A Word In Your Shell-Like. Nigel Rees

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СКАЧАТЬ Robin.’ The Birds of the Air is the title of a novel (1980) by Alice Thomas Ellis. A variant is ‘fowl(s) of the air’ (Genesis 1:26), though much more commonly one finds ‘fowls of the heavens’ in (mostly) the Old Testament. The ‘fish(es) of the sea’ occurs at least three times in the Old Testament (e.g. Genesis 1:26). ‘All the beasts of the forest’ is biblical, too (Psalms 104:20), though more frequent is beasts of the field (e.g. Psalms 8:7).

      birth pangs Denoting initial difficulties in any sphere of activity, as though comparable to those experienced when a mother gives birth. Date of origin unknown. ‘The inevitable transformation of universities everywhere into “multi-versities” is being achieved with appalling birth pangs in the University of California’ – The Guardian (30 November 1968); ‘The boom in DIY retailing in the 1980s had been fuelled by the growth in home ownership and the number of house moves. Once that engine was switched off, retail price wars and “20pc off everything” promotions followed. Do It All, still in its painful birth pangs, was thrust into the firing line’ – The Daily Telegraph (7 May 1994).

      bishop See AS THE BISHOP; BASH THE; DO YOU KNOW.

      Bisto See AHH!

      bitch See EVERY DOG.

      (the) bitch-goddess Success This phrase was coined by the American psychologist William James (1842–1910) in a letter to H. G. Wells (11 September 1906): ‘The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That – with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success – is our national disease.’ In Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), D. H. Lawrence uses the term ‘bitch-goddess Success’ on no fewer than ten occasions – and then attributes it to William James’s brother, Henry…

      (to) bite the bullet Meaning, ‘to face up to adversity with courage’. The phrase probably derives from the days of field surgery in battle before anaesthesia was available. A wounded man would literally be given a bullet to bite on to distract him from the pain. ‘Brace up and bite the bullet. I’m afraid I’ve bad news for you’ – P. G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves, Chap. 2 (1923).

      bite the dust See KICK THE BUCKET.

      bitter See ALL.

      (the) bitter end Meaning, ‘the last extremity; the absolute limit’, and a common phrase by the mid-19th century. Bitterness doesn’t really enter into it: the nautical ‘bitt’ is a bollard on the deck of a ship around which cables and ropes are wound. The end of the cable that is wrapped round or otherwise secured to the bollard is the ‘bitter end’. On the other hand, ends have – for possibly longer – been described as bitter in other senses. Proverbs 5:4 has: ‘But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword’. ‘The rather shallow stretch of water we call “la Manche” has always masked a gaping chasm of a different sort – between the island and the Continent (what a strange word!) in general, and France in particular. Right to the bitter end, some island fundamentalists have feared that the tunnel will bring some foreign plague or other, be it rabies, frogs’ legs or garlic’ – The Guardian (6 May 1994); ‘The maverick anti-Maastricht MP, Denzil Davies, indicated that he would continue fighting for nominations until the bitter end. The former Treasury minister and MP for Llanelli is not expected to attract more than a handful’ – The Independent (16 June 1994).

      bitter experience An inevitable pairing of words. Date of origin unknown. A cliché by the 1920s/30s and listed in The Independent (24 December 1994) as a cliché of newspaper editorials. ‘Breeders know from bitter experience that matings do not always “nick” and that…they are sure to suffer many a disappointment’ – The Daily Telegraph (4 January 1971); ‘The bitter experience of 1960 affected Nixon deeply. Watergate was born in the way the Kennedys and the Kennedy money treated him then. Nobody was ever going to cheat him again’ – The Scotsman (2 May 1994); ‘The battery alone in my laptop weighs just marginally less than the combined weight of a Psion computer and modem – and I know from bitter experience you always have to carry at least one spare battery’ – Lloyd’s List (28 June 1994).

      black See ANY COLOUR; AS BLACK.

      (the) blackboard jungle One of several phrases that suggest that there are urban areas where the ‘law of the jungle’ may apply – in this case, the educational system. The Blackboard Jungle was the title of a novel (1954; film US 1955) by Evan Hunter. Earlier, there had been W. R. Burnett’s novel The Asphalt Jungle (1949), though OED2 finds that phrase in use in 1920. A little later, in 1969, came references to ‘the concrete jungle’.

      (a) black box After a plane crash there is usually a scramble to retrieve the aircraft’s ‘black box’ – or, more properly, its ‘flight data recorder’. This contains detailed recordings of the aircraft’s performance prior to the crash and can be of value in determining what went wrong. The name has been used since the Second World War. Originally it was RAF slang for a box containing intricate navigational equipment. Flight recorders are in fact orange so as to be more easily seen. The popular name arose probably because black is a more mysterious colour, appropriate for a box containing ‘secret’ equipment (Pye produced a record player with the name in the 1950s) and because of the alliteration.

      black-coated workers Referring to prunes as laxatives, this term, of earlier origin, was popularized from 1941 onwards in an early-morning BBC programme The Kitchen Front by the ‘Radio Doctor’, Charles (later Lord) Hill. He noted in his autobiography, Both Sides of the Hill (1964): ‘I remember calling on the Principal Medical Officer of the Board of Education…At the end of the interview this shy and solemn man diffidently suggested that the prune was a blackcoated worker and that this phrase might be useful to me. It was.’ Earlier, the diarist MP Chips Channon was using the phrase in a literal sense concerning the clerical and professional class when he wrote (8 April 1937): ‘The subject was “Widows and Orphans”, the Old Age Pensions Bill, a measure which affects Southend and its black-coated workers’ – Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon, ed. Robert Rhodes James (1967).

      (the) black dog Used notably by Winston Churchill to describe the fits of depression to which he was sometimes subjected, this is an old phrase. It was known by the late 18th century, as in the country/nursery saying about a sullen child: ‘The black dog is on his back’. Brewer (1894) has the alternative, ‘a black dog has walked over him’. The reference here is to the devil, as in J. B. Priestley’s The Good Companions (1929): ‘He [Jess Oakroyd] was troubled by a vague foreboding. It was just as if a demoniac black dog went trotting everywhere at his heels.’ A perfect explanation appears in a letter from Samuel Johnson to Mrs Thrale (28 June 1783): ‘The black Dog I hope always to resist, and in time to drive though I am deprived of almost all those that used to help me…Mrs Allen is dead…Mrs Williams is so weak that she can be a companion no longer. When I rise my breakfast is solitary, the black dog waits to share it…’

      black dwarf See POISONED CHALICE.

      Black Friday Originally this was a description of Good Friday, when clergymen wore dark vestments. However, there have been any number of specific ‘Black Fridays’ so designated. In Britain, on one such day (15 April 1921), certain trade unions withdrew support from the hard-pressed miners, a general strike was cancelled, and this is recalled in the Labour movement as a day of betrayal. In the USA, the ‘first’ Black Friday was on 24 September 1929 when panic broke out on the stock market. During the Wall Street crash there were similarly a Black Wednesday, a Black Thursday – the actual day of the crash – and a Black СКАЧАТЬ