A Word In Your Shell-Like. Nigel Rees

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      (the) blue bird (of happiness) An allusion to the title of a children’s play, L’Oiseau bleu by Maurice Maeterlinck, that was translated as The Blue Bird in 1909. Hence, the prevalence of Blue Bird cafés, Blue Bird toffees and song lyrics such as ‘There’ll be blue birds over / The White Cliffs of Dover…’ (1941).

      blue for a boy, pink for a girl Colour coding for babies along these lines may be comparatively recent. Although the Daily Chronicle (18 November 1909) had ‘Brief drawing-room appearances in a nurse’s arms with robes and tie-ups – blue for a boy, pink for a girl’, according to The Independent (7 February 1994), ‘there are also indications that the Women’s Institute were advising blue for girls and pink for boys as late as 1920’. Indeed, blue has for centuries been the colour of the Virgin Mary’s robe. Possibly it is the case that greetings card manufacturers happened upon the revised guidelines by emphasizing the alliterative qualities of ‘blue for a boy’.

      blue murder See GET AWAY.

      (to) blue-pencil To censor. In the BBC wartime radio series Garrison Theatre (first broadcast 1939), Jack Warner as ‘Private Warner’ helped further popularize this well-established synonym (the OED2’s first citation is an American one from 1888). In reading blue-pencilled letters from his brother at the Front, expletives were deleted (‘not blue pencil likely!’) and Warner’s actual mother boasted that, ‘My John with his blue-pencil gag has stopped the whole nation from swearing.’ In his autobiography, Warner recalled a constable giving evidence at a London police court about stopping ‘Mr Warner’, a lorry driver. The magistrate inquired, ‘Did he ask what the blue pencil you wanted?’ ‘No, sir,’ replied the constable, ‘this was a different Mr Warner…’ It is said that when the Lord Chamberlain exercised powers of censorship over the British stage (until 1968), his emendations to scripts were, indeed, marked with a blue pencil.

      (the) blue-rinse brigade (or set) A blue rinse is a hair preparation (known since the 1930s) designed to disguise grey or white hair with a temporary blue tint. As this is favoured by middle-class women of advancing years, the term has come to be applied to them collectively, suggesting their respectable, conservative tastes and views. ‘The blue-rinse vote went down the drain’ – Punch (28 October 1964). ‘During his 16-year tenure with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Mehta was at once a matinée idol of the blue-rinse brigade and a favorite target of critical barbs’ – Los Angeles Times (16 August 1986).

      (a) blue stocking Denoting ‘a literary or studious woman’, this phrase derived from the gatherings of cultivated females and a few eminent men at the home of Elizabeth Montagu in London around 1750. Boswell in his Life of Johnson (1791) explains that a certain Benjamin Stillingfleet was a popular guest, soberly dressed but wearing blue stockings: ‘Such was the excellence of his conversation, that his absence was felt as so great a loss, that it used to be said, “We can do nothing without the blue stockings,” and thus by degrees the title was established.’

      blue velvet A film (US 1986), directed by David Lynch, about drugs and menace, has the title Blue Velvet. This alludes firstly to the song ‘Blue Velvet’ (1951), written by Wayne and Morris, which is sung by the night-club singer heroine in the film, and secondly – as DOAS describes – to the name for ‘a mixture of paregoric, which contains opium and…an antihistamine, to be injected’, which is also relevant to the film.

      boats See BURN ONE’S.

      (and) Bob’s your uncle! An almost meaningless expression of the type that takes hold from time to time. It is another way of saying ‘there you are; there you have it; simple as that’. It was current by the 1880s but doesn’t appear to be of any hard and fast origin. It is basically a British expression – and somewhat baffling to Americans. There is the story of one such [the director and playwright Burt Shevelove – according to Kenneth Williams on BBC Radio Quote…Unquote (24 July 1980)] who went into a London shop, had it said to him, and exclaimed: ‘But how on earth do you know – I do have an Uncle Bob!?’ In 1886, Arthur Balfour rose meteorically from the Scottish Office to be Chief Secretary for Ireland. He was appointed by his uncle, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquis of Salisbury. Could this be a possible source? There is slang use, too, of the expression ‘one’s uncle’, meaning a pawnbroker, which might perhaps be linked.

      (in) bocca del lupo See BREAK A LEG.

      (the) bodger on the bonce Referring to the horn of a rhinoceros, as in the Flanders and Swann song ‘The Rhinoceros’ (1956): ‘(Chorus) Oh the Bodger on the Bonce! / The Bodger on the Bonce! / Oh pity the poor old Rhino with / The Bodger on the Bonce!’. Few dictionaries seem to have recorded the word ‘bodger’ in the sense of a pointed instrument, though it has long been used to mean a stick for picking up litter or for a tool used to make holes in the ground for seeds. And ‘to bodge’ is Black Country dialect for poking or making a hole. A link between bodgers in this sense and with the name given to skilled, itinerant wood-turners who worked in the beech woods on the chalk hills of the Chilterns and who led to the establishment of the chair-making trade in the High Wycombe area has yet to be proved. Or with ‘The Bodgers’ as the nickname of the Wycombe Wanderers football team and with bodgers as the name given to people who do a bodged job (a variation on ‘botchers’).

      (a) body blow Meaning ‘a severe knock to one’s esteem or activities’, this clearly derives from boxing. ‘That body-blow left Joe’s head unguarded’ – Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown (1857). ‘Its latest action is a body-blow to the growers’ – Daily Chronicle (24 August 1908); ‘Criminalizing squatters, New Age travellers and the like is hardly a body-blow to the well-established underworld. No matter how many times Mr Howard says the word “people” (count it, next time you hear him), he will not convince me that he is really going to deal with the real problems of crime in this country’ – Independent on Sunday (1 May 1994); ‘In unambiguous terms they declared he was technically bust, and so it proved. It was a body blow from which Bond never recovered’ – The Sunday Times (6 November 1994).

      (a) body count A phrase from the Vietnam War (in use by 1968), referring to the number of enemy dead. In 1981, the American horror film Friday the 13th Part II was promoted with the line, ‘The body count continues’. From Time Magazine (15 April 1985): ‘In the field, the Americans were encouraged to lie about their “body counts” (measuring progress in the war by lives taken, not land taken).’ Later, used less literally to describe the number of people (not necessarily dead) in a specific situation.

      body fascism In July 1980, Anna Ford, then a television newcaster with ITN, popularized this phrase in a speech given to the Women in Media group in London. Attacking the obsession with the looks and clothes of women who appear on television, she added: ‘Nobody takes pictures of Richard Baker’s ankles or claims that Peter Woods only got his job because of the bags under his eyes.’ Ford did not invent the feminist phrase, however. It is not a very clear one, except that ‘fascism’ is often invoked simply to describe something that the speaker dislikes. ‘Sexism’ and ‘lookism’ would have conveyed what Ford meant; possibly even ‘glamour-abuse’.

      body odour (or BO) This worrying concept was used to promote Lifebuoy soap, initially in the USA, and was current by 1933. In early American radio jingles, the initials ‘BO’ were sung basso profundo, emphasizing the horror of the offence: ‘Singing in the bathtub, singing for joy, / Living a life of Lifebuoy – / Can’t help singing, ‘cos I know / That Lifebuoy really stops BO.’ In the UK, TV ads showed pairs of male or female friends out on a spree, intending to attract partners. When one of the СКАЧАТЬ