lounging potato to appear on T-shirts, etc.
Several couch potato books followed: The Couch Potato Handbook; The Couch Potato Guide To Life (by Dr. Spudd); and The Couch Potato Cookbook. The term rapidly became a standard description of anyone watching too much TV.
Countdown 5-4-3-2-1
A 1928 novel by Thea von Harbou, Die Frau in Mond (The Woman in the Moon), was one of many early manifestations of fascination with the notion of traveling to the moon (even Dr. Dolittle travelled to the moon).Von Harbou’s novel entered another realm when it became the basis of an early German sci-fi movie. Variously known as Woman in the Moon, or Girl in the Moon, or By Rocket to the Moon, the 1929 German film classic had three screenwriters, headed by director Fritz Lang.
Created entirely from the imagination and using models, the rocket sequences were so convincing at the time that German authorities regarded the film as a possible leak of German rocket development and had the movie banned (one good copy survived). Another of its remarkable features was Lang’s treatment of the rocket launch—he is credited with inventing the reverse countdown.
Instead of the previously universal “1-2-3-Go,” his rocket was launched after “3-2-1-Go.” Fritz Lang’s idea was taken up in real life and has now become standard practice, not only for space mission launches but also for talent quests, raffle winners, or beauty contests—any situation where the tension of announcing a winner is enhanced by a reverse lead-up.
Count your blessings
The phrase has become familiar mainly because of Irving Berlin’s song “Count Your Blessings” (instead of sheep) from the movie White Christmas (1954) and the recordings by Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, and Eddie Fisher.
But the line had first been heard in the hymn originally called “When Upon Life’s Billow” by Johnson Oatman Jr., published in 1897, but later known as “Count Your Blessings”—for obvious reasons:
Count your blessings, name them one by one,
Count your blessings, see what God hath d
one!
Count your blessings, name them one by one,
And it will surprise you what the Lord hath done.
Creative accounting
A development arising from the original seventeenth-century reference to information being “cooked.” Creative accounting refers to the presenting of financial information in such a way that it influences whoever peruses it toward a contrived conclusion and possibly hides some unwelcome facts. The term crept into being during the 1960s, but was given international prominence by Mel Brooks in his script for the movie The Producers (1968).
The accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) tells the Broadway producer:
Under the right circumstances a producer could make more money with a flop than he could with a hit ... If he was certain that the show would fail, a man could make a fortune . . . It’s simply a matter of creative accounting.
See also Cooking the books
Credibility gap
The difference between a statement of claim, and the reality that is perceived to exist. During the presidency of Lyndon Johnson the American involvement in Vietnam was presented by officialdom as limited. But the American public formed a strong and growing impression that the American involvement, far from being limited, was actually escalating.