A Word In Your Shell-Like. Nigel Rees

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СКАЧАТЬ 1943, there was an American song ‘Chocolate Soldier from the USA’ that did describe a black soldier fighting for his country and so was not considered derogatory.

      Christmas See ALL DRESSED; BY CHRISTMAS; DO THEY KNOW. ’Christmas comes but once a year’ – thank God! The allusion is to a 16th-century rhyme (’…and when it comes it brings good cheer’); the sour comment – presumably from someone objecting to the commercialization of the season or the exhaustion of having to organize the festivities – was known by the 1940s.

      Christmas has come early this year Meaning, ‘We have had some good fortune or welcome [usually financial] news’. Beginning a report in The Guardian (8 April 1988), Michael Smith wrote of the Volvo purchase of the Leyland Bus operation: ‘Christmas has come early for management and staff at Leyland Bus, the sole UK manufacturers of buses which changed hands last week’ – they stood to enjoy a windfall of £19 million. The previous week, Lord Williams had said of another sale – that of Rover to British Aerospace: ‘Christmas has come rather early this year.’ From McGowan & Hands’s Don’t Cry for Me, Sergeant-Major (1983) (about the Falklands war): ‘De-briefings afterwards…related that the SAS “thought Christmas had come early”. They couldn’t believe their luck. There were at least eleven Argentine aircraft virtually unguarded.’

      Christmasses See ALL OF.

      chuck it—! Meaning, ‘Abandon that line of reasoning, that posturing’. An example from the BBC’s World at One radio programme in May 1983 during the run-up to the General Election: Roy Hattersley complained that he was being questioned only on the ten per cent of the Labour Party manifesto with which he disagreed. Robin Day, the interviewer, replied: ‘Chuck it, Hattersley!’ This format was used earlier and notably by G. K. Chesterton. In his ‘Antichrist, or the Reunion of Christendom’ (1912), he satirized the pontificating of F. E. Smith (later 1st Earl of Birkenhead) on the Welsh Disestablishment Bill: ‘Talk about the pews and steeples / And the cash that goes therewith! / But the souls of Christian peoples…/ Chuck it, Smith!’

      cigar See END OF ME; GIVE THE MAN.

      cigarette See AH, WOODBINE.

      Cinderella See COULD MAKE ANY.

      circumstances See DUE TO.

      circuses See BREAD AND.

      (a) citizen of the world Cicero has this phrase as ‘civem totius mundi’, meaning ‘one who is cosmopolitan, at home anywhere’. Similarly, Socrates said, ‘I am a citizen, not of Athens or Greece, but of the world.’ The OED2 finds the English phrase in Caxton (1474) and, ‘If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world’ in Francis Bacon’s ‘Goodness, and Goodness of Nature’ (1625). The Citizen of the World was the title of a collection of letters by Oliver Goldsmith purporting to be those of Lien Chi Altangi, a philosophic Chinaman living in London and commenting on English life and characters. They were first published as ‘Chinese Letters’ in the Public Ledger (1760–1), and then again under this title in 1762. James Boswell, not untypically, in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1786) reflects: ‘I am, I flatter myself, completely a citizen of the world…In my travels through Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, France, I never felt myself from home; and I sincerely love “every kindred and tongue and people and nation”.’

      —City PHRASES. The suffix ‘—City’, applied since the 1960s, is a way of elevating a place or situation, concrete or abstract, to a higher status. ‘Fat City’, meaning ‘an ideal situation’ or ‘wealth’ (often illegally gained), however, may have been around since the 1940s. Fat City was the title of a film with a boxing theme (US 1972). ‘Nose City’ featured in the BBC Radio show The Burkiss Way (20 December 1977). ‘Cardboard city’ was the name applied to an area on London’s South Bank where homeless people would shelter in cardboard boxes (1980s). ‘Depression City – one of a number of wholly imaginary localities invented in the early 1980s, as the symbolic dwelling places of people in certain states of mind. It originated as the obverse of “Fun City”, as New York was christened in 1966 by a Herald Tribune journalist at the start of Mayor John V. Lindsay’s tenure in office. In the same vicinity you may find the ironically named Thrill Central, the neighbouring state of Dullsville, Arizona, and the inhabitants of Loser’s Lane’ – John Walsh in The Independent (2 December 2000).

      civilisation See END OF.

      clanger See DROP.

      clap hands, here comes Charley This apparently nonsensical catchphrase, popular at one time in Britain, appears to derive from a song used as the signature tune of Charlie Kunz (1896–1958). Born in the USA, Kunz became a feathery-fingered, insistently rhythmic pianist popular on British radio in the 1930s/40s. The song went, ‘Clap hands, here comes Charley…here comes Charley now.’ With lyrics by Billy Rose and Ballard MacDonald, and music by Joseph Meyer, it was first recorded in the USA in 1925. According to The Book of Sex Lists, the song was written ‘in honour of a local chorine, first-named Charline, who had given many of the music publishers’ contact men (song pluggers) cases of gonorrhoea – a venereal disease commonly known as “the clap”.’ Partridge/Slang adds that ‘to do a clap hands Charlie’ was 1940s’ RAF slang for flying an aircraft in such a way as to make its wings seem to meet overhead.

      Claude See AFTER YOU.

      clay See BALL OF.

      cleanliness is next to godliness Although this phrase appears within quotation marks in Sermon 88 ‘On Dress’ by John Wesley, the Methodist evangelist (1703–91), it is without attribution. Brewer (1989) claims that it is to be found in the writings of Phinehas ben Yair, a rabbi (circa 150–200). In fact, the inspiration appears to be the Talmud: ‘The doctrines of religion are resolved into carefulness…abstemiousness into cleanliness; cleanliness into godliness.’ So the saying is not from the Bible, as might be supposed. Wesley might have found it, however, in Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Bk 2 (1605): ‘Cleanliness of body was ever deemed to proceed from due reverence to God.’ Thomas J. Barratt, one of the fathers of modern advertising, seized upon the phrase to promote Pears’ Soap, chiefly in the UK. On a visit to the USA in the 1880s, he sought a testimonial from a man of distinction. Shrinking from an approach to President Grant, he ensnared the eminent divine Henry Ward Beecher. Beecher happily complied with Barratt’s request and wrote a short text beginning: ‘If cleanliness is next to godliness…’ and received no more for his pains than Barratt’s ‘hearty thanks’.

      cleans round the bend Harpic lavatory cleaner used this slogan in the UK from the 1930s onwards, but it is not the origin of the idiom ‘round the bend’, meaning ‘mad’. The OED2 cites F. C. Bowen in Sea Slang (1929) as defining that, thus: ‘An old naval term for anybody who is mad’.

      clear and present danger A phrase taken from a ruling by the US Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr in the case of Schenk v. United States (1919). This concerned free speech and included Holmes’s claim that the most stringent protection of same would not protect a man who falsely shouted fire in a theatre and caused panic: ‘The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the evils that Congress has a right to prevent.’ A film with the title Clear and Present Danger (US 1994) was about a CIA agent in conflict with his political masters in Washington.

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