Common Phrases

by Max Cryer

  With its magnetic teaming of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, the 1958 movie was received with critical acclaim and commercial success, and its title went into the vernacular.

  Publishers Signet Books reissued Faulkner’s original story, but now with the movie’s title. Following the movie came a TV series in 1965, and a remake TV series in 1985.

  Loose cannon

  In practice, a loose cannon was one inadequately lashed in place on the deck of a ship, which caused havoc by rolling dangerously and unpredictably. The first known image of an unlashed rolling cannon occurs (in French) in Victor Hugo’s 1874 novel Ninety Three. But within a year English writer Henry Kingsley in his book Number Seventeen (1875) narrowed the expression down into the form we now know it—but again in its literal sense:

  At once, of course, the ship was in the trough of the sea, a more fearfully dangerous engine of destruction than Mr.Victor Hugo’s celebrated loose cannon.

  It was another decade before the term became metaphorical—referring to an unpredictable or unreliable person or situation—when the Texas newspaper Galveston Daily News referred to the potential influence of the African-American vote as “a loose cannon.”

  Lounge lizard

  A “lounge lizard” is, or was, a well-dressed man of good appearance and sleek manners, very much at home in circumstances where there are also unattached women. His actual employment may be vague and his social motives suspect.

  The term was in use in America in the early 1920s. It was brought to public attention in 1923 when The Washington Post reported that an Anti-Flirt Club had been organized in Washington, DC. Its president was Miss Alice Reighly and the club was composed of “young women and girls who have been embarrassed by men in automobiles and on street corners.”

  On February 18, 1923 the Post published the code of guidance for members of the Anti-Flirt Club. Besides advising members against smiling at strangers, getting too close to elderly men taking a “fatherly” interest, and accepting rides from flirtatious motorists, the code included:

  Don’t fall for the slick, dandified cake eater—the unpolished gold of a real man is worth more than the gloss of a lounge lizard.

  American researcher Joe Manning ascertained that Miss Reighly died, unmarried, at eighty-one.

  Lunatic fringe

  President Theodore Roosevelt’s opinion of the Progressive Party in 1913:

  Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.

  (The) lunatics have taken over the asylum

  In the earliest days of cinema, neither the actors’ nor the director’s names were displayed or advertised. That anonymity gradually gave way to the star system, but there was still a feeling at the administration level that actors and directors were just staff.

  In 1918, three of the greatest stars—Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, together with director W.D. Griffith—founded a movie studio of their own to be called United Artists. When this news reached the head of Metro Pictures Richard Rowland, his reaction was: “The lunatics have taken over the asylum.”

  (Metro Pictures later teamed with Samuel Goldwyn and Louis Mayer, became MGM, and eventually bought United Artists.)

  British Prime Minister David Lloyd George was of a similar opinion, albeit on a grander scale: “The world is becoming like a lunatic asylum run by the lunatics.”

  Mad as a hatter

  Originally the expression is believed to have been “mad as an adder,” meaning “angry as a snake.” However, in the Canadian writer Thomas Haliburton’s Clockmaker serial (1836), the adder became a hatter and mad could mean loopy as well as angry.

  By then it was known that mercurous nitrate caused mental instability among hatters, who used the substance in brushing fur pelts. But contrary to perception, the character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) is not actually named the Mad Hatter.

  Make a hash of it

  Most uses of the word hash derive from the French “hacher”—to cut up (e.g., the # key, which resembles “cross-hatching” as practised by draughtsmen). By 1662 in English it had come to mean chopped up foods. Samuel Pepys recorded:

  After oysters, I had at first course, a hash of rabbits, a lamb, and a rare chine [backbone] of beef.

  (This was followed by a roasted fowl, a tart, then fruit and cheese. Pepys observed, “My dinner was noble and enough.”)

  By association with chopping and mixing, hash came to refer to any job or project which has collapsed into mess and disorganization.

  Make haste slowly

  When Emperor Augustus ruled Rome, from 27 BC, one of his favorite maxims was “Festina lente” (make haste slowly). The term first came into English through Geoffrey Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde (c.1385):

  He hasteth wel that wisly kan [knows how to] abyde.

  Making a mountain out of a molehill

  The Greek satirist Lucian (AD 120–200) in his work Ode to a Fly reflects on the concept of magnifying a small problem out of all proportion to its actual size. Other languages have their own versions: To make an elephant (or a stallion) out of a mosquito, to make a camel out of a flea, or to make an ox out of a fly.

  Thomas Becon was chaplain to Archbishop Cranmer, and around 1563 his “Catechism” brought the matter into English:

  They make of a fly an elephant and of a mole-hill a mountain; making such a stir in the house as though heaven and earth should go together.

  Male bonding

  The concept may have existed ever since the invention of cricket, football or bar-rooms. But in his book Men in Groups (1969) American anthropologist Lionel Tiger analyzed the particular way in which men befriend each other, establish camaraderie, and share activities and time together, leading to a feeling of mutual comfort.

  The phrase he created—male bonding—went into common use almost immediately.

  Many happy returns

  In 1776, Miss Hester Mundy married Sir Roger Newdigate. The novelist George Eliot lived nearby, and the character of the aristocratic lady in Eliot’s Mr Gilfil’s Love Story is modeled on George Eliot’s acquaintanceship with Hester, Lady Newdigate. When Hester died, she was commemorated by a beautiful white marble urn that still stands in Harefield Church.

  Lady Newdigate’s other claim to fame is that she was the first person known to use the expression “Many happy returns.” In 1789 Hester was away from her home, and on Sir Roger’s birthday she wrote to him:

  I am just come from Church my dear love, and at the Altar have implored for Blessings on your head—and for many happy returns of this day . . .

  The same term appeared in another of her letters on their wedding anniversary, indicating an annual celebration for various notable occasions. But during the nineteenth century the application of the expression narrowed to birthdays alone.

  Marches to a different drum

  The contemporary usage is a condensed version of a thought from American writer Henry David Thoreau. As an exercise in selfreliance, he had spent two years living in a rustic cabin in the woods. His resultant work Walden; or, Life in the Woods was published in 1845 and admired as a work of philosophical nonfiction.

  Thoreau’s desire was to experiment with simple living and to focus on self-sufficiency.This period of self-imposed rural solitude was considered somewhat eccentric by his acquaintances, but in Chapter 18 he outlined a relevant point of view:

  If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

  The sentiment became widely quoted, and over time was paraphrased and contracted into various shorter versions, though the basic image remained the same.

  (The) medium is the message

  Although there are conflicting reports as to when he actually originated the term, there is no doubt that Canadian commentator on communications Marshall McLuhan was creator of the phrase. One version has him voicing the idea at an academic cocktail party before inclu
ding it in a lecture in 1958.

  McLuhan was a Professor in the University of Toronto’s Centre for Culture and Technology, and his most famous expression reached print in his 1959-60 report Project on Understanding the New Media written for the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare. In a radio interview he summarized the concept as:

  The dominant fact in any art form is the medium being employed.

  In 1967, when his original remark had become known internationally, McLuhan (perhaps with tongue in cheek) co-authored The Medium Is the Massage with Quentin Fiore and Jerome Agel.

  Metrosexual

  In the early 1990s a concept of maleness emerged that did not confine itself to football, beer, and bawd.The new type of man was politely perceived as having a heightened aesthetic sense. In 1994, writing in the Independent, journalist Mark Simpson in his article “Here Come the Mirror Men” invented a term to describe this new development:

  Metrosexual man, the single young man with a high disposable income, living or working in the city (because that’s where all the best shops are), is perhaps the most promising consumer market of the decade. In the Eighties he was only to be found inside fashion magazines such as GQ, in television advertisements for Levi’s jeans or in gay bars. In the Nineties, he’s everywhere and he’s going shopping . . . A metrosexual is a clotheshorse wrapped around a dandy fused with a narcissist. Like soccer star David Beckham, who has been known to paint his fingernails.

  Mark Simpson’s word survives as the first description of the quiet social phenomenon now known as the metrosexual.

  Middle Earth

  From 1936 on, J.R.R. Tolkien certainly made the term famous, and he invented the setting, the language, the characters, and the stories. But the name had been around a long time before that.The term middle earth dates back to ancient Scandinavian mythology, perceived of as a mystic place somewhere between heaven and hell.

  By the eighth century, an English version of the name existed—middangeard—and is mentioned in one of the oldest pieces of English writing, Beowulf, a work with which Tolkien as a professor of Anglo-Saxon studies was very familiar.

  Shakespeare, too, mentions it in The Merry Wives of Windsor when someone speaking of Falstaff says, “Smell a man of middleearth,” implying that it was not at that time seen as a very desirable place.

  So although the name already had an impressive pedigree, it was Tolkien who gave it a whole new life in the popular imagination.

  Midnight cowboy

  The term “midnight cowboy” has no distinct definition, but various strong if ill-defined connotations of shady sex. Real cowboys ride by day; midnight cowboys “ride” late at night, probably requiring payment, and perhaps “on top.”

  While watching rehearsals of his own play A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948, Tennessee Williams saw Marlon Brando playing Stanley Kowalski. Brando biographer Darwin Porter reports that Williams described Brando as an “earthy proletarian male,” and a “regular midnight cowboy.”

  Williams’ friend James Leo Herlihy liked the latter phrase, remembered it and later used it as the title of his 1965 novel, which became an Oscar-winning film (1969).

  (The) Mile-High Club

  An experienced daredevil American aviator, Lawrence Sperry, invented an early prototype of the autopilot (his father was coinventor of the gyro-compass). In 1916, Lawrence Sperry was giving flying lessons to a Mrs. Waldo Polk. They were flying together in a biplane over the district of Babylon near New York when Sperry apparently decided to give the newly invented autopilot a rather stringent test. Mrs. Polk agreed, and Sperry set the plane onto auto before abandoning the controls in favor of less mechanical activities.

  Something went wrong and the small plane crashed into a bay below (Sperry later mentioned having bumped a lever with a knee when his hands were busy elsewhere). Duck hunters rescued the two passengers—both naked. The shock of crash-landing, they explained, had shaken their clothes off, which some newspapers obligingly reported (though perhaps with tongue in cheek).

  One paper was less coy. Rhiannon Guy’s book Travellers’ Companion recounts that the headline in the New York Daily Mirror read:

  Aerial Petting—Ends in Wetting.

  Lawrence Sperry and Mrs. Polk did not create the term “Mile-High Club,” and few would have had the opportunity to do so before 1916. But it’s fair to say that their widely publicized amorous pleasures were an inspiration to their adventurous imitators, through whose highjinks (literally) the name evolved.

  Mince your words

  Usually expressed as not mincing your words. It is commonly acknowledged that less tender cuts of meat can only be made more palatable if they are finely minced. Matters that demand honesty but have not been couched in gentler terms could be compared to meat which hasn’t been minced.

  This analogy between cheap meat and blunt words was not lost on the Rt. Reverend Joseph Hall, Bishop of Norwich, the first known user of the mince metaphor. In 1649, when referring to messages from God in his Resolutions and Decisions of Divers Practicall cases of Conscience, he wrote that:

  It is not for an herald of heaven to be out of countenance, or to mince aught.

  (The) moment of truth

  A Spanish term—hora de la verdad—used in bullfighting. In theory it refers to the decisive moment in the battle in which the fate of the bull and the fighter is determined: who will win and who will die?

  (This is, of course, illusory since the bull always dies, either in the fight, or afterward because he killed the matador.)

  The term came into English in 1932 in Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon.

  Monarch of all I survey

  The character of Robinson Crusoe (inspired by the real-life adventures of Alexander Selkirk) was written about in prose by Daniel Defoe in 1718.

  William Cowper followed in 1782 with “Verses Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk” (1782), which began with the lines:

  I am monarch of all I survey,

  My right there is none to dispute . . .

  Mondegreen

  Lyrics have been misheard as long as there have been songs. There was the child puzzled by a hymn about “Gladly, the Cross-eyed Bear,” or the people who sang “My Body Lies Over the Ocean” and followed it up with “God Rest Ye Married Gentlemen.”

  Until 1954 this phenomenon didn’t have a name. Then writer Sylvia Wright confessed in Harper’s Magazine that for years she had felt sorry for the bonny Earl of Moray’s wife, whenever she heard the song that told how:

  They hae slain the Early of Moray, and Lady Mondegreen.

  A kind friend eventually explained that the entire misfortune was solely the Earl’s—they laid him on the green.

  Ms Wright’s article on the subject released a tide of recognition in a public who had experienced precisely the same confusion with other songs. Some had been convinced that Rudolph was teased by a female fellow-worker: “Olive, the other reindeer, used to laugh and call him names.” Others that Bob Dylan was singing “The ants are my friends, they’re blowing in the wind,” or that the Beatles were saying “She’s got a chicken to ride.” And that well-known bridge was not over “troubled Walter” after all, but “troubled water.”

  And so the word mondegreen settled firmly into the language (in academic terms, a mondegreen is closely related to a homonym, where two different words are spoken with much the same sound).

  Money makes the world go around

  This feels as if it should date back to early historical proverbs and the first urban mercantile societies. Indeed, a saying that was current in 1754, “Money governs the world,” comes close. But the more flowing version with which we are familiar arose only in 1972. Christopher Isherwood’s stories in Goodbye to Berlin had become the basis of John Van Druten’s play I Am a Camera, which then metamorphosed into the New York musical Cabaret in 1966.

  The show, starring Jill Haworth, Joel Grey, and Lotte Lenya, was extremely successful and a movie version wa
s planned. For movie purposes, writers John Kander and Fred Ebb deleted some songs from the stage version, and created some new ones, especially designed for a movie-style delivery.

  The song “Money Makes the World Go Around” was a dazzling duet between Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey. It made a considerable impact in the movie, and also put a new phrase into common usage.

  Money talks

  The power of money to change, improve, or smooth a difficult situation has been known since time immemorial. A selection of sayings exist to reminds us, from Horace’s “All things are obedient to money” (c. 30 BC) to Giovanni Torriano’s “Man prates but gold speaks” (1666) and “Money speaks in a language all nations understand” (1682).

  In 1903 the Saturday Evening Post joked that if money did speak, it was usually saying “Goodbye.”

  But the neat, abbreviated version now in use came first from P.G. Wodehouse in Something New (1915). An impoverished young woman named Joan is told by her rich friend Aline that Aline’s father has lost an ancient Egyptian scarab and is distraught. To Joan a scarab seems an ugly little geegaw to get upset about, until Aline remarks that her dad would give $5000 to anyone who could find it for him.