by Max Cryer
(Memorably quoted by Mae West when a lifejacket was named after her:
“I’ve been in Who’s Who and I know what’s what, but this is the first time I’ve been in a dictionary.”)
(The) Lady with the Lamp
In November 1854, only a few months after the start of the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale arrived in the Constantinople district of Scutari with thirty-eight nurses. To begin with, the doctors were resistant to the women’s presence but they soon proved themselves invaluable.
Besides acting as head nurse, Florence also wrote letters home on behalf of injured soldiers, helped them with their pay and arranged for reading material. Eventually, she was treated with enormous respect. She was unswerving in her care of the wounded and often remained with them long after the rest of the hospital staff had gone to bed.
She was first connected with a lamp in a report from John Cameron Macdonald in The Times:
She is a ‘ministering angel’ without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor . . . she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.
The war ended in 1857 and Florence returned to England to considerable fame and a long campaign to upgrade the qualities of and respect for the nursing profession. By then several drawings of her had been published, showing her night-time tours holding a lamp.
That same year, American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem Santa Filomena was published in the Atlantic Monthly. St. Philomena is thought to have been a thirteen-year-old medieval Greek princess who on declining to marry the Emperor of Rome was tortured, saved by angels, and died a martyr. There is no connection at all between Florence Nightingale and Philomena, who in her thirteen troubled years was never known to have nursed soldiers. But in spite of Longfellow’s poem being named for Philomena, it was widely perceived as having been inspired by the reports of Florence Nightingale.
The wounded from the battle-plain,
In dreary hospitals of pain,
The cheerless corridors,
The cold and stony floors.
Lo! in that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.
The legend of the Lady with the Lamp was set for all time.
(Strangely, for one so associated with curing the sick, after her return to London from Turkey, Florence Nightingale went to bed and stayed there for fifty years!)
Lame duck
In 1761 the Earl of Orford, Horace Walpole, wrote to the British Envoy in Tuscany, Sir Horace Mann, saying:
How Scipio would have stared if he had been told that he must not demolish Carthage, as it would ruin several aldermen who had money in the Punic actions! Apropos – do you know what a Bull, a Bear and a Lame Duck are? Nay, nor I either—I am only certain they are neither animal nor fowl!
This indicated that the expressions, later famous in the financial sector, were being used at the time, even if Walpole didn’t understand them apart from recognizing a vague connection with people who had money invested.
The usage was clarified a decade later when David Garrick’s play Foote’s Maid of Bath made its debut (1771). In the Prologue, Garrick referred to financiers who frequented Exchange Alley (the Stock Exchange) and classified them as:
. . . gaming fools are doves, knaves are rooks, Change-Alley bankrupts waddle out lame ducks.
The term went into use referring to brokers who defaulted on debts, and remained in use to describe those with financial problems, but grew to include anyone deemed ineffectual. When the “lame duck” term traveled to America it assumed the feathers of politics and waddled into the arena of elected officials whose term of office was nearing an end.
(As) large as life (and twice as natural)
Pre-photography, portraits were painted, and while head and shoulders was the norm, the grand and the wealthy were depicted full length—and as large as life. Canadian historian, agriculturalist and humorist Thomas Haliburton in The Clockmaker (1837) extended the image and made a subtle put-down of it:
He marched up and down afore the street door like a peacock—as large as life and twice as natural!
More than sixty years later, Lewis Carroll picked up the idea and has the King’s messenger say it about Alice.
(The) last laugh
The person with the last laugh is the one who appeared initially to be failing in some way, but ultimately is proven correct and successful. The modern version is a variation on “Hee laugheth best that laugheth to the end,” found in The Christmas Prince (anon, 1607) and later in Vanburgh’s Country House (1715).
There is a version in German, “Wer zuletzt lacht, lacht am besten” (He who laughs last, laughs best), and a character of Sir Walter Scott’s (in Peveril of the Peak, 1822) refers to the old French proverb: “Rira bien, qui rira le dernier” (He laughs best who laughs last).
The abbreviated English version came into popular usage during 1937 as a result of songwriters George and Ira Gershwin and their amusing song “They All Laughed” with its refrain, ‘Who’s got the last laugh now?” Gershwin’s lyrics refer to historical figures whose theories were mocked (Christopher Columbus, Marconi, the Wright Brothers) but who eventually had the last laugh.
It was composed for the 1937 movie Shall We Dance and sung by Ginger Rogers, who was later joined by Fred Astaire for a spectacular dance routine built around the song. Astaire later sang the song himself many times, and subsequent recordings by Frank Sinatra, Chet Baker, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and André Previn helped the term achieve wider recognition.
Last, loneliest, loveliest
From Song of the Cities, in which Rudyard Kipling gave poetic impressions of his 1891 visits to Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong, Halifax, Quebec, Montreal, Victoria, Cape Town, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Hobart, finishing at Auckland:
Last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart—
On us, on us the unswerving season smiles,
Who wonder ’mid our fern why men depart
To seek the Happy Isles!
Laugh on the other side of one’s face
The basic idea (the reaction to unwelcome contrary news) has been around for several centuries, surfacing in Italian (Torriana) and French (Molière), usually as laugh “on the other side of one’s mouth.”
French author Alain-René Lesage used the mouth version in Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane in 1715 and that was how it arrived in English in the 1809 translation by Benjamin Malkin:
We were made to laugh on the other side of our mouth by an unforeseen circumstance.
By 1837 when Thomas Carlyle wrote his fictional Diamond Necklace (based on an incident concerning Marie Antoinette), he had moved from the mouth to the face:
Thou laughest there; by-and-by thou wilt laugh on the wrong side of thy face.
From there, the wrong side gradually became the other side.
(A) legend in his own lunchtime (or lunch hour)
In 1976 a book called Testkill was published in Britain, co-written by well-known cricket captain Ted Dexter, with an experienced sports editor called Clifford Makins, who was known among his colleagues for his bon vivant lifestyle and gravitation toward wine bars.
Reviewing the book in the Observer on June 20, 1976, journalist Christopher Wordsworth commented that Makins was “a legend in his own lunchtime.”
Wordsworth’s dig was clearly a play on “legend in one’s own lifetime,” first seen in Lytton Strachey’s description of Florence Nightingale in Eminent Victorians (1918):
She was a legend in her lifetime, and she knew it.
Custom and usage added the word “own” in later years, presumably for greater emphasis.
Let sleeping dogs lie
In the early 1300s the French were saying “N’esveillez pas lou chien qui dort” (Wake not the sleeping dog). It drifted toward Geoffrey Chaucer some years later
(Troilus and Criseyde, c.1374) and the English language was enriched with
It is nought good a slepyng hound to wake.
Over centuries, the advice gradually shifted its focus from negative to positive, and by 1824 in Redgauntlet Sir Walter Scott phrased it in the familiar modern form. The character of Wandering Willie (who likes to whistle Corelli sonata melodies) is asked whether the laird has ever been a soldier. He replies:
I’se warrant him a soger. But take my advice and speer as little about him as he does about you. Best to let sleeping dogs lie.
Let them eat cake
The line is referred to as an already familiar expression in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions written between 1766 and 1770. He wrote “brioche,” which is usually a bun-shaped, slightly sweet, soft pastry, though this has been interpreted in English as “cake.”
The expression was known long before Rousseau’s Confessions—and he had written that particular section before Marie Antoinette even arrived in France. After Rousseau, other people quoted the line and it became a common saying.
Marie Antoinette could quite possibly have heard the phrase after she’d arrived in France (1770), and there is doubt that she ever said it. But if she did, she was quoting Rousseau.
(A) license to print money
By 1955 television in Britain was starting to develop from being a service into a business. In 1957 a commercial television company opened in Scotland, with Roy Thomson (later Lord) as CEO. In Roy Thomson of Fleet Street biographer Russell Braddon highlighted Thomson’s description of a commercial television network as “a license to print money.”
The term quickly went into the vernacular referring to any organization making a sure profit.
(A) lick and a promise
Familiar enough as a reference to doing something in a hurry and fairly inadequately, but with the intention of completing the job later.The meaning hasn’t changed since the 1812 Critical Review of the Annals of Literature makes a snide remark about nurses delivering only “a lick and a promise” when feeding babies.
But in The Modern Cook (1845), Elizabeth Acton went out on a limb and nailed the expression down for all future use when she advised her readers:
You ought not to do anything by halves. What you do, do well. If you clean, clean thoroughly, having nothing to do with the “slut’s wipe,” and the “lick and a promise.”
Lie back and think of England
The line and its various versions (“close your eyes and ... ” or “ . . . and think of the Empire”) have absolutely no verifiable provenance. The remark was purportedly advice given by Lady Hillingdon to young women apprehensive about sexual activity. The source is said to be her 1912 diary.
But there is absolutely no proof (and even the name varies, from Hillingdon to Hillingham). There was a genuine baroness, Lady Hillingdon (1857–1940), but neither her diary nor any other statement of advice from her on sexual matters has ever been seen.
Other sources claim that Mrs. Stanley Baldwin thought “of the Empire,” but nobody knows exactly who first said what, or when, but it has become too popular an expression to be laid aside for lack of provenance.
Life begins at forty
In 1932 American psychologist and writer Walter B. Pitkin created the phrase as the title of his book on the subject.
Pitkin opined that in previous eras the American male was worn out at forty. From seventeen to twenty-four were the years of apprenticeship to social life.Then from twenty-four to forty the responsibilities of employment, home and family left no energy for anything else in the years following. Pitkin was himself fifty-four when he wrote the book, and pointed out that in view of new standards of living, better technology, and increased opportunities for leisure, life after forty could become enjoyable, productive, profitable, and exciting.
Life Begins at Forty was the bestselling nonfiction book in America for 1933, and its title became a byword for a new, more positive attitude to aging.
In successive decades, Pitkin’s argument that improved living conditions would extend our active years proved to be true, and the forty of his original estimate was occasionally informally upped to fifty, or even sixty.
(Pitkin’s expression became extremely popular as the title of a song Sophie Tucker recorded in 1936 when she was actually fiftytwo (Parlophone F-621), and sang for the next twenty years.)
Like a bear with a sore head
The afflicted bear has at times been called “cross” or just “sulky,” but maritime novelist Captain Frederick Marryat in Kings Own (1830) settled for:
As savage as a bear with a sore head.
Like a house on fire
Indicating great speed or the rapid progress of intimate understanding, the term first appeared in English in the book A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty by Washington Irving (as Diedrich Knickerbocker) in 1809, when writing of a nation or a community:
In proportion does it rise in grandeur—and even when sinking under calamity, makes, like a house on fire, a more glorious display than ever it did in the fairest period of its prosperity.
Like it or lump it
In earlier times the word lump carried a meaning of sulking, possibly as a result of having to swallow something disagreeable. Although known beforehand, the expression “like it or lump it” was first set before a wide audience by Bernard Blackmantle in The Punster’s Pocket Book (1826).
The term appears here as an awful pun in a little dialogue between a hostess and an unfavored guest, who is handed an unsweetened cup of tea. The guest explains that this is not to her taste, upon which she is handed a bowl of sugar cubes with the line:
Well, ma’am, if you do not like it, you may lump it.
American author John Neal in Down Easters (1833) used the term in a more straightforward way:
Bear it like a man Mr. Potipher . . . git naite-ralized right away, and let ’em lump it if they don’t like it, an’ squirm their hides off; that’s none o’ your look out is it?
Little grey cells
The term “grey matter” has long been found in genuine medical writings, referring to the cortex of the brain—the part responsible for processing information.The reason why it is referred to as grey matter even in a clinical context is quite simple—when viewed it does literally look grey.
The scientific name for grey matter is cinera, and it is made up of neutrons—otherwise known as cells.
In 1920 Agatha Christie invented a Belgian detective named Hercule Poirot, whose command of English, though informative, was occasionally slightly eccentric. Bypassing cinera, or neutrons, or even grey matter, M. Poirot frequently acknowledged that his “little grey cells” were what led him to conclude who had done the murder.
Agatha Christie’s books have sold over two billion copies, of which thirty-nine titles and fifty-one short stories featured Poirot, plus nine movies, five TV specials, and two television series. One result has been that Dame Agatha single-handedly caused the term grey matter to be virtually sidelined in popular usage for the brain, while the phrase little grey cells has become the more commonly used term for intelligence, reasoning, and the processing of information.
Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse
The expression was first seen in 1947 in the novel Knock on Any Door by American writer Willard Motley, about a law-breaker whose life’s end was inevitable. The novel became a movie of the same name in 1949, and actor John Derek spoke the line:
Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse.
In 1958 the line itself became the title of another movie. And in later years Willard Motley’s image was applied to reality, summing up in macabre fashion the tragic lives and early deaths of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Kurt Cobain, Marc Bolan, Princess Diana, Janis Joplin, James Morrison, River Phoenix, Buddy Holly, Freddie Mercury, and Heath Ledger.
Lock, stock, and barrel
Meaning “everything,” and referring to the sum
of parts of a musket, the expression surfaced in 1838 when John Gibson Lockhart’s Life of Sir Walter Scott included a letter of Scott’s written in 1817, using the phrase:
Like the High-landman’s gun she wants stock, lock and barrel to put her into repair.
Over time, the lock and the stock became reversed.
Lock the stable (or barn) door after the horse is stolen (or has bolted)
The basic idea is found in Asinaria by Plautus (c. 200 BC):
Ne post tempus praedae praesidium parem.
In English, the concept arrived with John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (1390):
Whan the grete Stiede Is stole, thanne he taketh hiede, And makth the stable dore fast.
Over time the horse was variously stolen, lost or simply broke loose, but eventually settled into having bolted.
Long hot summer
Some of the elements in William Faulkner’s 1940 book The Hamlet became the basis of a famous movie, but the movie’s simple evocative title was the result of a small alteration of Faulkner’s original.The movie rights for The Hamlet were bought in 1955 and it was quickly decided that its title had to change to avoid confusion with the other Hamlet. Screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank took one section of Faulkner’s book, entitled “The Long Summer,” and added the word hot.
