Kitabı oku: «A Word In Your Shell-Like», sayfa 22

D

dabra, dabra! See EYEYDON.

daddy See DON’T GO DOWN.

Dad’s Army The long-running BBC TV comedy series Dad’s Army (1968–77) established in general use a nickname for the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV), formed in Britain at the outbreak of the Second World War and soon renamed the Home Guard. ‘Dad’s Army’ was a posthumous nickname given by those looking back on the exploits of this civilian force (though its members were uniformed and attached to army units). Many of the members were elderly men.

daft See EE, ISN’T IT.

daft as a brush Meaning ‘stupid’, this expression was adapted from the northern English soft as a brush by the comedian Ken Platt (1921–98), who said in 1979: ‘I started saying daft as a brush when I was doing shows in the Army in the 1940s. People used to write and tell me I’d got it wrong!’ (Partridge/Slang suggests that ‘daft…’ was in use before this, however, and Paul Beale reports the full version – ‘daft as a brush without bristles’ – from the 1920s.)

daggers See AT DAGGERS.

Damascus See ROAD TO DAMASCUS.

damn See AS NEAR AS.

(a) damn close-run thing A narrow victory. What the 1st Duke of Wellington actually told the memoirist Thomas Creevey about the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo was: ‘It has been a damned serious business. Blucher and I have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice thing – the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’ (18 June 1815). The Creevey Papers in which this account appears were not published until 1903. Somehow out of this description a conflated version arose, with someone else presumably supplying the ‘close-run’.

damn(ed) clever these Chinese (or dead clever chaps/devils these Chinese) Referring to a reputation for wiliness rather than skill. A Second World War phrase taken up from time to time by the BBC radio Goon Show (1951–60). Compare the line ‘Damn clever, these Armenians’ uttered by Claudette Colbert in the film It Happened One Night (US 1934).

damned if you do and damned if you don’t A modern version of ‘betwixt the devil and the deep blue sea’ – possibly of American origin. From The Guardian (1 July 1992): ‘It’s still very much a thing with women that you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If women choose to stay at home and look after their children, now they’re accused of opting out of the workforce and decision-making because they’re afraid to look up to it.’

damn fine cup of coffee – and hot! ‘Kyle Maclachlan, who plays the FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks…is one of TV’s true originals. His much loved and oft-repeated catchphrase “Damn fine cup of coffee, and hot!” has indeed caught on and Maclachlan himself parodies it crisply in a TV commercial’ – Radio Times (15–21 June 1991).

damn the torpedoes – full speed ahead! Meaning, ‘never mind the risks [torpedoes = mines], we’ll go ahead any way’. A historical quotation. David Glasgow Farragut, the American admiral, said it on 5 August 1864 at the Battle of Mobile Bay during the Civil War.

(a) damsel in distress A young maiden in difficulty or in an embarrassing position and in need of rescue by a knight in shining armour, by way of allusion to supposed situations in medieval romances. Date of origin unknown. From Tobias Smollett, Roderick Random, Chap. 22 (1748): ‘Coming to the relief of a damsel in distress.’ The P. G. Wodehouse novel A Damsel in Distress (1919) eventually became a film musical (US 1937).

(the) dance of the seven veils Salome so beguiled Herod by her seductive dancing that he gave her the head of St John the Baptist, as she requested. In neither Matthew 14:6 nor Mark 6:22 is she referred to by name – only ‘as the daughter of Herodias’. The name Salome was supplied by Josephus, a 2nd-century Jewish historian. Nor is the nature of her dancing described. One must assume that the particular nature of the dance originated with Oscar Wilde in whose play Salomé (pub. 1893) appears the stage direction: ‘Salomé dances the dance of the seven veils.’ Originally, Wilde’s play was written in French). Richard Strauss took the idea for his opera Salome (1905) from it. However, a little earlier, in Gustave Flaubert’s ‘Hérodias’ in Trois contes (1877) only one veil is mentioned.

dance at the other end of the ballroom See IS SHE A FRIEND.

dancing See ALL-DANCING; ANGELS; BRING ON THE.

(to get one’s) dander up Meaning ‘to get ruffled or angry’, the expression occurs in William Thackeray’s Pendennis, Chapter 44 (1848–50): ‘Don’t talk to me about daring to do this thing or t’other, or when my dander is up it’s the very thing to urge me on.’ Apparently of US origin (known by 1831), where ‘dander’ was either a ‘calcined cinder’ or ‘dandruff’. It is hard to see how the expression develops from either of these meanings. The Dutch word donder, meaning ‘thunder’, or ‘dunder’, a Scottish dialect word for ‘ferment’, may be more relevant.

(the) dangerous age The title of an early (and very mild) Dudley Moore film comedy of 1967 was Thirty Is a Dangerous Age, Cynthia. This would seem to allude, however distantly and unknowingly, to Den farlige alder [The dangerous age], a book in Danish by Karin Michaelis (1910). In that instance, the dangerous age was forty. In the Moore film, it was very important for him to write a musical, or perhaps get married, before he was thirty. In fact, the ‘dangerous age’ is whatever the speaker thinks it is. It might be said of teenagers first encountering the opposite sex, ‘Well, that’s the dangerous age, of course’ as much as it might be said of married folk experiencing the SEVEN YEAR ITCH.

(from) Dan to Beersheba See FROM LAND’S END.

Darby Kelly (or Derby Kelly) Rhyming slang for ‘belly’, known in the USA but probably more so in the UK, chiefly through the song ‘Boiled Beef and Carrots’, popularised by Harry Champion (1866–1942): ‘Boiled beef and carrots – that’s the stuff for yer darby kel, / Makes yer fat an’ keeps yer well…’ But who was he? A likely person features in a marching/recruiting song that probably dates from the Napoleonic Wars – as it refers back to the singer’s grandfather’s involvement with the Duke of Marlborough as well as to the Duke of Wellington between the Peninsular Campaign and Waterloo: ‘My grandsire beat the drum complete / His name was Darby Kelly-o, / None smart as he at rat-tat-too, / At roll-call or reveille-o.’ Thomas Dibdin has been credited with the words of a song entitled ‘Darby Kelly’ and dated 1820. Whether this is the same, is not known.

(the) daring young man on the flying trapeze The original person featured in the song ‘The Man on the Flying Trapeze’ by George Leybourne and Alfred Lee (1868) was Jules Léotard (d. 1880), the French trapeze artist. He also gave his name to the tight, one-piece garment worn by ballet dancers, acrobats and other performers. The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze was the title of a volume of short stories (1934) by William Saroyan.

dark See ALL WOMEN; AS DARK; I WOULDN’T LIKE.

(the) dark continent (and darkest Africa) In 1878, H. M. Stanley, the journalist who discovered Dr Livingstone, published Through the Dark Continent and followed it, in 1890, with Through Darkest Africa. It was from these two titles that we appear to get the expressions ‘dark continent’ and ‘darkest—’ to describe not only Africa but almost anywhere remote and uncivilized. Additionally, Flexner (1982) suggests that ‘In darkest Africa’ was a screen caption in a silent film of the period 1910–14.

(the) darkest hour comes just before the dawn A proverb of the ‘things will get worse before they get better’ variety. Terence Rattigan used it in his play The Winslow Boy (1946). Mencken finds it in Thomas Fuller’s A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine (1650): ‘It is always darkest just before the day dawneth.’ Whether there is any little literal truth in it is another matter.

(a) dark horse Figuratively, the phrase refers to a runner about whom everyone is ‘in the dark’ until he comes from nowhere and wins the race – of whatever kind. It is possible the term originated in Benjamin Disraeli’s novel The Young Duke: A Moral Tale Though Gay (1831) in which ‘a dark horse, which had never been thought of…rushed past the grandstand in sweeping triumph.’ It is used especially in political contexts. ‘Rank dark horse in bid to run lottery…Brian Newman, lottery follower at Henderson Crosthwaite, says: “Because of its low profile, Rank was unfancied at the outset. But it has emerged as the dark horse”’ – The Sunday Times (15 May 1994); ‘The biggest challenges to Britain appear likely to come from Australia and the United States, with South Africa, back in both events for the first time since 1976, emerging as a possible dark horse’ – The Times (30 December 1994).

(the) dark lady of the sonnets Nickname of the beauty to whom Shakespeare addressed some of his sonnets (from no. 128 onwards). Her eyes were ‘raven black’ and so was her hair. Her identity has been a subject for literary detectives for many years, and the candidates are numerous. She was referred to as the ‘Dark Lady’ in literary criticism by 1901 but the full phrase seems to have been coined by Bernard Shaw as the title of a short play in which the Dark Lady and Shakespeare are both characters. The Dark Lady of the Sonnets was first performed in 1914.

darkness and gnashing of teeth A humorous phrase for where there is unhappiness and dissatisfaction. Taken from Matthew 8:12: ‘But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ ‘[Rogers] had candles placed all round the dining room, in order to show off the pictures. “I asked [the Reverend Sydney] Smith how he liked the plan.” “Not at all,” he replied, “above there is a blaze of light, and below, nothing but darkness and gnashing of teeth”’ – quoted in Rogers’s Table Talk, ed. A. Dyce (1856).

darkness at noon Darkness at Noon, or the Great Solar Eclipse of the 16th June 1806 was the title of an anonymous booklet published in Boston (1806). Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon (1940) (originally written in German but apparently with the title in English) is about the imprisonment, trial and execution of a Communist who has betrayed the Party. It echoes Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671): ‘O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon.’

(a) dark night of the soul Mental and spiritual suffering prior to some big step. The phrase ‘La Noche oscura del alma’ was used as the title of a work in Spanish by St John of the Cross. This was a treatise based on his poem ‘Songs of the Soul Which Rejoices at Having Reached Union with God by the Road of Spiritual Negation’ (circa 1578). In The Crack-up (1936), F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: ‘In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.’ Douglas Adams wrote The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul (1988), a novel.

darling See DON’T GO NEAR.

(the) darling buds of May Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 contains the lines: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate. / Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, / And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.’ Hence, the titles of two modern novels. In H. E. Bates, The Darling Buds of May (1958), Charlie the tax inspector recites the poem when he is drunkenly pursuing the lovely Mariette. John Mortimer’s Summer’s Lease (1988) is about goings-on in a villa rented by English visitors to Tuscany.

(the) Darling of the Halls (Sir) George Robey, the British music-hall comedian, was sometimes known as ‘the Darling of the Halls’. The appellation derived from the possibly apocryphal exchange between the lawyer F. E. Smith (later Lord Birkenhead) (1872–1930) and a judge. In the way judges have of affecting ignorance of popular culture (compare WHO ARE THE BEATLES?), the judge asked who George Robey was and Smith replied: ‘Mr George Robey is the Darling of the music halls, m’lud.’ This gains added sense when you know that the judge was Mr Justice Darling whose own witticisms attracted much publicity.

Darth Vader Applied to any dark, menacing person, this name derives from a character in the film Star Wars (US 1977) and its prequels and sequels. He was a fallen Jedi knight who had turned to evil, appeared totally in shiny black, all skin hidden, and spoke with a distorted voice. ‘Mr Lorenzo, who in some circles is viewed as the “Darth Vader” of the industry, has shown nothing but contempt for Eastern [Airlines’] employees, both union and non-contract’ – Palm Beach Post (5 March 1989).

dash my wig! An archaic oath. The writer and jazz singer George Melly described on BBC Radio Quote…Unquote (27 May 1997) how his paternal grandmother exclaimed on being offered some (then rare) Danish Blue cheese in the late 1940s: ‘Dash me wig, where did you get that?’ This turned into a Melly family saying. When cheese was fancied, they said, ‘I’ll have a bit of dash-me-wig.’ OED2 has ‘dash my wig’ as a ‘mild imprecation’ by 1797. As ‘dash my vig’ the exclamation appears in R. S. Surtees, Handley Cross, Chap. 50 (1843). Brewer (1894) finds in addition ‘Dash my buttons!’ and explains: ‘Dash is a euphemism for a common oath; and wig, buttons, etc., are relics of a common fashion at one time adopted in comedies and by “mashers” of swearing without using profane language.’

(a) date with destiny Alliterative cliché. ‘Cheers and tears at Ark Royal’s date with destiny’ – headline in The Observer (12 January 2003). Compare: ‘They had a date with fate in…Casablanca’ – poster slogan for the film (US 1941).

dat’s my boy dat said dat See GOODNIGHT, MRS CALABASH.

daughter See DON’T GO NEAR.

(a) daunting prospect (or task) A very difficult prospect/task in prospect. Date of origin unknown, but this inevitable pairing of words was a cliché by the mid-20th century. ‘Reclaiming prostitutes was a daunting prospect for charitable women however tough-minded’ – F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth Century England (1980); ‘She’s always been honest with me. When I was about 21 I cooked dinner for her, which was a daunting prospect. I made a salmon souffle which I thought was rather good, but she said: ‘This is disgusting’ – Daily Mail (24 January 1995); ‘Owning a second home is an attractive, but daunting, prospect. However, a Scottish property firm believes that it has the answer at its holiday cottages in St Andrews in Fife and Drummore, near Portpatrick’ – The Herald (Glasgow) (22 February 1995); ‘Jane Forder rings to see whether I will still produce “HBR” diary entries to run alongside those of James Lees-Milne…It’s a very daunting task’ – National Trust Magazine (Summer 1995).

dawn See AT THE CRACK; CAME THE; DARKEST HOUR.

(the) dawn’s early light Phrase from ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ (1814) – latterly an American national anthem – by Francis Scott Key: ‘O, say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light, / What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming.’ Hence, also, So Proudly We Hail, title of a film (US 1943), and Twilight’s Last Gleaming, title of a film (US/West Germany 1977).

day See ALL; ANOTHER DAY; AS NIGHT; HAPPY AS THE.

day and age See IN THIS.

day for night A film-maker’s term for shooting a scene during the day and then tinting it dark to make it look like night. Hence, Day for Night – the English title given to François Truffaut’s film about film-making (1973) whose original title La Nuit Américaine [American Night], is the equivalent phrase in French film-making.

(a) day in the life ‘A Day in the Life’, the most remembered track from the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album (1967), presumably took its name from that type of magazine article and film documentary that strives to depict 24 hours in the life of a particular person or organization. In 1959, Richard Cawston produced a TV documentary that took this form, with the title This Is the BBC. The English title of a novel (1962; film UK 1971) by Alexander Solzhenitsyn was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s use of the phrase ‘A Day in the Life’ for the description of incidents in the life of a drug-taker may have led to the Sunday Times Magazine feature ‘A Life in the Day’ (running since the 1960s) and the play title A Day in the Death of Joe Egg by Peter Nichols (1967; film UK 1971).

(a) day late and a dollar short When describing people, this means they are unprepared and undependable, irresponsible and disorganized. By extension, to include those who habitually miss out on life’s opportunities. Confined almost exclusively to the USA, the expression seems to have arisen in the mid-20th century. There was a song, ‘Day Late and a Dollar Short’, recorded by Billy Barton in 1959. Terry McMillan wrote a novel, A Day Late and a Dollar Short, in 2001. A possible origin has been suggested – that the saying derives from field workers who were paid on a daily basis or at the end of their work period. If workers were too tired or too lazy to get in line, they lost out on that day’s wages. Compare, perhaps, TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE.

daylight robbery Flagrant over-charging – a phrase in use by the 1940s and building upon the simple ‘it’s robbery’ to describe the same thing, dating from the mid-19th century. Application of the phrase in Britain to the Window Tax (1691–1851) that led to the blocking up of windows – and thus to a literal form of daylight robbery – appears to be retrospective.

day of destiny See RENDEZVOUS.

daylight See BURN.

(the) day of the locust The relevance of the title The Day of the Locust to Nathanael West’s novel (1939) about the emptiness of life in Hollywood in the 1930s is not totally clear. Locusts are, however, usually associated with times when waste, poverty or hardship are in evidence. They also go about in swarms, committing great ravages on crops. The climax of the novel is a scene in which Tod, the hero, gets crushed by a Hollywood mob. In the Bible, Joel 2:25 has: ‘And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten’; Revelation 9:3: ‘There came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them we give power’; Revelation 9:4: ‘locusts give power to hurt only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads’.

days See HAPPIEST.

(the) days of wine and roses Ernest Dowson wrote the lines: ‘They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, / Love and desire and hate…/ They are not long the days of wine and roses; / Out of a misty dream / Our path emerges for a while, then closes / Within a dream’ in ‘Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetar Incohare Longam’ (1896). Hence, The Days of Wine and Roses, title of a film (US 1962) about an alcoholic (though the phrase is often used to evoke romance). Hence, also, The Weeping and the Laughter, the title of a novel (1988) by Noel Barber, and of autobiographies by J. Maclaren-Ross (1953) and Viva King (1976).

(the) day that the rains came down A line from the song ‘The Day the Rains Came’, written by Carl Sigman and Gilbert Bécaud. Jane Morgan had a hit with it in 1958.

(the) day war broke out A catchphrase from the Second World War radio monologues of the British comedian Robb Wilton (1881–1957): ‘The day war broke out…my missus said to me, “It’s up to you…you’ve got to stop it.” I said, “Stop what?” She said, “The war.”’ Later, when circumstances changed, the phrase became ‘the day peace broke out’.

dead See AIN’T IT; BRING OUT YOUR.

dead and gone See HERE’S A FUNNY.

dead – and never called me mother This line is recalled as typical of the threevolume sentimental Victorian novel, yet it does not appear in Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1861) as is often supposed. Nevertheless, it was inserted in one of the numerous stage versions of the novel (that by T. A. Palmer in 1874) which were made before the end of the century. The line occurs in a scene when an errant but penitent mother who has returned in the guise of a governess to East Lynne, her former home, has to watch the slow death of her eight-year-old son (‘Little Willie’), but is unable to reveal her true identity.

dead and your arse cold See IT WILL ALL BE.

dead as a doornail Completely dead. In the Middle Ages, the doornail was the name given to the knob on which the knocker struck: ‘As this is frequently knocked on the head, it cannot be supposed to have much life in it’ – Brewer (1894). The phrase occurs as early as 1350, then again in Langland’s Piers Plowman (1362). Shakespeare uses it a couple of times, in the usual form and, as in Henry IV, Part 2, V.iii.117 (1597): Falstaff: ‘What, is the old king dead!’ Pistol: ‘As nail in door!’

(he’s) dead but he won’t lie down Partridge/Catch Phrases dates this saying from around 1910. A song with the title ‘He’s Dead But He Won’t Lie Down’ was written by Will Haines, James Harpur and Maurice Beresford for Gracie Fields to sing in the film Looking on the Bright Side (UK 1931). A separate song with this title was written by Johnny Mercer (with music by Hoagy Carmichael) for the film Timberjack (1955).

dead in the water Helpless, lacking support, finished. Suddenly popular in the late 1980s and undoubtedly of North American origin. In other words, an opponent or antagonist is like a dead fish. He is still in the water and not swimming anywhere. ‘Mr John Leese, editor of both the Standard and the Evening News, replied: “This obviously means that Mr Maxwell’s [news]paper is dead in the water”’ – The Guardian (2 March 1987).

deadlier than the male See FEMALE OF THE SPECIES.

deadly earnest Really serious. Known by 1880. A cliché phrase by the mid-20th century. ‘A recital which had more of the air of friendly music-making at home than the deadly earnest aspiration usually encountered on this platform’ – The Times (1963); ‘The Getaway is in deadly earnest about its deadly games. Without a trace of irony, it often looks crude and cruel’ – Independent on Sunday (3 July 1994); ‘All good knockabout stuff, but Elvis is in deadly earnest about his new venture’ – The Sunday Times (27 November 1994).

(to wait for) dead men’s shoes To wait for someone to die in order to inherit his possessions or position. Known by 1530. ‘Who waitth for dead men shoen, shall go long barefoote’ – included in John Heywood, Proverbs (1546).

dead men tell no tales A proverbial phrase that, oddly, does not seem to have been used as the title of a film (yet), though there was a TV movie (US 1971) with it, based on a novel by Kelly Roos. Apperson has it first appearing in the form ‘The dead can tell no tales’ in 1681. E. W. Hornung entitled a novel Dead Men Tell No Tales in 1899. ‘Dead men don’t tell tales’ appears in Walter de la Mare, The Return, Chap. 27 (1910).

(a) dead parrot Meaning, ‘something that is quite incapable of resuscitation’. This expression derives from the most famous of all Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketches, first shown on BBC TV (7 December 1969). A man (named ‘Praline’ in the script) who has just bought a parrot that turns out to be dead, registers a complaint with the pet shop owner in these words: ‘This parrot is no more. It’s ceased to be. It’s expired. It’s gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life it rests in peace. It would be pushing up the daisies if you hadn’t nailed it to the perch. It’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It’s an exparrot.’ In early 1988, there were signs of the phrase becoming an established idiom when it was applied to a controversial policy document drawn up as the basis for a merged Liberal/Social Democratic Party. Then The Observer commented (8 May 1988): ‘Mr Steel’s future – like his document – was widely regarded as a “dead parrot”. Surely this was the end of his 12-year reign as Liberal leader?’ In October 1990, Margaret Thatcher belatedly came round to the phrase (fed by a speechwriter, no doubt) and called the Liberal Democrats a ‘dead parrot’, at the Tory Party Conference. When the Liberals won a by-election at Eastbourne the same month, the Tory party chairman Kenneth Baker said the ‘dead parrot’ had ‘twitched’. Whether the phrase will have much further life, ONLY TIME WILL TELL. As indeed it did: on 6 October 1998, The Sun carried a front page photo of a dead parrot with the head of the Conservative Party leader William Hague superimposed. The headline was: ‘This party is no more…it has ceased to be…this is an EX-party.’

(a) dead ringer Meaning ‘one person closely resembling another’, the expression derives from horse-racing in the USA, where a ‘ringer’ has been used since the 19th century to describe a horse fraudulently substituted for another in a race. ‘Dead’ here means ‘exact’, as in ‘dead heat’. Dead Ringers was the title of a BBC Radio 4 comedy series (from 2000) featuring topical impersonations.

(a) deafening silence A silence that by being so noticeable is significant. Known by 1968. ‘Conservative and Labour MPs have complained of a “deafening silence” over the affair’ – The Times (28 August 1985); ‘Many in the Rosyth area would like to know why he has maintained a deafening silence on the issue since it was first mooted in 1986’ – letter to the editor in The Scotsman (19 August 1994); ‘As the internationals begin to multiply in the runup to the World Cup, it is deflating to realise that in too many aspects, the game in Britain is in a mess. The deafening silence which has greeted a sequence of discreditable events in recent months is shaming enough’ – The Daily Telegraph (5 November 1994).

deal See BIG DEAL.

dear boy Mode of address, now considered rather affected and often employed when poking fun at the speech of actors and similar folk. If the many people who have tried to imitate Noël Coward’s clipped delivery over the years are to be believed, the words he uttered most often in his career were ‘Dear boy’. His friend Cole Lesley claimed, however, in The Life of Noël Coward (1978) that, ‘He rarely used this endearment, though I expect it is now too late for me to be believed.’ William Fairchild, who wrote dialogue for the part of Coward in the film Star! (US 1968), was informed by the Master, after he had checked the script: ‘Too many Dear Boys, dear boy.’

dear John Name for a type of letter sent by a woman to a man and telling him that she is breaking off their relationship. Its origins are said to lie in US and Canadian armed forces’ slang of the Second World War when faithless girls back home had to find a way to admit they were carrying on with or maybe had become pregnant by other men. It subsequently became the name of a letter informing a man that he had given the woman VD. Perhaps even AIDS? Known by 1945.

dear mother See SELL THE PIG.

death See AND DEATH; ANGEL OF; HIS.

death and the maiden A phrase originally made famous by ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ – a song (D. 531) by Schubert (1817), which was a setting of a poem by Matthias Claudius (a brief exchange between the Maiden and Death). The theme was a subject that fascinated northern European painters in the 14th/15th centuries, especially Hans Baldung Grien, whose Death and the Maiden (1517) is now to be seen at Basel. It was later re-used by Schubert as the title of his notable String Quartet in D Minor (D. 810). More recently, Death and the Maiden was the title of a play (1992; filmed UK/US/France 1994) by Ariel Dorfman. His original version was in Spanish and called La Muerta y la doncella.

death by chocolate Name of a recipe for an extremely rich type of chocolate cake, described as a ‘cake/mousse dessert’ – probably of US origin. Gallows humour by chocoholics who are happily aware of the possible consequence of overindulgence in their favourite food. Known by 1990. By 2003, there were signs that, possibly in emulation of this coinage, a format phrase ‘death by—’ was emerging. TV programmes were entitled Death By Home and Death By Gardening (showing video clips of household mishaps) and headlines included ‘Death by indifference’ and ‘Death by embarrassment’.

(a/the) death knell Meaning, ‘an event that signals the end or destruction of something’. Originally, the tolling of a bell that signalled a person’s death. The figurative use has been known since the 19th century. ‘A slogan cry which would…sound the death-knell of ascendancy and West Britishism in this country’ – Dundalk Examiner (1895); ‘Boston’s union longshoremen have sounded the death knell of their traditional but unwieldy dock shape-up’ – Boston Sunday Herald (30 April 1967); ‘The Polish Parliament…yesterday voted…for a new trade union law that sounds the death knell of Solidarity’ – The Times (9 October 1982); ‘This announcement will almost certainly be the death-knell to the 25-square-mile site’ – The Scotsman (9 February 1995); ‘The European Union and Canada yesterday ended their six-week fishing dispute with a deal hailed in Ottawa as a “victory for conservation” but condemned in Spain as the “death knell for the fishing industry”’ – The Times (17 April 1995).

deathless prose/verse An (often ironical) description of writing, sometimes used self-deprecatingly about one’s own poor stuff. ‘He would embody the suggestion about the nose in deathless verse’ – Rudyard Kipling, ‘Slaves of the Lamp, Part 1’ (1897); ‘Robert Burns once expressed in deathless verse a Great Wish. His wish, translated into my far from deathless prose, was to the effect…’ – Collie Knox, For Ever England (1943); ‘A passionate devotion to your deathless prose’ – a 1963 letter from M. Lincoln Schuster to Groucho Marx in The Groucho Letters (1967); ‘No piece of prose, however deathless, is worth a human life’ – Kenneth Tynan in The Observer (13 March 1966). From an actor’s diary: ‘The writer…concentrates his most vicious verbal gymnastics [in these scenes]. After we’ve mangled the deathless prose we have another cup of tea’ – Independent on Sunday (13 May 1990).