Common Phrases

by Max Cryer

  A few centuries post-jousting, the expression appeared in print in Upton Sinclair’s King Coal (1917):

  And suddenly the boss whirled upon him. “Get the hell out of here!” he shouted. “If you don’t like it, get your time and quit. Shut your face or I’ll shut it for you.”

  Significant other

  By formal definition, a “significant other” is a person of importance in someone’s life—as regards their emotions, behavior, and indeed how they spend their time. It may be a sibling, fiancé, parent, spouse, other family relation or business colleague.

  During the 1980s and 90s, the field of reference narrowed slightly—there was an unspoken assumption that a significant other was a person’s lover, life partner, or in some way shared a sexual and emotional connection (without gender restriction).

  The original term dates back several decades, to 1953, when it was coined by American psychiatrist Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan in his book: The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry.

  The work deals with the relationships between individuals and the network of others surrounding them. An individual may be:

  . . . vulnerable to being arrested or impeded in direct chronological and otherwise specific relationship to the emotional disturbance of the significant other.

  Armistead Maupin’s book Significant Others (1987) brought wide (and more accessible) American coverage to the term. And in 1989 the expression received amused attention in Britain when the TV series Only Fools and Horses featured Del-Boy referring grandiloquently to his girlfriend as his significant other.

  Six degrees of separation

  In 1929 Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy’s short story “Chain Links” investigated the concept that technology was making the world smaller. Because of increased travel and communication, any two people could be connected through acquaintance with five intermediary people.

  This story came to be seen by social commentators as a possible first step toward a study of “degrees of separation.” Five intermediaries became six when playwright John Guare explained in an interview with David Finkle that Marconi had connected the world with wire, and it had been calculated that to connect with anyone anywhere on the planet could require 5.82 relay stations. Comparing this with social connections, Guare decided that six would be a better round number.

  His play Six Degrees of Separation opened in New York in 1990, ran for over a year and was subsequently made into a movie. The expression has remained in the language to describe a fascinating possibility.

  Six of one and half a dozen of the other

  The saying was in use early in the nineteenth century, meaning that when an alternative is available, the choice between the two may be straightforward—or tricky.

  It was captured by Captain Frederick Marryat in The Pirate (1836). Jack and Bill are discussing the advantages of having “wives” wherever the sea takes them. Jack agrees that a wife in every port is fine, but he misses seeing the children that might result:

  I knows the women, but I never knows the children. It’s just six of one and half-a-dozen of the other; ain’t it, Bill?

  Skating on thin ice

  It refers to either speaking carefully on a potentially dangerous topic, or more straightforwardly taking a risk and challenging danger. The image was captured by American poet, philosopher, orator and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson in an essay on “Prudence” (1841):

  Our Yankee trade is reputed to be very much on the extreme of this prudence. It takes bank-notes, good, bad, clean, ragged, and saves itself by the speed with which it passes them off.

  Iron cannot rust, nor beer sour, nor timber rot, nor calicoes go out of fashion, nor money stocks depreciate, in the few swift moments in which the Yankee suffers any one of them to remain in his possession. In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.

  Skeleton in the cupboard

  When popular literature was in its Gothic period, there was a fascination with bodies in priest holes, bricked walls revealing hidden bones, and corpses being snatched for medical experiments. Then the notion of hiding a skeleton in a cupboard (or closet) began to acquire a metaphorical edge, referring to an unsavoury secret that a person or family was keen to keep hidden.

  Figurative use of a skeleton in a closet was made by W.H. Stowell in a magazine called Eclectic Review in 1816. But the image took off when the more famous writer William Makepeace Thackeray put it into print.

  His first reference to a skeleton as an embarrassing secret was about his own figure. In 1845, writing for Punch, he explained that eating too much was making his garments tight, so his name and address were written inside his coat breast-flap in case he were found speechless in the street:

  A smiling face often hides an aching heart; I promise you mine did in that coat, and not my heart only, but other regions. There is a skeleton in every house.

  Thackeray went back to the skeleton image several times, and moved it into the closet when he wrote The Newcomes: memoirs of a most respectable family (1855):

  . . . persons with whom our friends have had already, or will be found presently to have, some connexion. And it is from these that we shall arrive at some particulars regarding the Newcome family, which will show us that they have a skeleton or two in their closets.

  Sledging

  Verbal abuse, particularly by sportsmen to their opposition, during a match. The term is used in cricket to describe loud annoying comments delivered by fielders close to a batsman.

  This practice goes back to the 1800s, but the name for it arose from the actions of Australian fast bowler Grahame Corling. He didn’t create the term, but his tendency to make outspoken comments led to its creation. During the 1960s Corling made a particularly pungent faux pas in front of an embarrassed waitress at a cricket party, prompting a team member to say, “You’re as subtle as a sledgehammer.”

  At the time, soul singer Percy Sledge had a hit song in Australia, and his name amalgamated with Corling’s gaffe. The image of a sledgehammer became associated with rude remarks so that when players ridiculed a batsman they were sledge hammering, eventually abbreviated to sledging.

  Slept her way to the middle

  Rachel Abramowitz’s book about female power in Hollywood Is That a Gun in Your Pocket? (2000) reports that Sherry Lansing’s first step upwards from aspiring actress to studio executive in 1975 caused a male producer to remark that Lansing had “slept her way to the middle.”

  But since Abramowitz refrained from naming the man who said it, or when, we can’t honor him as the originator. The term’s more public launch and with acknowledged authorship was in actor/writer Dirk Bogarde’s novel Voices in the Garden (1981), albeit in a rather more blunt version. The short-time boyfriend of a nondescript actress (who plays “someone’s mother on television and does voice-overs for custard commercials”) says of her:

  Decca York is the only woman I know who has screwed her way to the middle.

  Repeats of the line have tended to bowdlerise it back to the Hollywood version. Voices in the Garden became a television drama in 1993 with an all-star cast led by Joss Ackland, Samuel West, and Anouk Aimee.

  Small but perfectly formed

  Diplomat, author, British Member of Parliament and Britain’s ambassador to France Sir Alfred Duff Cooper married the famous beauty Lady Diana Manners, daughter of the Duke of Rutland. In 1914 Duff Cooper wrote a letter to Lady Diana about a party at Belvoir, her father’s castle, joking about his own slight build:

  I really did enjoy Belvoir you know . . .You must I think have enjoyed it too, with your two stout lovers frowning at one another across the hearth rug, while your small, but perfectly formed one kept the party in a roar.

  The letter was published by their daughter (Artemis Cooper) in 1983.

  Small fry

  The young of some kinds of fish have been referred to as fry for several centuries and there are examples of it crossing over sometimes to refer to children. But it was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s widely read Uncl
e Tom’s Cabin which put the term into the public domain:

  Roars of laughter attended the narration, and were taken up and prolonged by all the small fry who were lying, in any quantity, about on the floor, or perched in every corner.

  Smoking gun

  The expression’s ancestor is a line from Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “Gloria Scott” (1893) involving dirty doings on a ship of that name. The original line reads:

  We rushed into the captain’s cabin . . . there he lay . . . while the chaplain stood with a smoking pistol in his hand . . .

  Over the following years, pistol slowly changed to gun.

  Smooth-shaven

  Smoothness was hardly an unknown condition, but in times past men without beards were generally referred to as “smooth-skinned” or “smooth-faced.” English poet John Milton introduced the term “smooth-shaven” c.1635 in Il Pensoroso. Milton was actually referring to a lawn-like patch of grass when he wrote:

  And missing thee I walk unseen,

  Upon the dry smooth-shaven green . . .

  In vernacular usage the term moved from the lawn to refer to a man’s smooth-shaven face.

  Snug as a bug in a rug

  The line occurs in a comedy by the prolific Irish playwright Francis Gentleman in 1769. A character says of a widow that if the rumor of her having money is true, he will “have her as snug as a bug in a rug.”

  Benjamin Franklin may have seen the play; he certainly knew the line. For in 1772 he wrote a charming letter to Miss Georgiana Shipley whose pet squirrel Skugg had died. His suggested epitaph for the buried creature was:

  Here Skugg

  Lies snug

  As a bug

  In a rug.

  Sober as a judge

  British judges apparently had a fine reputation when Henry Fielding wrote this line in Don Quixote in England (1733):

  Oons sir—do you say that I am drunk?

  I say, sir, I am as sober as a judge.

  Spam

  In 1937 the Hormel Food Co. launched a competition to find a name for a canned meat product. Apparently the company didn’t want to call it “pork loaf ” (though that’s what it was) and was not permitted to call it ham because the meat was shoulder, rather than hindquarter. A prize of $100 was to be made available to a name the firm approved.

  Kenneth Daigneau from New York came up with the name Spam—a condensed version of spiced ham—but without claiming it to be actual ham.

  Thirty-three years later the British comedy group Monty Python’s Flying Circus performed a bizarre television sketch in which a run-down café served only ludicrous variations of Spam. The customers’ indignation climaxed in a ridiculous song whose lyrics consisted simply of the word Spam repeated.

  The sketch was first broadcast on December 15, 1970. Its popularity, and the association of spam with something unwanted but in oversupply, is credited with the word coming to mean junk email.

  (There is no truth in the rumor that the title of the original Hormel tinned Spam was an acronym for “Something Posing as Meat.”)

  Speak softly and carry a big stick

  Although sometimes referred to as being of West African origin, the expression is most indelibly associated with Theodore Roosevelt.

  The American Treasures of the Library of Congress traces its first use in a letter from Roosevelt (dated January 26, 1900, before he was President) to Henry L. Sprague, in reference to support being withdrawn for a state insurance commissioner whose honesty had been found wanting.

  In later years, as President, Roosevelt said “Speak softly and carry a big stick” publicly several times, once referring to it as “an old adage.” No connection with Africa has been found.

  (It’s sometimes misquoted as “Walk softly and carry a big stick.”)

  Spill the beans

  By itself, spill indicates something has been allowed out of where it should have remained (as in “blood was spilled”) or, metaphorically, that information has been released—inadvertently or unwisely.

  There are different stories explaining how beans got into the picture: ancient Greek voting was done with beans; or Turkish fortune-tellers poured beans from a cup and “read” the resulting configuration. There is no solid evidence behind these.

  But spilling beans certainly crept into informal American usage in the early 1900s. The first author to use it was Thomas K. Holmes in The Man from Tall Timber (1919). We learn that, in front of acquaintances she had hoped to impress, Mrs. Lemoyne is claimed joyously by a frowsy old woman who knew her years before when they had worked together in Shattuck’s eating house.

  “And mother certainly has spilled the beans!” thought Stafford in vast amusement. For Mrs. Lemoyne, once having been caught by Aunt Tabby, saw the futility of clinging to any of her city airs and graces.

  (The) squeaky wheel gets the grease

  With various wordings, the image has been around for several hundred years. But in 1870 American poet Henry Wheeler Shaw—who wrote as Josh Billings—in his poem “The Kicker” neatly nailed the image in the form we now know it:

  I hate to be a kicker,

  I always long for peace,

  But the wheel that does the squeaking,

  Is the one that gets the grease.

  (The) stately homes of England

  While most of the output of British poet Felicia Hemans is neglected, at least two of her lines are famous:

  The boy stood on the burning deck, when all but he had fled . . .

  This is from “Casabianca” (1826). And in “The Homes of England” (1827) she wrote:

  The stately homes of England,

  How beautiful they stand,

  Amidst their tall ancestral trees,

  O’er all the pleasant land!

  A century later, Hemans’ poem was satirized by Noël Coward:

  The stately homes of England,

  How beautiful they stand

  To prove the upper classes

  Have still the upper hand . . .

  British eccentric and writer Quentin Crisp, in his 1968 autobiography The Naked Civil Servant, referred to himself as “a stately homo of England.”

  State of the art

  The term originally used the word state in its meaning of status, and referred to engineering, which historically is regarded as an art because it creates things that never existed before.

  The earliest known use of the term in print was in 1910, when it appeared in a manual written by H.H. Suplee:

  In the present state of the art this is all that can be done.

  The art being referred to is the engineering of gas turbines. In a modern context the term retains a connection with its engineering background, since “state of the art” now often refers to new and improved versions of some form of technology.

  Steal my thunder

  In 1709 the Drury Lane theater staged a new play, Appius and Virginia. Its author was aware that if during a part of the action the audience could hear something resembling thunder, the play’s dramatic atmosphere would be greatly enhanced. He invented the effect of stage thunder by hanging a wobbly metal sheet on wires, and then shaking it and beating it. The thunder effect was very successful but the play wasn’t, and had only a short run.

  Shortly after, the play’s author John Dennis returned to the theater to see its production of Macbeth. During the performance he immediately recognized that his own invention was being used by the theater company. He called out:

  They will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder!

  Within a short time his cry had come to mean any situation where credit is being seized at the expense of where it is actually due.

  (A) stiff upper lip

  Somehow perceived as exemplifying British stoicism, the term’s ancestry appears to be from elsewhere. London Telegraph writer Mark Steyn (October 19, 2004) cites evidence that stiff upper lip was actually of American origin, being referred to in the Massachusetts Spy newspaper in June 1815, and must have traveled to E
ngland and Bertie Wooster much later.

  Its first appearance with acknowledged authorship was in 1833, in The Down Easters by American poet, critic and novelist John Neal:

  What’s the use o’ boo-hooin, I tell ye! Keep a stiff upper lip; no bones broke don’t I know?

  Storm in a teacup

  There were various changes before we settled on a storm and a teacup. Around 70 BC Cicero wrote about a lot of fuss over something relatively unimportant as “billows in a ladle.”

  Many centuries later Americans spoke of a tempest in a teapot. The United States Democratic Review in 1838 chided the Supreme Court over a minor matter concerning a University with these words: “This collegiate tempest in a teapot might serve for the lads of the University to moot.” And tempest in a teapot has remained in common usage in America.

  The British version was first brought into public prominence by American-born playwright William Bayle Bernard, who had lived in Britain since he was thirteen. He wrote over 100 plays, and the London farce Storm in a Teacup (1845) nailed the expression down into its now familiar form.