A Word In Your Shell-Like. Nigel Rees

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СКАЧАТЬ blind man on a galloping horse could see that It is very obvious indeed. Swift has ‘a blind man would be glad to see that’ in Polite Conversation (1738), and Apperson finds ‘A blind man on a galloping horse would be glad to see it’ by 1894. Former Beatle Paul McCartney on the similarity between the sound of the Fab Four and the much later group Oasis: ‘You would have to be a blind man on a galloping horse not to see it’ – quoted by the Press Association (5 September 1996). Compare the Australianism even blind Freddie could see that, for what is blindingly obvious, a phrase since the 1930s.

      (a) blinking idiot Term of abuse where ‘blinking’ is a euphemism for ‘bloody’. However, Shakespeare coined the phrase in The Merchant of Venice, II.ix.54 (1596), where the Prince of Arragon opens the silver casket and exclaims: ‘What’s here? the portrait of a blinking idiot / Presenting me a schedule.’ This is probably a more literal suggestion of an idiot whose eyes blink as a token of his madness.

      bliss beyond compare See OH JOY.

      block See CHIP OFF THE OLD.

      (a) blonde bombshell A journalistic cliché now used to describe any (however vaguely) blonde woman but especially if she has a dynamic personality and is a film star, show business figure or model. In June 1975, Margo Macdonald complained of being described by the Daily Mirror as ‘the blonde bombshell MP’ who ‘hits the House of Commons today’. The original was Jean Harlow, who appeared in the 1933 US film Bombshell. In the UK – presumably so as not to suggest that it was a war film – the title was changed to Blonde Bombshell.

      blondes See IS IT TRUE.

      blood all over the walls See SHIT HITS.

      (through) blood and fire Motto of the Salvation Army, founded by General William Booth in 1878. The conjunction of blood and fire has appropriate biblical origins. In Joel 2:30, God says: ‘And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke.’

      blood and iron When Bismarck addressed the Budget Commission of the Prussian House of Delegates on 30 September 1862, what he said was: ‘It is desirable and it is necessary that the condition of affairs in Germany and of her constitutional relations should be improved; but this cannot be accomplished by speeches and resolutions of a majority, but only by iron and blood [Eisen und Blut].’ On 28 January 1886, speaking to the Prussian House of Deputies, he did, however, use the words in the more familiar order: ‘This policy cannot succeed through speeches, and shooting-matches and songs; it can only be carried out through blood and iron [Blut und Eisen].’ The words may have achieved their more familiar order, at least to English ears, through their use by A. C. Swinburne in his poem ‘A Word for the Country’ (1884): ‘Not with dreams, but with blood and with iron, shall a nation be moulded at last.’ (Eric Partridge, while identifying this source correctly in A Dictionary of Clichés, 1966 edn, ascribes the authorship to Tennyson.) On the other hand, the Roman orator Quintillian (1st century AD) used the exact phrase sanguinem et ferrum.

      blood and sand Blood and Sand was the title of a silent film (US 1922) starring Rudolph Valentino as a matador. It was adapted from a play with the title by Tom Cushing, in turn adapted from a novel about bullfighting, Sangre y Arena (which means the same thing) by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. It was later re-made with Tyrone Power (US 1941).

      blood and thunder Bloodshed and violence – especially as found in ‘blood-and-thunder’ books, films and tales (especially in the USA, where the coinage originated by 1852). However, the conjunction occurred before this in England as an oath. Byron’s Don Juan, Canto 8, St. 1 (1822), has the line: ‘Oh, blood and thunder! and oh, blood and wounds! / These are but vulgar oaths.’ The melodramatic, violent, bloody and sensational tales are sometimes called ‘thud and blunder’, if they are ineptly done.

      (a) blood libel Name given to accusations by medieval anti-Semites that Jews had crucified Christian children and drunk their blood at Passover. In September 1982, following allegations that Israeli forces in Lebanon had allowed massacres to take place in refugee camps, the Israeli government invoked the phrase in a statement headed: ‘BLOOD LIBEL. On the New Year (Rosh Hashana), a blood libel was levelled against the Jewish state, its government and the Israel Defense Forces…’

      (to pay the) blood price To be willing to sustain casualties by going to war. The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, said that he was prepared to send troops and ‘pay the blood price’ of Britain’s special relationship with America by attacking President Hussein of Iraq (in a BBC 2 TV interview, 8 September 2002). In fact, the phrase had been fed to him by the interviewer, quoting Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson’s Defense secretary in the Vietnam War. The phrase occurs much earlier, in Spenser, The Faerie Queene, I.v.26 (1590): ‘The man that made Sansfoy to fall, / Shall with his owne blood price that he hath spilt.’

      bloodstained tyrannies Cited as the phrase of a ‘tired hack’ by George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’ in Horizon (April 1946). ‘The Prime Minister [Mrs Thatcher] welcomed Romania to “the family of free nations” and promised help for its people. She praised the Romanian “heroes” who had not been prepared to “knuckle under in a bloodstained tyranny”’ – The Guardian (23 December 1989).

      blood, sweat and tears In his classic speech to the House of Commons on 13 May 1940, upon becoming Prime Minister, Winston Churchill said: ‘I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’ Ever since then, people have had difficulty getting the order of his words right. The natural inclination is to put ‘blood’, ‘sweat’ then ‘tears’ together – as did Byron in 1823 with ‘blood, sweat and tear-wrung millions’ and as did the Canadian/US rock group Blood Sweat and Tears in the late 1960s and 70s. Much earlier, however, there had been yet another combination of the words in John Donne’s An Anatomy of the World (1611): ‘’Tis in vain to do so or to mollify it with thy tears, or sweat, or blood.’ Churchill seemed consciously to avoid these configurations. In 1931, he had written of the Tsarist armies: ‘Their sweat, their tears, their blood bedewed the endless plain.’ Having launched his version of the phrase in 1940, he referred to it five more times during the course of the war.

      bloody See CAN A BLOODY.

      bloody but unbowed Often used as an unascribed quotation, meaning ‘determined after having suffered a defeat’. From W. E. Henley’s poem ‘Invictus. In Memoriam R.T.H.B.’ (1888): ‘In the fell clutch of circumstance, / I have not winced nor cried aloud: / Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody but unbowed.’ ‘Bloody but unbowed, veteran discount retailers Gerald and Vera Weisfeld have hit out at the new £56m rescue deal agreed between struggling Poundstretcher owner Brown & Jackson and South African group Pepkor’ – Daily Mail (10 May 1994); ‘Bloody but unbowed, Dungannon had several heroes. Johns lorded the lineouts; while Beggs and Willie Dunne scrapped for everything’ – The Irish Times (17 October 1994); ‘Charles Scott, acting chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi, now renamed Cordiant, survived his first shareholders’ meeting since the upheavals at the top of the advertising combine bloody but unbowed, with investors’ vitriol shared out fairly equally between him, the Saatchi brothers and David Herro, the Chicago investor’ – The Times (17 March 1995).

      (the) bloody deed was done The provenance of this phrase has proved elusive. In Shakespeare, the phrase ‘bloody deed’ occurs several times and, what with Macbeth’s ‘I have done the deed’ and the almost immediate СКАЧАТЬ