A Word In Your Shell-Like. Nigel Rees

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СКАЧАТЬ a position from which it is impossible to advance or retreat – in a dilemma, fix or jam. ‘We are squeezed to death, between the two sides of that sort of alternative which is commonly called a cleft stick’ – in a letter from the poet William Cowper (1782). The word ‘cleft’ is of the same derivation as ‘cleave’ or ‘cloven’. A literal use of a ‘cleft stick’ – as a piece of wood with a hole chopped out – in which an African bearer might carry messages famously occurs in Evelyn Waugh, Scoop, Bk 2, Chap. 2, Pt 4, (1938): ‘She went over to the pile of cleft sticks. “How do you use these?” “They are for sending messages.”…Lord Copper said I was to send my messages with them”.’

      clerk See ALL DRESSED.

      clever See DAMNED.

      (a) clever clogs (or clever boots) An overly clever person. Since the 1940s. It is not clear what the footware has to do with the cleverness. ‘Clever clogs fly BIA to Amsterdam’ – British Island Airways advertisement (mid-1970s).

      (the) cleverest young man in England An unofficial title bestowed semi-humorously from time to time. In 1976, the recipient was Peter Jay (b. 1937), then an economics journalist on The Times. He was called this in an article so headed (with the saving grace of a question mark) by The Sunday Times Magazine (2 May). Two years earlier he had been included in Time Magazine’s list of the 150 people ‘most likely to achieve leadership in Europe’. He became Britain’s Ambassador to Washington at the age of 40, at which point people stopped calling him one of the most promising of his generation. In September 1938, at the League of Nations, Chips Channon had written in his diary of: ‘John Foster, that dark handsome young intellectual…Fellow of All Souls, prospective candidate, and altogether one of the cleverest young men in England.’ This was presumably the person who became Sir John Foster QC, a Tory MP. Punch (12 September 1874), in a cartoon caption, has: ‘Now look at Gladstone, the cleverest man in all England!’ Compare also Gladstone’s remark that Mary Sedgwick, mother of the fabulous Benson brothers – A. C., E. F. and so on – was ‘the cleverest woman in Europe’.

      (the) climate of opinion The prevailing view that may dictate public decisions and actions. A phrase since 1661. ‘To us he [Freud] is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion’ – W. H. Auden, poem ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ in Another Time (1940); ‘He likes saving causes…he’s brilliant at forming what they call now “climates of opinion”’ – Angus Wilson, Hemlock and After (1952); ‘Mrs Thatcher as premier was more made by the anti-statist climate of opinion in the 1970s and 1980s than vice versa. It is a truth about her often overlooked, not least by her admirers’ – The Daily Telegraph (4 May 1994); ‘But the public can look, learn, comment, write and agitate if it feels like it, make its input as the project moves from winning entry to final design, and help create a climate of opinion that will affect future competitions’ – The Sunday Times (4 December 1994).

      (to) climb aboard the gravy train To gain access to a money-spinning scheme. This was an American expression originally – DOAS suggests that it started in sporting circles. An alternative version is ‘to climb aboard the gravy boat’, which is a bit easier to understand. Gravy boats exist for holding gravy in and take their name from their shape. So, if money is perceived as being like gravy, it is not hard to see how the expression arose. According to Webster’s Dictionary, the ‘train’ and ‘boat’ forms are equally popular in the USA (and have been since the 1920s). ‘Boat’ is probably less popular in the UK.

      (to) climb on the bandwagon (or jump on the bandwagon) To join something that is already an established success. Principally in the USA, circuses had bandwagons. They had ‘high decks so that musicians could be seen and heard by street crowds’, according to Flexner (1982). Barnum and Bailey had an elaborately decorated one in 1855 for use in circus parades. Politicians in the USA also had bandwagons which would lead the procession when votes were being canvassed. Those who jumped, climbed or hopped aboard were those who were leading the support for the candidate. Since then, a slight shift in meaning has bandwagon-jumpers as people who give support once success has been assured.

      clinging to the wreckage Clinging to the Wreckage was the title of the autobiography (1982) of the playwright, novelist and lawyer (Sir) John Mortimer. He explained its significance in an epigraphic paragraph or two: ‘A man with a bristling grey beard [a yachtsman, said:] “I made up my mind, when I bought my first boat, never to learn to swim…When you’re in a spot of trouble, if you can swim you try to strike out for the shore. You invariably drown. As I can’t swim, I cling to the wreckage and they send a helicopter out for me. That’s my tip, if you ever find yourself in trouble, cling to the wreckage!”’ Mortimer concludes: ‘It was advice that I thought I’d been taking for most of my life.’

      close See GIVE THE MAN.

      (a) close encounter of the—kind An expression derived from the title of Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (US 1977) that, in turn, is said to be taken from the categories used in the American forces to denote UFOs. A ‘close encounter 1’ would be a simple UFO sighting; a ‘close encounter 2’, evidence of an alien landing; and a ‘close encounter 3’, actual contact with aliens. The categories were devised by a UFO researcher called J. Allen Hynek – source: Rick Meyers, The Great Science Fiction Films. Used allusively to describe intimacy: ‘For a close encounter of the fourth kind, ring ****’; ‘Polanski’s new movie – Close Encounters with the Third Grade’ – graffiti, quoted 1982.

      (a) closely knit community (or tightly knit community) Cliché phrase invariably invoked whenever a community is hit by trouble or tragedy. By the 1980s. ‘A local SDLP councillor, Ms Margaret Ritchie, also condemned the killing but said it would not shatter the community which had always been very closely knit’ – The Irish Times (9 August 1994); ‘When you have a community as closely knit as this one, what you do to one person affects everybody else. You can’t threaten to evict somebody and not expect to get everybody’s blood pressure up, but Schelly doesn’t seem to understand that’ – The Herald (Glasgow) (2 November 1994); ‘“Everyone will be touched by this [coach crash],” said Bill McLeod, 52, owner of a local guesthouse, “It’s such a tight-knit community…that everyone will know someone who was killed or injured”’ – The Independent (25 May 1995); ‘Relatives and friends of the Royal Welch Fusiliers held hostage in Bosnia anxiously awaited news of their fate yesterday. The 300-year-old regiment is based in the tightly knit community of Wrexham in Clwyd’ – The Independent (29 May 1995).

      close-run See DAMN.

      close your eyes and think of England The source that Partridge/Catch Phrases gives for this saying – in the sense of advice to women when confronted with the inevitability of sexual intercourse, or jocularly to either sex about doing anything unpalatable – is the Journal (1912) of Alice, Lady Hillingdon: ‘I am happy now that Charles calls on my bedchamber less frequently than of old. As it is, I now endure but two calls a week and when I hear his steps outside my door I lie down on my bed, close my eyes, open my legs and think of England.’ There was an Alice, Lady Hillingdon (1857–1940). She married the 2nd Baron in 1886. He was Conservative MP for West Kent (1885–92) and, according to Who’s Who, owned ‘about 4,500 acres’ when he died (in 1919). A portrait of Lady Hillingdon was painted by Sir Frank Dicksee PRA in 1904. The rose ‘Climbing Lady Hillingdon’ may also have been named after her. But where her journals are, if indeed they ever existed, is not known. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, repeating the quotation in The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny (1972), calls her Lady Hillingham, which only further makes one doubt that a woman with any such a name was coiner of the phrase. Salome Dear, СКАЧАТЬ