Common Phrases

by Max Cryer

  The whole story took on a different complexion for Joan. Money talks. A man who shouts that he will give five thousand for a thing may very well mean he will give five hundred—and Joan’s finances were perpetually in a condition which makes five hundred dollars a sum to be grasped at.

  (The) moral majority

  Initially this was a formal organization that arose in America as a result of some controversy within an earlier organization called Christian Voice. In 1979 Evangelist pastor Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, made up of united Christian political action committees. Through the 1980s the organization became a powerful political lobby group for Christians in the U.S.

  Towards 1989 support for the Moral Majority began to diminish, partly because its adherents felt the nation was in better moral health than during the previous decade. Falwell announced, “Our goal has been achieved.”

  But the name remained in use as a vague reference to that sector of the population that believed morality was on their side, when disagreeing with another part of the population whose morality they felt to be in question.

  More bang for your buck

  Originally the “bang” was meant quite literally. In 1954 a defense policy of “massive retaliation” was presented to the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, relying on nuclear deterrents. Newsweek quoted Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson referring to the “plutonium explosion” policy as: “A bigger bang for a buck.” Later usage reduced the alliteration and substituted the word “more,” besides gradually eliminating the nuclear connotation. In modern usage it means more value for your money.

  Motel

  The word dates back to 1925 when travel by private car was burgeoning in California. In the pleasant town of San Luis Obispo, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, architect Arthur Heineman designed and had built a hostelry which was deliberately planned to attract motorists—it had garages adjoining the accommodation. Mr. Heineman named it the Milestone, and added the word Mo-Tel.

  Since this word was Heineman’s own invention, it generated some confusion among people anxious to report that the “hotel” had misspelled its sign. But the abbreviation of “motor hotel” caught on, eventually contracting to motel and becoming an internationally common word.

  The building in San Luis Obispo carries a plaque advising (quite correctly) that it is the world’s first motel.

  Movers and shakers

  Often used in reference to rebels, financial wizards, and leaders in business and politics to describe those who are highly influential in their field, the breakers of perceived and actual barriers. But the original seems to suggest that the phrase’s creator meant quite the opposite.

  William (Arthur Edgar) O’Shaughnessy was a British poet, born in London in 1844 to Irish parents. (A relative, surgeon Sir William Brooke O’Shaughnessy, introduced cannabis to Western medicine and the telegraph to India). Young William worked at the British Museum, eventually specializing in ichthyology (the study of fishes) though he was a devotee of literature and writing. Several volumes of his poetry were published and his volume Music and Moonlight (1874) contains the “Ode,” several lines of which have become familiar—albeit slightly out of context.

  We are the music-makers,

  We are the dreamers of dreams,

  Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

  And sitting by desolate streams;

  World-losers and world-forsakers,

  On whom the pale moon gleams:

  Yet we are the movers and shakers

  Of the world for ever, it seems.

  The Ode was set to music by Sir Edward Elgar in 1912 and its first two lines are spoken by Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

  Ms.

  Miss, Mrs. and Ms. have a common ancestor: they are all versions of the word mistress (from Old French maistresse, the feminine of maistre). Mistress was used to address all women, but it evolved into two forms designating a woman’s marital status: Mrs. for a married woman; Miss for an unmarried one.

  A further variation in parts of America was Miz for women, married and unmarried, both in fiction (Miz Scarlett in Gone With the Wind) and in fact (during the 1970s President Jimmy Carter’s mother was universally known as Miz Lillian). Meanwhile, mistress had acquired the meaning of a woman who has an ongoing extramarital sexual relationship with a man.

  By the late 1940s some women were beginning to agitate for a prefix that didn’t identify their marital status. As early as 1949 there had been occasional low-profile mention of Ms. as a possible nondiscriminatory courtesy prefix for all women, but it did not have a smooth passage into everyday language.The American Business Writing Association and also the National Office Management Association had viewed the term with favor, but the general public ignored it.

  A turning point came in 1961. Sheila Michaels was a member of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), and like other feminists was seeking an honorific that didn’t disclose her private status. One day a newspaper dropped into her mailbox and she noticed what seemed to be a misprint in the address: Ms. She had never seen it before, but decided that this was what she sought.

  There was still difficulty promoting the idea, but in a later radio interview discussing feminism, Michaels suggested that Ms. be adopted, and pronounced as she had heard Miz in her home state of Missouri. A friend of Gloria Steinem’s heard the interview, and in 1971 suggested it to Ms. Steinem as the name for a new magazine about to be launched. The first issue of Ms. Magazine sold 300,000 copies in one week, and the “new” honorific started to take hold.

  But there were still some roadblocks: the New York Times initially held out and would not publish the new word, in 1984 dismissing Ms. as “business-letter coinage too contrived for news writing.” But in 1986 it succumbed.

  Muck-raking

  Long before the age of tabloid sensationalism or election campaign dirty tricks, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was published in 1678. In it we are shown:

  . . . a Man that could look no way but downwards, with a Muck-rake in his hand.

  And we are told that he never looked up, but continued to rake the filth on the floor “ . . . and his Muck-rake doth shew his carnal mind.”

  Mumbo jumbo

  British writer Francis Moore introduced the term to the English language in 1738. In his book Inland Parts of Africa, Moore reported on a custom in villages where men had several wives. If dissension arose between wife and husband, or among the wives, the weird and mysterious figure of Mumbo Jumbo would appear out of the jungle at night, shriek, curse, and dance outside the wives’ sleeping quarters, and having announced a decision on their behaviour, would even administer a whipping to the offender.

  Mumbo Jumbo was twice as tall as a man, dressed outlandishly in a costume of bark and wisps of bushes. It was clear to Francis Moore that the African village women were in awe and terror of a visit from Mumbo Jumbo. The fact that the man inside the costume was one of their own neighbors (or even their own husband) seemed to escape them—and made the story seem rather unlikely.

  But Moore’s report was completely backed up by the later Scottish travel writer, called (appropriately perhaps) Mungo Park, whose 1795 Travels in the Interior of Africa reported the same phenomenon—women in African villages were kept in subjection by the fear of Mumbo Jumbo.

  English readers began to associate the term mumbo jumbo with arcane rituals and the puzzling language associated with them. Eventually this led to the term being used to describe any language causing bewilderment, confusion, or boredom.

  My better half

  In the Odes of the Roman poet Horace (23 BC), his reference to a “better half” meant—in the idiom of the time—a good friend of either gender (“animae dimidium meae,” 1 Odes iii. 8.), in this case his friend Virgil. When the term went into English, the passage of time effected a change in reference so that the “other half” gradually came to mean a spouse, of either gender.

  It first surfac
es with this meaning during the Elizabethan age, when Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia was published in 1590.The fair Parthenia reports of her dying husband, the knight Argalus:

  . . . it seemed a little cheerful blood came up to his cheeks, like a burning coal, almost dead, if some breath a little revive it: and forcing up, the best he could, his feeble voice, “My dear, my dear, my better half,” said he, “I find that I must now leave thee ...”

  My heart was in my mouth

  The ancient Roman work Satyricon (c. AD 66) is also known as A Recital of Lecherous Happenings, and in P.G. Walsh’s translation the character of Niceros tells of watching a man in a graveyard take all his clothes off and urinate around them before turning into a wolf. Niceros’s reaction was: “Mihi animam in naso esse” (The life spirit rose into my nose), rendered in English as, “My heart was in my mouth.”

  The more familiar version first appeared in English in a different context. In 1548 Nicholas Udall (known as “the flogging headmaster”) completed the section he was in charge of translating from Ersamus’s Paraphrase of the New Testament. Udall’s translation included:

  Hauyng their herte at their verai mouth for feare, they did not belieue that it was Iesus.

  (Udall was light-footed enough to compose songs for the coronation of Queen Anne Boleyn, be engaged by Queen Catherine Parr to do translations, and yet avoid being burned by Queen Mary Tudor, even though he was a Protestant and she burned several hundred of them.)

  My husband and I

  In 1953 Queen Elizabeth II made her second Christmas broadcast, this time from New Zealand. She explained to listeners: “My husband and I left London a month ago,” a perfectly harmless remark, even abiding by normal protocols in placing herself after the other person mentioned. But for some unknown reason the phrase “my husband and I” became regarded as faintly comic, though Her Majesty continued to use it for the next fourteen years before making a subtle change to “Prince Philip and I.”

  She returned to the phrase with gentle irony in 1972, at a banquet in the London Guildhall for the couple’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Her speech began:

  I think that everybody really will concede that on this, of all days, I should begin my speech with the words “my husband and I.”

  My lips are sealed

  The expression first saw the light in 1909 in Mike and Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse when Psmith promises not to reveal that Mike is about to play a cricket match.

  Wodehouse used the term several times over the next three decades, most memorably in Spring Fever where Lord Shortlands confides to Mike Cardinal that he wants to marry his cook. His lordship’s daughter Lady Teresa is horrified and begs Mike Cardinal not to spread it about. Mike Cardinal assures her:

  My lips are sealed. Clams take my correspondence course.

  (In December 1935, British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin—who was perhaps a fan of Wodehouse—reversed the term in a speech to Parliament. Unwilling to comment on a crisis concerning Abyssinia, he said: “I have seldom spoken with greater regret, for my lips are not yet unsealed.” But in general usage the Wodehouse version is preferred.)

  Naff off

  There is no decisive origin of the term, but between 1973 and 1977 it became familiar to British viewers in the television series Porridge, the word “naff” being deliberately scripted (by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais) in place of the more obvious swear words which would have been the norm in the prison context.

  In April 1982 the context shifted to the opposite end of the social scale when Princess Anne (not a woman to mince words) fell off a horse. She became the target of snapping paparazzi, to whom she snapped back in no uncertain tones: “Naff off!”

  This elevation from the lower reaches of society to the pinnacle caused headlines and made the term available for use in general circumstances.

  Namby pamby

  During the eighteenth century, Ambrose Philips was a don of St Johns College, Cambridge, and in addition gained some recognition as a poet. But his poetic style and political affiliations incurred the wrath of the musician and poet Henry Carey (who wrote “Sally in our Alley” and was possibly the first person to sing “God Save the King”).

  Carey thought Philips’ poetic style was half-witted. So he set out in 1725 to create a poem that would satirize it with an ingenious series of rhyming couplets—a stinging series of childish epigrams. Carey came up with namby-pamby as a word-play on the name Ambrose Philips, and entitled his poem “Namby Pamby—A Panegyric on the New Versification.”

  The poem was so successful that Philips was henceforth known as Namby Pamby, and Alexander Pope used the term in his satiric epic The Dunciad.

  Since then the term has been used to label anything perceived as childish, ineffectual or insipid.

  (A) nation of shopkeepers

  Napoleon is believed to have said it (in French) as a put-down of the English, and his doing so made the description famous. But long before Napoleon, the term “nation of shopkeepers” had already been used in English, though not as a put-down. Josiah Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester Cathedral, first floated the idea of a shopkeeping nation in 1763 when he wrote:

  A shopkeeper will never get more custom by beating his customers, and what is true of a shopkeeper is true of a shopkeeping nation.

  Just over a decade later Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), encapsulated the concept more concisely and put the words in neater order:

  To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.

  Navel gazing

  The expression has its origin in real life—the members of some religious sects do actually go into a kind of trance by staring at their navels. There is even a formal word for it: omphaloskepsis. During the nineteenth century that was translated as “navel contemplators”—the direct ancestor of the contemporary form.

  The term first appears in a book by Robert Alfred Vaughan in 1857: Hours with the Mystics—A Contribution to the History of Religious Opinion. In one fairly lengthy sentence, he reports on a visit to the holy monasteries of Mount Athos in Greece:

  It seems that some of the monks (called, if I mistake not, Hesychasts) held that if a man shut himself up in a corner of his cell, with his chin upon his breast, turning his thoughts inward, gazing towards his navel, and centering all the strength of his mind on the region of the heart; and, not discouraged by at first perceiving only darkness, held out at this strange in-looking for several days and nights, he would at length behold a divine glory, and see himself luminous with the very light which was manifested on Mount Tabor.

  They call these devotees Navel-contemplators.

  The activity itself may not have caught on in any major way beyond Mouth Athos, but the term “navel contemplators” did. Over several decades of use, contemplating became gazing, and the image moved from the literal to the metaphoric—indicating excessive introspection, self-absorption, and an inability to take action.

  Nerd

  In contemporary times, a nerd is generally perceived as a person with an obsessively narrow focus on certain intellectual or technological matters to the exclusion of ordinary activities and social graces. Nerds are not necessarily admired, whereas a geek is a person who also has advanced knowledge but a more relaxed attitude to other aspects of life (most people who own a computer are happy to have a geek as a friend).

  The first known appearance of the word nerd in print—which launched its growth into international use—was in the story If I Ran The Zoo (1950), by children’s author Dr. Seuss, in which a character proclaims:

  I’ll sail to Ka-Troo And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo, A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!

  The story was illustrated with a grumpy-looking android not particular
about personal grooming.

  Never look a gift horse in the mouth

  “Never inspect the teeth of a gift horse” (Noli equi dentes inspicere donati) is credited to Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus (later known as St. Jerome), around AD 400.

  The writings of Magdalen College School’s headmaster John Stanbridge brought the term into English in 1509. In his book Vulgaria, among somewhat gloomy sentences for schoolboys to study (“I fear the master,” “I am weary of study,” “I shall be beaten”) there is also:

  A gyven hors may not be loked in the tethe.

  Never-never land

  The term “never-never” had at least two uses before it became internationally known. Early British migrants to Australia during the 1800s referred to the remote, stark and sparsely populated outback areas of Australia as “The Never Never,” and the term still survives there. Then in 1900 American writer Israel Zangwill used the phrase in the title of a play: The Moment of Death; or, The Never, Never Land.

  It is not known whether J.M. Barrie picked up the term from these two sources, but its widespread use came after his play Peter Pan introduced the concept to British audiences in 1904.

  In the play, Peter Pan describes the place as “the Never Land” without doubling “never,” but in general usage the island’s single never quietly developed into never-never. In that form it was often used to describe hire-purchase, where goods could be obtained and their full price paid in instalments over a long period.