Allens dictionary of english phrases

Some phrases closely associated with him or regarded as his inventions are also found in the work of his contemporaries and in some cases precede his use; a notable example is nip in the

978-0-14-191768-9

For Alison

This book is intended to fill a major gap in the record of the English language It offers, forthe first time on this scale, a scholarly and systematic treatment of thousands of idiomaticphrases that play a crucial role in modern spoken and written English, and seeks to provide acomprehensive picture of their use and history If words are the building blocks of language,then phrases are the walls and windows, providing a shape and structure and allowing thedaylight of metaphor and imagery into the darkened rooms of everyday language

The treatment of phrases in the major historical dictionaries is far less rigorous than thecoverage of individual words; many are given with a sketchy or incomplete record or aremerged into the ordinary senses of words, and some are not included at all There are manybooks of idioms, cliches, and catchphrases, all invariably entertaining but falling well short of

a complete narrative and making little attempt to go beyond conventional anecdote to tracethe history and usage of phrases in systematic ways, which is a key feature of this book Nor,generally, do they provide evidence in the form of quotations in support of their history anddevelopment, except opportunistically and spasmodically There have been more scholarly

Compiling this book has taken several years and involved considerable amounts of originalinvestigation Assembling the list of phrases to be treated was the simplest part of the task, assuch lists exist in other places and can easily be collated and then edited into a coherent

form More important, as with all historical lexicography, is the reading of primary sources(chiefly fiction, drama, and poetry, but also biography and other works of non-fiction) toestablish what really exists in the language and at what dates This evidence of actual usage isthe life-blood of any treatment of the language Many phrases can be traced back to older

forms of English, even to Anglo-Saxon, and some (such as busy as a bee and be at one’s

wits’end) are found in Chaucer and other writers of the period after the Norman Conquest

known as Middle English References to Shakespeare in this book run into several hundred, as

do those to the Authorized Version of the Bible (1611) The rise of the novel in the late 18thand 19th centuries provided a vehicle for the rapid spread of very many phrases that are now

in the context of his time Some phrases closely associated with him or regarded as his

inventions are also found in the work of his contemporaries and in some cases precede his

use; a notable example is nip in the bud, which we owe to John Fletcher and Thomas Dekker and not to Shakespeare (who uses it in the form blasted in the bud) Other phrases (such as

In the Introduction I have explained the principles that underlie the choice of material

included Despite these attempts to establish boundaries to keep the book within manageableproportions, the reader will find a fair number of entries that defy the selection principles as Ihave outlined them I have usually included them because I could not resist it Serendipityand personal idiosyncrasy help to make a book like this – and language in general – a lotmore interesting and a lot more fun

I should like to thank all those who helped me to write this book, and to improve earlier

establishing chronology and tracking down early uses of phrases, and Rosalind Fergusson,who copy-edited the book and brought greater order to a mass of detailed information Anyremaining inconsistencies or errors are entirely my fault I am also very grateful for the

support and encouragement of the publishers, especially Nigel Wilcockson and Sophie Lazar.Everyone involved in the project became aware of how much the book represents work inprogress and can never be the last word I am sure there are readers who will have

suggestions and improvements to offer, and theseespecially when backed up by evidence –will always be welcome Please write to the publisher at the address on the title verso

Robert Allen Edinburgh 2006

For the paperback reprint I have taken the opportunity to make a few routine corrections tothe text, to enter an occasional antedating, and to add a few phrases that came into

prominence a little too late for the original edition, including ahead of the curve and the

elephant in the room.

Edinburgh 2008

total metaphor, as with a red herring, a rule of thumb, and the bee’s knees), and not when they

are relatively static and usually comparatively transparent in meaning or based on the

figurative meaning of a single word (as with war baby and pearls of wisdom).

Most of the idioms we are concerned with here are productive, that is to say they can befitted into sentences and altered as necessary in functional ways to suit the context in which

A recurring feature of the phrases included here is, as we have seen, that their meaningscannot be explained in terms of their constituent words This aspect is not, however, an

absolute: some phrases are more understandable than others, and what we are dealing withhere is a spectrum of transparency At one end of the spectrum are phrases that are totallyopaque – that is to say, an individual who did not know them would have no idea of whatthey meant by analysing their content and in many cases might be struck by their literal

absurdity: bite the bullet, bury the hatchet, give somebody the cold shoulder, off the cuff, go Dutch,

no hard feelings, sit on the fence, pull one’s finger out, fly off the handle, lead somebody up the garden path, and lose one’s head A fair number of idiomatic phrases are based on words or

transparency of some of these phrases depends on knowledge about the real world: anyone

who knows how a football game is played might be able to work out what move the goalposts means, and a corresponding situation arises with throw in the towel, which is an image from boxing But a sporting ignoramus would remain baffled Contrast these with bite the bullet and

fly off the handle, from the ‘opaque’ group, where no amount of special knowledge will lead to

an explanation Indeed, special knowledge might lead one astray in the matter of ‘losing one’shead’, which is the traditional fate of traitors in a very literal sense Some phrases are now

better known for their generalized meanings than for their technical origins, for example in

the offing, one of many idioms to do with the sea (the offing is the part of the horizon in which

ships are visible and therefore shortly to put into harbour) I was struck during the writing ofthis book by the large number of phrases that have nautical origins: as well as those already

allusive uses Many phrases based on Shakespeare, for example, first appear as late as the

19th century, some three hundred years after his works became known This is true of be cruel

to be kind and this mortal coil (both from Hamlet), one’s pound of flesh (from The Merchant of

dates normally given in these cases are of the allusive uses, and only exceptionally of theoriginal use (for example, in cases where this does not differ markedly in form or sense fromthe later uses)

Some other special kinds of phrase are worth mentioning as they form an important part of

the picture These include set similes (e.g as drunk as a lord, as merry as a grig, etc) and

proverbs (phrases that give advice or state a general truth, e.g if you can’t beat them, join them and the end justifies the means) The principle I have followed in including proverbs has been

to concentrate on those that have given rise to truncated allusive free forms, often with the

free form itself as the heading (as with be an early bird, which alludes to the proverb the early

bird gets the worm, and count one’s chickens, which originates in the admonition don’t count your chickens until they are hatched) Thirdly there are catchphrases, fairly rigid phrases that

allude to well-known historical events and to areas of public life such as literature,

entertainment, sport, and politics: examples include cut the Gordian knot (associated with

Alexander the Great), like Caesar’s wife (Pompeia), meet one’s Waterloo (the fate of Napoleon), and in more recent times flavour of the month (derived from American marketing of ice cream

in the 1940s), be economical with the truth (a euphemism for lying, redolent of the Thatcher years in Britain), and don’t ask, don’t tell (denoting tolerance in moral behaviour, from the end

of the 20th century)

The phrases mentioned so far are predominantly based on metaphor, drawing on imagesfrom the real world Others, which for our purposes belong to a different class of phrase, aremore abstract, not drawing at all on physical images but using basic function words in special

ways, often in ways that do not conform to the normal patterns of English (for example, stay

put) Within this class are many transparent formulae of the type by all means, I’m sorry to say, more or less, etc, which are idiomatic and fit the criteria of fixedness but have no special

literature of the century in which the phrase first occurs in a form now recognizable Where Ihave been unable to trace material of my own, I have (with permission) used quotations

given in the Oxford English Dictionary or other published sources Other material has been drawn from language databases, including the British National Corpus (a collection of about

100 million words of printed and spoken British English of many kinds made by a number of

academic institutions) and the Chadwyck Healey database Literature Online A small amount

of material has been sent in by contributors, to whom I am most grateful

The most important and familiar authors, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens,and Hardy, are cited by surname alone; others are given with first names or initials to enableidentification Chaucer, who lived from c1343 to 1400, is cited without specific dates fromthe Riverside edition (Oxford, 1988), and Shakespeare from the Oxford text edited by Wellsand Taylor (second edition, 2005) References to the Bible are to the Authorized Version of

1611 unless another edition (such as the New English Bible) is specified Older English

spellings have been modernized when necessary to aid comprehension or avoid confusion,and glosses in square brackets have been added to quotations to explain words that will not

be familiar to most readers In 17th and 18th century printing, common nouns were oftengiven initial capital letters; these have been modified in places to conform with modern

practice

It might be helpful to add a few words on some of the less well-known early sources thatare cited throughout the book In particular, English versions of the Bible formed a key

English poem Piers Plowman, a work attributed to William Langland (about whom very little

is known), is an allegorical series of dream visions narrated by ‘Will’, which describe the

progress of the ploughman Piers to serenity and salvation It was written down in the secondhalf of the 14th century

Phrases by their nature defy a rational ordering, and no arrangement has been found thatsatisfies everybody In this book, they are grouped for convenience under keywords Thekeyword chosen is normally the most significant word in the phrase, where such a word can

Variants and alternative words are shown by means of parentheses and slashes, so that (for

example) put on / give oneself airs (and graces) embodies the forms put on airs, put on airs

and graces, give oneself airs, and give oneself airs and graces Set similes are normally entered at

the first word, so that (as) bold as brass is given at BOLD But (as) merry/lively as a grig will

be found at GRIG because neither merry nor lively is a stable element in the phrase.

Cross-references are given at the ends of entries to direct readers who look in the wrongplace: for example, anyone looking for rain cats and dogs at the entry foror RAIN will be

redirected to the entry for CAT In these references, the target keyword is given in small

the ones given in The New Penguin Encyclopedia (2003 edition).

from one place to another, representing a whole journey from the starting-point (A) to thedestination (B) Occasionally used figuratively about lengthy tasks and ventures that are

as an equal.

aback

be taken aback

to be surprised or disconcerted Aback is an Old English word meaning ‘backward’, ‘to the rear’, and survives in modern English only in this phrase: earlier phrases, such as hold aback

(as) easy/simple as ABC

very easy or straightforward The use of ABC to mean the alphabet as a whole dates from Middle English, and expressions such as know one’s ABC and learn one’s ABC are found from

influenced each other and affected the main meaning we are concerned with here 19th cent.

J H Ingraham The Gipsy of the Highlands 1843

Paul’s intimacy with Duncan Powell, had early initiated him into the first steps of dissipation; and, by bringing him into the social circle of young men, whom his humble condition would prevent him from afterwards associating with, inspired him with ideas above himself and his circumstances, which would prevent him from engaging, with proper feelings, in the pursuit for which his mother designed him.

reference is to the Old Testament father of the Hebrews, and ancestor of the three great

religions that profess one God (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) In the Genesis account hewas born in the Sumerian town of Ur (of the Chaldees) in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), andmoved with his family to the city of Mari on the Euphrates and then on to the promised land

of Canaan 18th cent.

Thomas Holcroft The Adventures of Hugh Trevor 1794

You may guzzle wine here, but you shall want a drop of water to cool your tongue hereafter! You may guttle, while righteous Lazarus is lying at your gate But wait a little! He shall soon lie in Abraham’s bosom, while you shall roast on the devil’s great gridiron, and be seasoned just to his tooth!

absence

absence makes the heart grow fonder

(proverb) one becomes nostalgically fond of a person or place after a period of separation.The sentiment can be found as early as the 1st cent bc in a poem by the Roman poet

Propertius (Elegies ii.xxxiii): semper in absentes felicior aestus amantes (‘Passion is always

stronger in absent lovers’) In English the phrase appears as a line in a mid 19th cent song

‘The Isle of Beauty’ by T Haynes Bayly (1797-1839) The emotional effects of absence feature

in much earlier writing, e.g a 16th cent source offers the assurance that ‘Absence works

‘nothing was able to add more to [affection] than absence’ But contrary notions are alsofound: ‘three things there be that hinder love, that’s absence, fear, and shame’ (W Averell,

absolutely

absolutely fabulous

excellent, first-class: representing an upper-class utterance, often used ironically The phrasewas given prominence as the title of a television sitcom broadcast from 1992 and featuring apair of women friends who behave outrageously, one an ostentatiously neurotic and sociallyaspiring PR agent, the other a hard-drinking chain-smoking mutton-dressed-as-lamb type

Samuel Beckett in Vogue 1970

People look unhappy here [New York]… It is the weight of every man’s fear and emptiness that produces this look Somewhere he

must know that self-perception is the most frightening of all human observations He must know that when man faces himself, he is looking into the abyss.

favourite expression of Charles Dickens, who used it in varying forms in Pickwick Papers

(1837), Dombey and Son (1848), and David Copperfield (1850: see below).

Richard Graves The Spiritual Quixote 1773

‘A whole heap of soot has fallen down into the fishkettle, and entirely spoiled the carps I very providentially caught up the loin of veal upon the spit; or else that would have been covered with dust and ashes.’ ‘Well, well,’ (says Mr Slicer) ‘accidents will happen;

a chapter of accidents

a series of unfortunate events or mishaps: from an earlier (18th cent.) phrase the chapter of

accidents meaning ‘the unpredictable way events unfold’ It is the heading of a chapter in Sir

Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), and of a section of Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) 19th cent.

He was reckoning without that chapter of accidents that was to make this night memorable above all others in his career.

more by accident than design

by chance rather than deliberately: also in variant forms The two words occur together incontrastive form from the 18th cent

Henry Fielding The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild 1743

I rejected them often with the utmost Indignation, till at last, casting my eye, rather by accident than design, on a diamond

necklace, a thought, like lightning, shot through my mind, and, in an instant, I remembered, that this was the very necklace you had sold the cursed Count, the cause of all our misfortunes.

not in any circumstances 18th cent.

Fanny Burney Cecilia 1782

The physician declined giving any positive opinion, but, having written a prescription, only repeated the injunction of the surgeon, that she should be kept extremely quiet, and on no account be suffered to talk.

take account of something / take something into account

to consider something as a factor when making a decision 16th cent.

Brian Melbancke Philotimus 1583

Philotimus began to recounte Archaretos his letters, & to take account of his passed life, howe he should deserve his passing goodwill.

Ace originally denoted the one on a dice, and was later extended to refer to a playing card

which has the numerical value of ‘one’ but often ranks highest of all This ambiguous status ofthe ace in cards has led to two strands of idiom, its low nominal value giving rise to phrasesassociated with misfortune or bad luck (it occurs in this sense in Chaucer), and its high valuebeing reflected in more recent idioms as the dominant underlying meaning The latter is

version to a cardsharp keeping a card literally up his sleeve, and in the second to stud poker,

in which a card is kept face down until after the betting is completed, and then turned over inthe hope of its being an ace The phrase is alluded to in the title of a novel by Annie Proulx,

That Old Ace in the Hole (2002) Early 20th cent.

M Ondaatje In the Skin of a Lion 1987

There was always, he thought, this pleasure ahead of him, an ace of joy up his sleeve so he could say you can do anything to me, take everything away, put me in prison.

have/hold all the aces

to have all the advantages Late 20th cent.

The Times 1985

Bairn, runner-up to Shaweed in the 2,000 Guineas and the fluent winner of the St James’s Palace Stakes at Ascot, went smoothly into the lead a quarter of a mile out but it was immediately obvious that Starkey was holding all the aces in the shape of

presidential phone call.

Within an ace of something

on the point of something, very close to something 18th cent.

Thomas Brown Amusements Serious and Comical 1700

Their rashness makes me tremble, when I see brute heavy beasts hurry through so many streets, and run upon slippery uneven stones, where the least false step brings them within an ace of death.

Achilles

Achilles’ heel / Achilles heel

a single vulnerable spot or weakness The allusion is to the story of the Greek hero Achilles,who was dipped into the River Styx by his mother Thetis to render him invulnerable But thewater did not cover the heel by which she held him, and it was in this spot that he was fatallywounded by an arrow fired by the Trojan Paris Early figurative uses of the phrase (which issurprisingly recent) referred to Ireland in relation to Britain (Coleridge) and divorce in

relation to marriage (G B Shaw) It was deplored by George Orwell in 1946 as a ‘lump of

verbal refuse’: see the acid test The Achilles’ tendon, which connects the heel and calf, carries the same allusion 19th cent.

Anna Cora Ritchie Armand 1855

Ah! you touch us nearly when you talk of her! Our love for the ‘illusive sex’ – for such we deem them – is our Achilles’ heel – our vulnerable point!

acid

Francis Bacon, in his natural history miscellany Sylva Sylvarum (1627), described sorrel as ‘a cold and acid herb’, an adjectival use of acid that predates the noun The chemical meaning is first recorded in Phillips’ Dictionary of 1696 but it does not appear in a real context until the

early 18th cent The 1960s slang use relating to the drug LSD underlies some modern uses

acid house

extremely loud repetitive music produced originally by sampling existing songs and featuringstrong complex percussion patterns; such music is played at gatherings often associated with

Orwell in his uncompromising article Politics and the English Language (first published in the periodical Horizon in 1946 and reprinted in several collections of his essays) included it

among the ‘verbal refuse’ – along with Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, and other phrases – that should be consigned ‘to the dustbin where it belongs’ Early 20th cent.

put the acid on somebody

Australian, informal to apply pressure on somebody for a favour The connection, if any, with acid test is uncertain Early 20th cent.

acquaintance

make the acquaintance (of somebody)

to come to know somebody (replacing take acquaintance with, which referred to knowledge of people and things) 18th cent.

Fanny Burney Camilla 1796

She then spoke of the ball, public breakfast, and raffle; chatting both upon persons and things with, an easy gaiety, and sprightly negligence, extremely amusing to Camilla, and which soon, in despight of the unwillingness with which she had entered her house, brought back her original propensity to make the acquaintance, and left no regret for what Lionel had done.

scrape (an) acquaintance with somebody

to become acquainted with somebody with difficulty or by making great efforts 17th cent.

John Dunton A Voyage Round the World 1691

Ben’t earth and heaven enough, that thou must go | To view the kingdoms of the world below; | Both of thy pockets and thy self take care, | For sholes of booksellers will scrape acquaintance there.

See also be on nodding terms / have a nodding acquaintance with somebody at nod.

acre

programme of entertainment’ which is the basis of some of the phrases below The verb is17th cent.

as the actress said to the bishop

used to suggest a sexual innuendo or ambiguity in an innocent remark The phrase also

appears in the reverse form as the bishop said to the actress, without any apparent difference of nuance Mid 20th cent.

the obstinately bad side of human nature, in Christian theology represented by the first Adamwhereas Christ was the second Adam and redeemer (Romans 6:6 ‘Knowing this, that our old

man is crucified with him [Christ]’) In the first scene of Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599), which

is a conversation about the King between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely,Canterbury declares (1.i.28-30) that ‘at that very moment [i.e his father’s death] |

Consideration like an angel came | And whipped th’ offending Adam out of him’ 19th cent.

Walter Besant Dorothy Forster 1884

Yet I confess to you, Miss Dorothy, that there have been moments, before Mr Forster came of age, when I have had a vehement yearning upon me to put on, as I may say, the old Adam That temptation has now disappeared.

add

See add fuel to the fire; add insult to injury.

Harrison Ainsworth (1827) and of a play (1902) by J M Barrie about a butler named Crichtonwho assumes responsibility when the household is shipwrecked (filmed in the UK in 1918 and

1957) 19th cent.

Trollope The Prime Minister 1876

‘I rather fancy I picked up more Greek and Latin at Bohn than I should have got here, had I stuck to nothing else.’ ‘I dare say; – I dare say You may be an Admirable Crichton for what I know.’

ado

without further/more ado

without any delay or pause for consideration Ado, which is a northern dialect form of to do,

dates from Middle English in the sense ‘business’ or ‘fuss’ (and in the Authorized Version ofthe Bible (1611), e.g at Mark 5:39 ‘Why make ye this ado and weep?’) It occurs from the

more effective in protecting friends and frightening off enemies 19th cent.

I tell you, then, that if Mrs Malcolm has thrown herself under the ágis of the revolution, I may hunt out where she is, but to bring her back I cannot give a pledge Is it understood?

in modern societies The phrase has been subject to irreverent variation, notably as the

effluent society in a poem of 1964 called ‘Never So Good’ by Stan Gooch Mid 20th cent.

G Pearson Hooligan 1983

What is altogether remarkable is the way in which these rough working-class youths who donned Ted suits in the 1950s, and slicked back their hair in a greasy imitation of Elvis Presley, could be mistaken for the children of the ‘affluent society’.

‘No, he suspects nothing; he’s disguised as a farmer.’ ‘Disguised as a farmer – here, and suspects nothing.’ ‘He’s after me, then – and only me.’ ‘Do your own revenge then, Jack.’

be after doing something

1 Anglo-Irish to have just done something The phrase is derived from a construction in Irish

Gaelic, in which the preposition ar (= after) is used with the verb be and a verbal noun to express the perfect tense; in its Anglicized form he’s after dying means ‘he’s died’ 19th cent.

Do you think the Inspection would have let this aircraft fly if there was any danger of that sort of thing? Be your age.

age before beauty

young people should give precedence to their elders Usually as a humorous or casual remarkwhen holding a door open for somebody (not necessarily older) or yielding the right of way.The phrase pays a compliment to the person giving precedence The corollary sometimes

found is the dog follows its master, and an anecdote attributes to the American writer and wit

Dorothy Parker the retort ‘pearls before swine’, although this is thought to be apocryphal

Eric Partridge (A Dictionary of Catch Phrases, 1977), defined the phrase in a way that is not

now familiar (‘a girl’s mock courtesy addressed to an old – or, at best, an elderly – man’) and

to get herself selected by a committee which normally has a preponderance of men ‘Quite often there is a hidden agenda, and the ideal is a married man, 35-plus with two children.’

Guardian 1984

The Minister for the Arts… has delayed the issuing of an export licence to give a British public collection a chance to match the valuation – £436,800 He has already embargoed the export of 12 drawings valued at about £13 million, from the Duke’s

collection The latest embargo piles on the agony for the British Museum and other bodies anxious to keep the drawings in this country.

prolong the agony

to make an unpleasant situation or experience last longer than is necessary Mid 20th cent.

The Times 1985

Mr Gow… could not support the Government’s change of policy on Northern Ireland That change, including the involvement of the foreign power in a consultative role in the administration of the province, ‘will prolong and not diminish the agony of Ulster’, Mr Gow said.

Stephanie Howard Miracles Can Happen 1992

Was she actually planning to aid and abet him in this unexpected, meaningless sexual dalliance?

British, informal what is the purpose of this idea, activity, etc? The phrase in aid of (=

supporting) dates from the 18th cent., and the present phrase is recorded from the mid 20thcent

and romantic variants of the phrase: see also get / lead somebody to the ALTAR 19th cent.

H is 19th cent An earlier form ache, with play on the more familiar word of that spelling, dates from about 1600 19th cent.

alar(u)ms and excursions