A Word In Your Shell-Like. Nigel Rees

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СКАЧАТЬ didn’t come up with the last boat’ as a Royal Navy phrase from the mid-1940s, but also ‘I didn’t come up in the last bucket’ and ‘I didn’t just get off the boat, y’know’, for similar situations.

      come the revolution…Introductory phrase to some prediction (often ironic) of what life would hold when (usually Communist) revolution swept the world. Second half of the 20th century. Compare the joke ascribed to the American comedian Willis Howard: ‘Come the revolution, everyone will eat strawberries and cream’ – ‘But, Comrade, I don’t like strawberries and cream’ – ‘Come the revolution, everyone will eat strawberries and cream!’

      cometh the hour, cometh the man An expression that appears from a survey of ten British newspapers in recent years to be a weapon (or cliché), especially in the sportswriter’s armoury. From Today (22 June 1986): ‘Beating England may not be winning the World Cup, but, for obvious reasons, it would come a pretty close second back in Buenos Aires. Cometh the hour, cometh the man? Destiny beckons. England beware.’ From The Times (13 August 1991): ‘“Graham [Gooch] is a very special guy,” [Ted] Dexter said. “It has been a case of ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man.’ I do not know anyone who would have taken the tough times in Australia harder than he did”.’ From the Scotsman (29 February 1992): ‘In the maxim of “Cometh the hour, cometh the man,” both the Scotland [Rugby Union] manager, Duncan Paterson, and forwards coach, Richie Dixon, indicated yesterday the need to look to the future.’ But where does the phrase come from? John 4:23 has ‘But the hour cometh, and now is’ and there is an English proverb ‘Opportunity makes the man’ (though originally, in the 14th century, it was ‘makes the thief’). Harriet Martineau entitled her biography of Toussaint L’Ouverture (1840) The Hour and the Man. An American, William Yancey, said about Jefferson Davis, President-elect of the Confederacy in 1861: ‘The man and the hour have met,’ which says the same thing in a different way. P. G. Wodehouse in Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen (1974) has: ‘And the hour…produced the man.’ Earlier, at the climax of Sir Walter Scott’s novel Guy Mannering, Chap. 54 (1815), Meg Merrilies says, ‘Because the Hour’s come, and the Man.’ In the first edition and in the magnum opus edition that Scott supervised in his last years, the phrase is emphasized by putting it in italics. Then, in 1818, Scott used ‘The hour’s come, but not [sic] the man’ as the fourth chapter heading in The Heart of Midlothian, adding in a footnote: ‘There is a tradition, that while a little stream was swollen into a torrent by recent showers, the discontented voice of the Water Spirit [or Kelpie] was heard to pronounce these words. At the same moment a man, urged on by his fate, or, in Scottish language, fey, arrived at a gallop, and prepared to cross the water. No remonstrance from the bystanders was of power to stop him – he plunged into the stream, and perished.’ Both these examples appear to be hinting at some earlier core saying that remains untraced.

      (to) come to a grinding halt General use, meaning ‘to come to a sudden and spectacular stop’ – and not usually in a vehicular sense. Date of origin unknown. Perhaps from the sound made by a railway train stopping in an emergency? Identified as a current cliché in The Times (17 March 1995). ‘Unfortunately, things did not go quite according to plan. “We came to a grinding halt pretty quickly,” he admitted’ – The Herald (Glasgow) (15 December 1994); ‘So this is Christmas…Police had a field day, towing away 14 cars. Princes Street came grinding to a halt and the city’s car parks also did a roaring trade’ – Sunday Mail (18 December 1994).

      come to Charlie! In about 1952, following the success of his BBC radio show Stand Easy, Charlie Chester (1914–97) had another programme with the title Come to Charlie – that grew out of his catchphrase. He recalled (1979): ‘I would talk to somebody from the stage and say, “Are you all right, Ada? Speak to Charlee–ee. Charlie spoke to you!”…You’d be surprised how many people still ask, “Say that phrase for me – say, “come to Charlee–ee!” It’s just one of those things they like to hear.’ In his later role as a BBC Radio 2 presenter, latterly on Sunday Soapbox, Chester developed an elaborate sign-off (from about 1970): there we are, dear friends, both home, overseas and over the borders.

      come up and see me sometime Mae West (1892–1980) had a notable stage hit on Broadway with her play Diamond Lil (first performed 9 April 1928). When she appeared in the 1933 film version entitled She Done Him Wrong, what she said to a very young Cary Grant (playing a coy undercover policeman) was: ‘You know I always did like a man in uniform. And that one fits you grand. Why don’t you come up some time and see me? I’m home every evening.’ As a catchphrase, the words have been rearranged to make them easier to say. That is how W. C. Fields says them to Mae West in the film My Little Chickadee (1939), and she herself took to saying them in the re-arranged version. Even so, she was merely using an established expression. The American author Gelett Burgess in Are You a Bromide? (1907) lists among his ‘bromidioms’: ‘Come up and see us any time. You’ll have to take pot luck, but you’re always welcome.’

      come up and see my etchings Nudging invitation from a man to a woman, as though he were an artist plotting to seduce her. By the 1920s, at least. A bit puzzling why he should choose ‘etchings’ rather than anything else? There is a James Thurber cartoon of a man and a woman in a hotel lobby, to which the caption is: ‘You wait here and I’ll bring the etchings down.’

      come with me to the Casbah A line forever associated with the film Algiers (1938) and its star, Charles Boyer. He is supposed to have said it to Hedy Lamarr. Boyer impersonators used it, the film was laughed at because of it, but nowhere was it said in the film. It was simply a Hollywood legend that grew up. Boyer himself denied he had ever said it and thought it had been invented by a press agent. In Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989), Germaine Greer writes of the early 1940s: ‘Frightened and revolted the Australians fled for the nearest watering-hole [in the Middle East]. “Kem wiz me to ze Casbah,” Daddy used to say, in his Charles Boyer imitation. Poor Daddy. He was too frightened ever to go there.’

      coming See BRITISH ARE.

      (where one is) coming from Listed in The Complete Naff Guide, ‘Naff Expressions’ (1983), this means ‘the origin of one’s stance, one’s motivation in doing whatever it is one is doing’.

      coming in on a wing and a prayer A popular US song of the Second World War (published in 1943) supposedly took its title from an alleged remark by an actual pilot who was coming in to land with a badly damaged plane. Harold Adamson’s lyrics include the lines: ‘Tho’ there’s one motor gone, we can still carry on / Comin’ In On A Wing And A Pray’r.’ A film about life on an aircraft carrier (US 1944) was called simply Wing and a Prayer.

      (the) commanding heights of the economy In a speech to the Labour Party conference in November 1959, Aneurin Bevan said: ‘Yesterday, Barbara [Castle] quoted from a speech which I made some years ago, and she said that I believed that socialism in the context of modern society meant the conquest of the commanding heights of the economy…’ Alan Watkins in a throwaway line in his Observer column (28 September 1987) said ‘the phrase was originally Lenin’s’. At the Labour Party Conference in October 1989, Neil Kinnock revived the phrase in saying that education and training were ‘the commanding heights of every modern economy’. The true source remains untraced.

      common See CENTURY OF THE.

      common decency The accepted standard of propriety in behaviour and taste. A common pairing. ‘There is one branch of learning without which learning itself cannot be railed at with common decency, namely, spelling’ – S. T. Coleridge, The Friend (1809–10). ‘Even though he [E. M. Forster] never renounced the ideal which suffuses his novels, СКАЧАТЬ