Kitabı oku: «A Word In Your Shell-Like», sayfa 8

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(a’)babbled of green fields One of the most pleasing touches to be found in all of Shakespeare may not have been his at all. In Henry V (II.iii.17), the Hostess (formerly Mistress Quickly) relates the death of Falstaff: ‘A’parted ev’n just between twelve and one, ev’n at the turning o’ th’ tide: for after I saw him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers and smile upon his fingers’ end, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a’babbled of green fields.’ The 1623 Folio of Shakespeare’s plays renders the last phrase as ‘and a Table of green fields’, which makes no sense, though some editors put ‘as sharp as a pen, on a table of green field’ (taking ‘green field’ to mean green cloth.) Shakespeare may well have handwritten ‘babld’ and the printer read this as ‘table’ – a reminder that the text of the plays is far from carved in stone and a prey to mishaps in the printing process, as are all books and newspapers. The generally accepted version was inserted by Lewis Theobald in his 1733 edition. As the 1954 Arden edition comments: ‘“Babbled of green fields” is surely more in character with the Falstaff who quoted the Scriptures…and who lost his voice hallooing of anthems. Now he is in the valley of the shadow, the “green pasture” of Psalm 23 might well be on his lips.’ Francis Kilvert, the diarist, makes a pleasant allusion to the phrase in his entry for 15 May 1875: ‘At the house where I lodge there is a poor captive thrush who fills the street with his singing as he “babbles of green fields”.’

babes in the wood (1) Simple, inexperienced, trustful people who are easily fooled. Known by 1866. So called by way of allusion to ‘The Children in the Wood’, an old ballad based on the case of two Norfolk children whose uncle plotted to kill them in order to obtain their inheritance. But one of the ruffians employed to do the deed prevented it, and the children were left in a wood to perish. The story (sometimes held to be true and to have taken place in Wayland Wood near Watton) was published in Norwich by Thomas Millington in 1595. In ballad form, it is mentioned in a play by Rob Yarrington (1601) and in Percy’s Reliques (1765). The story also forms the basis of the popular British pantomime format, Babes in the Wood.

(2) The name has also been applied to Irish ruffians who ranged the Wicklow mountains and the Enniscorthy woods towards the end of the 18th century.

(3) It was also given to men in the (wooden) stocks or pillory.

babies See KILL YOUR DARLINGS.

baby See DON’T THROW.

---Babylon PHRASES. Used to describe groups of people or whole societies where high living and scandals abound. The link to the biblical Babylon is not direct. Although heathen, that was rather a place of magnificence and luxury. In 588BC, Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, took Jerusalem and carried away many of the inhabitants to Babylon where they became slaves. These somewhat stuffy Jews reacted strongly to the amorality of the Babylonians (described by Herodotus), and Babylon became a byword for cruelty and vice. When the Romans took Jerusalem in AD 70, some Jewish writers (including the author of the Book of Revelation) referred to Rome as Babylon. The modern connotation of Babylon probably goes back at least as far as Disraeli, who wrote in Lothair (1847): ‘London is a modern Babylon’. Dickens has Mr Micawber make the same comparison in David Copperfield (1850), but here Babylon is evoked only to signify a magnificent, big city. So Brewer (1894) may have been a touch off the mark in saying that ‘The Modern Babylon’ is ‘London…on account of its wealth, luxury and dissipation’. The key to why, since film-maker Kenneth Anger entitled his book of movie scandals Hollywood Babylon in 1975, we have had a spate of titles like Rock’n’Roll Babylon (1982), Washington Babylon (1996), TV Babylon (1997) and Hamptons Babylon (1997) seems to lie in the popularization of the idea of Babylon as a city of decadence promoted by D. W. Griffith in his film Intolerance (US 1916). The Anger book is prefaced by a poem by Don Blanding ‘as recited by Leo Carillo in the 1935 musical Star Night at the Cocoanut Grove’: ‘Hollywood, Hollywood…/ Fabulous Hollywood…/ Celluloid Babylon, / Glorious, glamorous…/ City delirious, / Frivolous, serious…/ Bold and ambitious, / And vicious and glamorous…’ This led to Gary Herman, for example, writing of the original Babylon in his preface to Rock’n’Roll Babylon: ‘[It] was the capital of a vast and profligate empire. [Similarly] in the rock world, its citizens may start from humble beginnings, but soon they are ushered into lush hanging gardens where there are no dreams of democracy and change, only dreams of power, wealth and the perfect tan.’ In a separate development, because the Babylonians had enslaved the Israelites, Afro-Caribbean people with a history of enslavement have taken to referring to their oppressors – and by extension prosperous and privileged members of racist white society – as ‘Babylon’. In particular, ‘The Babylon’ means the police. A No.1 hit of 1977 for Boney M, the West Indies group, was ‘Rivers of Babylon’, based on ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, and wept’ (Psalm 137:1) – which in the Book of Common Prayer is, ‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.’ But, equally, this Babylonic allusion has also been used in what would seem to be the more traditional sense: in 1945, Elizabeth Smart likened New York to Babylon in the title of her novel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, a short, account of a love affair written in ‘poetic prose’. Much earlier, in a letter of 12 June 1775, Horace Walpole wrote: ‘By the waters of Babylon we sit down and weep, when we think of thee, O America!’

(a) bachelor gay Someone who puts himself about in a way characteristic of the unmarried male. ‘A Bachelor Gay (Am I)’ is the title of a song by James W. Tate in The Maid of the Mountains (1917). An arch phrase, to be used only within quotation marks, even before the change in meaning of ‘gay’ from the 1960s onwards. ‘“He was a bachelor gay,” says Diana. “He left his first wife and small child, years before I knew him…After that he’d lived at separate times with two other women and walked out on both of them. He said to me: “You must appreciate I’ve been around a lot.” It was part of the appeal’ – Daily Mail (29 November 1993).

back See—IS BACK.

back burner See PUT (SOMETHING ON).

back in the knife-box, little Miss Sharp! A nannyism addressed to a person with a sharp tongue. Compare the similar you’re so sharp you’ll be cutting yourself. Casson/Grenfell also has: ‘Very sharp we are today, we must have slept in the knife box / we must have slept on father’s razor case / we must have been up to Sheffield’. Also there is Mr Sharp from Sheffield, straight out of the knife-box! Paul Beale found a homely example of the knife-box version in Donald Davie’s autobiographical study These the Companions (1982): ‘More than twenty-five years ago I [composed] a poem which has for epigraph what I remember my mother [in Barnsley, Yorkshire] saying when I was too cocky as a child: “Mr Sharp from Sheffield, straight out of the knife-box!”’ Earlier than all this, Murdstone referred to David – Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, Chap. 2 (1849) – as ‘Mr Brooks of Sheffield’, to indicate that he was ‘sharp’. There was indeed a firm of cutlery makers called Brookes of Sheffield – a city that has for centuries been the centre of the English cutlery trade.

back of a lorry See FELL OFF THE.

backroom boys Nickname given to scientists and boffins – and specifically to those relied on to produce inventions and new gadgets for weaponry and navigation in the Second World War. Compare The Small Back Room, the title of a novel (1943) by Nigel Balchin. The phrase was originated, in this sense, by Lord Beaverbrook as Minister of Aircraft Production when he paid tribute to his research department in a broadcast on 19 March 1941: ‘Let me say that the credit belongs to the boys in the backrooms [sic]. It isn’t the man who sits in the limelight who should have the praise. It is not the men who sit in prominent places. It is the men in the backrooms.’ In the US, the phrase ‘backroom boys’ can be traced to the 1870s at least, but Beaverbrook can be credited with the modern application to scientists and boffins. The inspiration quite obviously was his favourite film, Destry Rides Again (1939), in which Marlene Dietrich jumped on the bar of the Last Chance saloon and sang the Frank Loesser song ‘See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have’.

(with our) backs to the wall This expression, meaning ‘up against it’, dates back to 1535 at least but was memorably used when the Germans launched their last great offensive of the First World War. On 12 April 1918, Sir Douglas Haig, the British Commander-in-Chief on the Western Front, issued an order for his troops to stand firm: ‘Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.’ A. J. P. Taylor in his English History 1914–45 (1966) commented: ‘In England this sentence was ranked with Nelson’s last message. At the front, the prospect of staff officers fighting with their backs to the walls of their luxurious chateaux had less effect.’

back to basics John Major, the British Prime Minister, launched this ill-fated slogan in a speech to the Conservative Party Conference in 1993: ‘The message from this Conference is clear and simple. We must go back to basics…The Conservative Party will lead the country back to these basics, right across the board: sound money, free trade; traditional teaching; respect for the family and the law.’ A number of government scandals in the ensuing months exposed the slogan as hard to interpret or, at worst, suggesting rather a return to ‘the bad old days’. The alliterative phrase (sometimes ‘back to the basics’) may first have surfaced in the USA where it was the mid-1970s’ slogan of a movement in education to give priority to the teaching of the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic.

back to normalcy Together with ‘Return to normalcy with Harding’, this was a slogan effectively used by US President Warren G. Harding. Both were based on a word extracted from a speech he had made in Boston during May 1920: ‘America’s present need is not heroics but healing, not nostrums but normalcy, not revolution but restoration, not agitation but adjustment, not surgery but serenity, not the dramatic but the dispassionate, not experiment but equipoise, not submergence in internationality but sustainment in triumphant nationality.’ Out of such an alliterative bog stuck the word ‘normalcy’ – a perfectly good Americanism, though it has been suggested that Harding was actually mispronouncing the word ‘normality’. He himself claimed that ‘normalcy’ was what he had meant to say, having come across it in a dictionary.

back to square one Meaning ‘back to the beginning’, this phrase is sometimes said to have gained currency in the 1930s through its use by football commentators on British radio. Radio Times used to print a map of the football field divided into numbered squares to which commentators would refer. Thus: ‘Cresswell’s going to make it – FIVE. There it goes, slap into the middle of the goal – SEVEN. Cann’s header there – EIGHT. The ball comes out to Britton. Britton manoeuvres. The centre goes right in – BACK TO EIGHT. Comes on to Marshall – SIX’ (an extract from the BBC commentary on the 1933 Cup Final between Everton and Manchester City). The idea had largely been abandoned by 1940. Against this proposition is the fact that square ‘one’ was nowhere near the beginning. The game began at the centre spot, which was at the meeting point of squares three, four, five and six. On the other hand, when the ball was passed to the goal-keeper (an event far commoner than a re-start after a goal), then this would indeed have been ‘back to square one’ (though, equally, two, seven or eight). Indeed, Partridge/Catch Phrases prefers an earlier origin in the children’s game of hopscotch or in the board game Snakes and Ladders. If a player was unlucky and his or her counter landed on the snake’s head in Square 97 or thereabouts, it had to make the long journey ‘back to square one’.

(ah, well,) back to the drawing-board! Meaning ‘We’ve got to start again from scratch’, this is usually said after the original plan has been aborted. It is just possible this phrase began life in the caption to a cartoon by Peter Arno that appeared in The New Yorker (3 January 1941). An official, with a rolled-up engineering plan under his arm, is walking away from a recently crashed plane and saying: ‘Well, back to the old drawing board.’

back to the jungle A return to primitive conditions, nearly always used figuratively (as in ‘a return to the Dark Ages’). Winston Churchill, in a speech about post-Revolution Russia on 3 January 1920, referred to a recent visitor to that country: ‘Colonel John Ward…has seen these things for many months with his own eyes…[and] has summed all up in one biting, blasting phrase – “Back to the jungle”.’

back to the land The cry ‘Back to the land!’ was first heard at the end of the 19th century when it was realized that the Industrial Revolution and the transfer of the population towards non-agricultural work had starved farming of labour. From The Times (25 October 1894): ‘All present were interested in the common practice that it was desirable, if possible, to bring the people back to the land.’ At about this time, a Wickham Market farmer wrote to Sir Henry Rider Haggard, who was making an inventory of the decline, published as Rural England (1902): ‘The labourers “back to the land”. That is the cry of the press and the fancy of the people. Well, I do not think that they will ever come back; certainly no legislation will ever bring them. Some of the rising generation may be induced to stay, but it will be by training them to the use of machinery and paying them higher wages. It should be remembered that the most intelligent men have gone: these will never come back, but the rising generation may stay as competition in the town increases, and the young men of the country are better paid.’ By 1905, the Spectator (23 December) was saying: ‘“Back-to-the-land” is a cry full not only of pathos, but of cogency.’ In the 1970s, a British TV comedy series was called Backs to the Land, playing on the phrase to provide an innuendo about its heroines – ‘Land Girls’, members of the Women’s Land Army conscripted to work on the land during the Second World War (though the WLA had first been established in the First World War.)

(either) back us or sack us From a speech by James Callaghan, when British Prime Minister, at the Labour Party Conference (5 October 1977). This became a format phrase in British politics, usually spoken by an individual rather than a whole government. From The Independent (25 October 1989): ‘The Chancellor of the Exchequer [Nigel Lawson] was last night challenged by the Opposition to stand up to the Prime Minister, say “Back me or sack me” and end confusion over who is running the economy…“It is time to say (to the Prime Minister) either back me or sack me”…Mr Smith said.’ Compare PUT UP OR SHUT UP.

bacon See BRING HOME THE.

bad See ANYONE WHO; CAN’T BE.

bad egg See GOOD EGG.

badger See BALD AS A.

(a) bad hair day A day on which you feel depressed, possibly because – as it used to be put – you ‘can’t do a thing’ with your hair. American origin, early 1990s. ‘I’m fine, but you’re obviously having a bad hair day’ – line delivered by Kristy Swanson in the film Buffy, The Vampire Slayer (US 1992); ‘“Having a bad hair day”, in the fastchanging slang favoured by Californian teenagers, is how you feel when you don’t want to leave the house: out of sorts, ugly and a bit depressed…having a bad hair day is meant to be a metaphor for a bad mood’ – The Daily Telegraph (19 December 1992); ‘The Chanel public relations director is having what Manhattanites describe as a bad hair day. But, somewhat perversely, she is quite enjoying herself’ – The Times (13 January 1993); ‘[Hillary Clinton] stopped saying “two-fer-one” and “vote for him, you get me” – but still, one bad hair day was following the next. Soon she started making jokes about it with her campaign staff. “How ‘bout it?” she’d say. “Another bad hair day?”’ – The Guardian (19 January 1993).

bah, humbug! Dismissive catchphrase, derived from Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Stave 1 (1843): ‘“Bah,” said Scrooge. “Humbug!”’ Ebenezer Scrooge, an old curmudgeon, userer and miser, has this view of the Christmas spirit until frightened into changing his ways by the appearance of visions and a ghost. The derivation of the word ‘humbug’ meaning ‘deception, sham’ is uncertain but it suddenly came into vogue circa 1750.

(a) baker’s dozen Thirteen. In use by the 16th century, this phrase may have originated with the medieval baker’s habit of giving away an extra loaf with every twelve to avoid being fined for providing underweight produce. The surplus was known as ‘inbread’ and the thirteenth loaf, the ‘vantage loaf’. A devil’s dozen is also thirteen – the number of witches who would gather when summoned by the devil.

(the) balance of power The promotion of peace through parity of strength in rival groups – an expression used by the British Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, in the House of Commons (13 February 1741). Safire (1978) states that the phrase had earlier been used in international diplomacy by 1700. Initially, the phrase appears to have been ‘the balance of power in Europe’. In 1715, Alexander Pope wrote a poem with the title ‘The Balance of Europe’: ‘Now Europe’s balanc’d, neither side prevails; / For nothing’s left in either of the scales.’

bald See FIGHT BETWEEN.

(as) bald as a badger/bandicoot/coot Completely bald. ‘Bald as a coot’ has been known since 1430. The aquatic coot, known as the bald coot, has the appearance of being bald. The Australian marsupial, the bandicoot, is not bald but is presumably evoked purely for the alliteration and because the basic ‘coot’ expression is being alluded to. As for badger, the full expression is ‘bald as a badger’s bum’. There was once a belief that bristles for shaving brushes were plucked from this area. Christy Brown, Down All the Days (1970), has, rather, ‘bald as a baby’s bum’.

bald-headed See GO AT SOMETHING.

(Mr) Balfour’s poodle A reference to the House of Lords. David Lloyd George spoke in the House of Commons on 26 June 1907 in the controversy over the power of the upper house. He questioned the Lords’ role as a ‘watchdog’ of the constitution and suggested that A. J. Balfour, the Conservative leader, was using the party’s majority in the upper chamber to block legislation by the Liberal government (in which Lloyd George was President of the Board of Trade). He said: ‘[The House of Lords] is the leal and trusty mastiff which is to watch over our interests, but which runs away at the first snarl of the trade unions. A mastiff? It is the Right Honourable Gentleman’s poodle. It fetches and carries for him. It bites anybody that he sets it on to.’ Hence, all subsequent ‘—’s poodle’ jibes usually applied to one politician’s (or government’s) subservience to another. ‘Ninety per cent of respondents feared military action against Baghdad would result in more September 11-style attacks on the West, while 54 per cent thought it fair to describe Mr Blair as “Bush’s poodle”’ – The Age (Australia) (13 August 2002).