A Word In Your Shell-Like

advise and consent The title of Allen Drury’s novel about Washington politics Advise and Consent (1959; film US 1962) (not ‘advice’) is taken from US Senate Rule 38: ‘The final question on every nomination shall be, “Will the Senate advise and consent to this nomination?”’ In the US Constitution (Art. II, Sect. 2), dealing with the Senate’s powers as a check on the President’s appointive and treaty-making powers, the phrase includes the noun rather than the verb, ‘Advice and consent’. Originally, George Washington as President went in person to the Senate Chamber (22 August 1789) to receive ‘advice and consent’ about treaty provisions with the Creek Indians. Vice-President Adams used the words, ‘Do you advise and consent?’ Subsequent administrations have sent written requests.

(the) affluent society Label applied to Western society in the mid-20th century. John Kenneth Galbraith’s book The Affluent Society (1958) is about the effect of high living standards on economic theories that had been created to deal with scarcity and poverty. The resulting ‘private affluence and public squalor’ stemmed from an imbalance between private and public sector output. For example, there might be more cars and TV sets but not enough police to prevent them from being stolen. The Revd Dr Martin Luther King Jnr, in a 1963 letter from gaol, used the phrase thus: ‘When you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smouldering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society…then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.’ The notion was not new to the mid-20th century. Tacitus, in his Annals (circa AD 115) noted that ‘many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable’ and Cato the Younger (95–46 BC), when denouncing the contemporary state of Rome said: ‘Habemus publice egestatem, privatim opulentiam [public want, private wealth].’ The punning tag of the effluent society, a commonplace by the 1980s, had appeared in Stan Gooch’s poem ‘Never So Good’ in 1964, and indeed before that.

after I’ve shampooed my hair, I can’t do a thing with it (or I washed my hair last night – and now…)! Commonplace excuse for one’s less than good appearance and a domestic conversational cliché. In Are You a Bromide? (1907), the American writer Gelett Burgess castigated people who spoke in what he called ‘Bromidioms’, like this one. The second part is sometimes given as a chorused response as though anticipating the cliché involved.

after the Lord Mayor’s show comes the shit-cart A reference to the anti-climactic appearance of a dust-cart and operative to clean up the horse manure that is left behind after the Lord Mayor’s annual show (really a procession) in the City of London. Partridge/Catch Phrases suggests that it is a late 19th century Cockney observation and one that could be applied to other from-the-sublime-to-the-ridiculous situations.

after you, Claude! / no, after you, Cecil! Catchphrase exchange spoken by Horace Percival and Jack Train playing two over-polite handymen, Cecil and Claude, in the BBC radio show ITMA (1939–49). It still survives in pockets as an admirable way of overcoming social awkwardness in such matters as deciding who should go first through a door. In the early 1900s, the American cartoonist Fred Opper created a pair of excessively polite Frenchmen called Alphonse and Gaston who had the similar exchange: ‘You first, my dear Alphonse’ – ‘No, no, you first, my dear Gaston.’

afternoon men Drunkards (‘afternoon’, presumably because they have imbibed a liquid lunch). ‘As if they had heard that enchanted horn of Astolpho, that English duke in Ariosto, which never sounded but all his auditors were mad, and for fear ready to make away [with] themselves…They are a company of giddy-heads, afternoon men.’ This is the final part of the quotation given by Anthony Powell as the epigraph to his novel Afternoon Men (1931). He gives the source as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The only other use found of the term ‘afternoon men’ is from the same work. In the introductory ‘Democritus to the Reader’, Burton has: ‘Beroaldus will have drunkards, afternoon men, and such as more than ordinarily delight in drink, to be mad.’

age See ACT YOUR.

age before beauty! A phrase used (like AFTER YOU…) when inviting another person to go through a door before you. In the famous story, Clare Boothe Luce said it to Dorothy Parker, ushering her ahead. Parker assented, saying, ‘Pearls before swine.’ Mrs Luce described this account as completely apocryphal in answer to a question from John Keats, Parker’s biographer, for his book You Might as Well Live (1970). The saying presumably originated when people first started worrying about the etiquette of going through doors. It does not occur in Jonathan Swift’s Polite Conversation (1738), as one might have expected. A variant reported from New Zealand (1987) is dirt before the broom, though Partridge/Catch Phrases has this as the response to ‘Age before beauty’ (which it describes as a ‘mock courtesy’). Other versions are dust before the broom (recorded in Dublin, 1948) and the dog follows its master. Whichever phrase is used, it usually precipitates a response. An exchange between two boozy buffoons at a pub door in Posy Simmonds’s cartoon strip in The Guardian (19 May 1985) included these phrases: ‘“Certainly! Dogs follow their master!” “Dirt before the broom!” “Shepherd before sheep!” “Shit before shovel!”’ Another phrase to offer in reply is: grace before meat!

(the) age of anxiety Label for the mid-20th century. It was the title of a long poem by W. H. Auden, written 1944–6 – an expression of loneliness in the midcentury. It was the inspiration of Leonard Bernstein’s second symphony (1947–9), which became known as ‘The Age of Anxiety’, and was used as the score for a ballet (US 1950), also with the title.

(the) age of Aquarius The astrological age, lasting two thousand years, which was said to be beginning in the 1960s (following the Piscean Age). ‘This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,’ sang the cast of the ‘American tribal love-rock musical’ Hair (1968), in what was to become something of a hippy anthem. This new age held forth the promise of more liberal values, world freedom and brotherhood, as well as promoting general optimism.

(the) age of innocence The Age of Innocence was the title of a novel published in 1920 by the American writer Edith Wharton. In it, she looked back on the New York of her youth and told the story of a love affair frustrated by the morals of the time. Presumably, the description ‘age of innocence’ is ironically applied to this earlier period.

(an) age of kings An Age of Kings was the title of a fifteen-part fortnightly BBC TV serialization of Shakespeare’s history plays from Richard II to Richard III, transmitted live in 1960. The phrase does not appear to have been used before. TV parodist Alan Melville came up with a version entitled ‘An Eternity of Kings’.

(the) age of miracles is past As with (the) age of chivalry is past, this proverb is now used more often in the ironic negative, i.e. when saying ‘the age of miracles is not past’ or ‘the age of chivalry is not dead’ out of feigned gratitude for a stroke of good fortune or an unexpected courtesy. In its original positive form, ‘miracles’ was current by 1602. ‘The age of chivalry is gone’ occurs in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In about 1900, Oscar Wilde wrote in a letter: ‘[Frank Harris] keeps Bosie in order: clearly the age of miracles is not over.’ In Ira Gershwin’s lyric for the song ‘A Foggy Day (in London Town)’ (1937) are the lines: ‘I viewed the morning with alarm. / The British Museum had lost its charm. / How long, I wondered, could this thing last? / But the age of miracles hadn’t passed.’

(the) age of reason Label for the 18th century as a period when philosophy was a predominant force in Europe – hence also the name age of enlightenment. The Age of Reason was the title of Thomas Paine’s book (1793), an attack on Christianity and the Bible. English-born Paine went to America and encouraged the fight for independence.

(the) age of uncertainty Label for the second half of the 20th century. The Age of Uncertainty was the title given by J.K. Galbraith to his 1976 TV series (and accompanying book) on ‘the rise and crisis in industrial society seen in the light of economic factors’. It contrasted the great certainties in economic thought of the 19th century with the uncertainties of the second half of the 20th.

à go-go PHRASES Meaning, ‘in abundance’, ‘no end of’. Known by 1965. Possibly derived from ‘Whisky à go-go’ – a name given to night clubs all over France since the 1960s. Curiously, these take the name from the French title of the film Whisky Galore (UK 1948) – source Philip Kemp, Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick (1991). ‘This is really nothing but Leninism à go-go!’ – The New York Times (24 September 1966).

—agonistes PHRASES The title of John Milton’s poem Samson Agonistes (1671) refers to the biblical Samson coupled with the Greek word for ‘champion/combatant’. T. S. Eliot used the format for his own poetic drama Sweeney Agonistes (1932), where the proletarian hero is called Sweeney.

(an) agonizing reappraisal A process of reconsideration in politics, possibly before a decision is taken to make a U-turn. The reassessment of position has usually been forced on the reappraiser. The modern use stems from a speech that John Foster Dulles, US Secretary of State, made to the National Press Club, Washington DC, in December 1953: ‘When I was in Paris last week, I said that…the United States would have to undertake an agonizing reappraisal of basic foreign policy in relation to Europe.’ Further examples: ‘As in response to new directions from an agonising reappraisal in MCC’s room at lunch, the scoring spurted as Cowdrey twice swung Benaud to the leg fence’ – Star (9 December 1958); ‘The nation’s rogue elephants rampage, shattering complacency and compelling many to an agonizing reappraisal’ – Kenneth Gregory, The First Cuckoo (1978); ‘He forecast a period of agonizing reappraisal for Nato. The flexible response strategy was now clearly untenable for many reasons, so a new approach would be essential’ – The Times (27 June 1987).

(the) agony and the ecstasy Phrase for the supposed turmoil of artistic expression – a colourful coinage, now used only in mockery. The Agony and the Ecstasy is the title of a novel (1961; film US 1965) by Irving Stone, about Michelangelo and the painting of the Sistine Chapel. Compare what the novelist William Faulkner said in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature (10 December 1950): ‘[Whatever was] worth the agony and the sweat [was worth writing about].’

(an) agony aunt One who answers questions about personal problems posed by readers of a newspaper or magazine. Hence the term agony column, originally applied to what would now be called a ‘personal column’ in newspapers, containing messages for missing relatives (by the 1860s). From the 1930s onwards, the name has been given to the space in which ‘advice’ journalism appears. Neither phrase was in wide use until the 1970s, and neither is much used outside Britain. Sob sister is a similar term for one who allows readers to weep on his or her shoulder. Although the name may be of American invention, such an adviser has long been known in British women’s magazines, the subjects formerly being household management, etiquette and bringing up the family. Such columnists proliferated after the Second World War and some achieved eminence for sympathetic advice and information. See also MISS LONELYHEARTS.

aha, me proud beauty (I’ve got you where I want you)! A phrase suggestive of 19th-century melodramas or, at least, parodies of their style. Dryden has the phrase ‘proud beauty’ in Oedipus (1679).

ahh, Bisto! Advertising line for Bisto gravy browning, which has been promoted with this cry in the UK since 1919. The name ‘Bisto’ is a hidden slogan, too. When the Cerebos company first put it on the market in 1910, the product did not have a name. According to legend, the initial letters of the proposed slogan ‘Browns, Seasons, Thickens In One’ were rearranged to produce ‘BISTO’. The Bisto Kids, drawn by Will Owen, first appeared in 1919, sniffing a wisp of gravy aroma and murmuring, ‘Ahh Bisto!’ This is a phrase much played on in political cartoon captions over the years – ‘Ah, Blitzo!’; ‘Ah, Bizerta!’; ‘Ah, Crippso!’; ‘Ah! Winston!’; ‘Ah! Coupon free!’, and so on.

ah,Woodbine – a great little cigarette! A slogan current in 1957. Norman Hackforth – the Mystery Voice from BBC radio’s Twenty Questions – spoke the line memorably in TV ads.

—Aid PHRASES In the mid-1980s, it became fashionable to give names with the suffix ‘—aid’ to charitable fundraising events. This stemmed from the first such event – the recording of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, performed in 1984 by an ad hoc group of pop singers and musicians called Band Aid, in punning allusion to the Band-Aid brand of medical dressing. This record, successfully drawing attention to those suffering in the Ethiopian civil war and famine, prepared the way for the notable foundation of the Live Aid rock concert of July 1985. Similar, though in some cases much smaller-scale, events followed, including Sport Aid (sponsored athletes), Mandarin Aid (civil servants), School Aid (children), Fashion Aid, Academy Aid (painters), Sheep Aid (agricultural events in Yorkshire) and Deaf Aid (no, only joking).

ain’t it a shame, eh? ain’t it a shame? Catchphrase spoken by Carleton Hobbs as a nameless man who told banal tales (‘I waited for hours in the fish queue…and a man took my plaice’), in the BBC radio show ITMA (1939–49). He always prefaced and concluded his remarks with, ‘Ain’t it a shame?’

ain’t it grand to be bloomin’ well dead? Title line of a song (1932) by Leslie Sarony, the British entertainer and writer (1897–1985).

aisle See GO UP THE.

Ajax defying the lightning Phrase for a particular artistic pose in 19th-century sculpture or painting. From Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Chap. 18 (1853): ‘Well!’ said Mr Boythorn…I am looked upon about here, as a second Ajax defying the lightning. Ha ha ha ha!’ From Oscar Wilde’s New York lecture ‘The English Renaissance of Art’ (9 January 1882): ‘The English [artists’] models form a class entirely by themselves. They are not so picturesque as the Italian, nor so clever as the French, and they have absolutely no tradition, so to speak, of their order. Now and then some old veteran knocks at the studio door, and proposes to sit as Ajax defying the lightning, or as King Lear upon the blasted heath.’ The Ajax referred to in this is not the warrior of the siege of Troy but Ajax the Lesser who was at the siege nevertheless and raped Priam’s daughter Cassandra after dragging her from a statue of Athena. This so annoyed the goddess that she shipwrecked Ajax on his way home. He clung to a rock, defied the goddess, not to mention the lightning, and was eventually washed off and drowned by Neptune. So, how and when did the allusion turn into a phrase? In the description of Ajax’s death in Homer’s Odyssey, the lightning incident is not mentioned. So is it from a later re-telling? Virgil’s Aeneid (Bk 1, line 42-) does show him being dealt with by Zeus’s bolts. Earlier, the matter was mentioned, though less specifically, by Euripides in his Trojan Women and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Bk 14; translated by Dryden, Pope and others). There are a number of representations in art of Ajax the Lesser going about his rapes and so on, but the search is still on for the lightning-defying pose. Was there a particular painting or a sculpture of the event that so fixed the defiant image that it was readily evoked thereafter?

alarums and excursions (sometimes alarms…) Confused noise and activity after the varying use of the phrase in the stage directions of Shakespeare’s history plays, notably Henry VI, Part 3 and Richard III, especially during battle scenes. ‘Alarum’ is a form of ‘alarm’ (meaning a call to arms) and an ‘excursion’ is a sally against the enemy. Now used about any sort of confused situation. ‘I was a happy child, skipping through the fifties, a time of calm and convention for the middle classes, with parents thankful for routine and certainty after the alarms and excursions of war’ – Kate Adie, The Kindness of Strangers, Chap. 2 (2002).

(The) Albany Whether this is a phrase or not rests on one’s response to a supposed solecism: is it correct to use the ‘The’ or not to use the ‘The’ when talking about Albany, a grand apartment block in Piccadilly, London? Oscar Wilde uses the full phrase ‘The Albany’ no fewer than three times in The Importance of Earnest (1895). He also used it earlier in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chap. 3 (1890). The earliest use so far found of the ‘the’ being apparently correct usage is in the title of a novel by Marmion Savage, The Bachelor of the Albany (1848). Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington, Chap. 43 (1864), has: ‘Plantagenet Palliser…felt, as he sat in his chambers in the Albany, that something else was wanting to his happiness.’ Charles Dickens describes the character ‘Fascination’ Fledgeby as living there in Our Mutual Friend, Pt 2, Chap. 5 (1865): ‘He lived in chambers in the Albany, did Fledgeby, and maintained a spruce appearance’. A resident’s letterhead dating from 1888 is shown in Harry Furniss, Paradise in Piccadilly: the Story of Albany, but the title of that book (published in 1925) is – so far – the earliest example found of the ‘the’ being deliberately excluded. Later, Terence Rattigan (who lived in the chambers for a while) gave this description of the setting for Act 1 of his play While the Sun Shines (1943): ‘The sitting-room of Lord Harpenden’s chambers in Albany, London.’ So what was it that happened between 1898 and 1925 to give rise to the change? Indeed, what is one to make of the whole question? Perhaps H. Montgomery Hyde has the simplest explanation in The Annotated Oscar Wilde (1982): ‘The Albany refers to the exclusive apartments off Piccadilly, very popular with bachelors, that had been converted in the early nineteenth century from the Duke of York and Albany’s large private house. About the turn of the century it became the custom to allude to it as “Albany” instead of “the” Albany, probably because the latter sounded like a club or pub.’

Alexander weeping for want of worlds to conquer The allusion is, undoubtedly, to Plutarch’s wonderful vignette of Alexander the Great to be found in ‘Of the Tranquillity of the Mind’: ‘So reason makes all sorts of life easy, and every change pleasant. Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there was an infinite number of worlds, and his friends asking him if any accident had befallen him, he returns this answer: Do not you think it is a matter worthy of lamentation, that, when there is such a vast multitude of them, we have not yet conquered one? But Crates with only his scrip and tattered cloak laughed out his life jocosely, as if he had been always at a festival.’ So it was not so much that Alexander wept because he had run out of worlds to conquer but because he felt that he had not even managed to conquer this one.

(an) Alice-blue gown The colour of the garment, a light-greenish blue, takes its name from a particular Alice – daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt. The song ‘Alice-blue Gown’ was written for her by Joseph McCarthy and Harry Tierney in 1900, when she was sixteen, though apparently it was not published until 1919. In the late 1930s, there was another (British) song, called ‘The Girl in the Aliceblue Gown’.

Alice in Wonderland Quoted from almost as extensively as Shakespeare and the Bible, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1872), both by Lewis Carroll, are alluded to for their particular characters and incidents and as a whole, to denote a mad, fantastic world. From Chips: the Diaries of Sir Henry Channon, entry for 30 July 1940 (1967): ‘The big FO debate began with an absurd Alice in Wonderland wrangle about procedure which lasted from 3.45 until 5.30…in war time! it was ludicrous in the extreme.’

(is) alive and well and living in—This format phrase probably began in a perfectly natural way – ‘What’s happened to old so-and-so?’ ‘Oh, he’s still alive and well and living in Godalming’ etc. In the preface to His Last Bow (1917), Conan Doyle wrote: ‘The Friends of Mr Sherlock Holmes will be glad to learn that he is still alive and well…’ The extended form was given a tremendous fillip when the Belgian-born songwriter and singer Jacques Brel (1929–78) became the subject of an off-Broadway musical show entitled Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris (1968–72). Quite why M. Brel should have merited this WHERE ARE THEY NOW? treatment is not too apparent, but the format caught on. The Listener (3 October 1968), quoting the Daily Mail, stated: ‘The Goon Show is not dead. It is alive and well, living in Yorkshire and operating under the name of BBC Radio Leeds.’ The format had earlier probably been used in religious sloganeering, possibly prompted by Time Magazine’s famous cover (circa 1966), ‘IS GOD DEAD?’ The New Statesman (26 August 1966) quoted a graffito, ‘God is alive and living in Argentina’. This suggests that the formula might have been used originally in connection with Nazi war criminals who had escaped prosecution and lived unharmed in South America. Other graffiti have included: ‘God is not Dead – but Alive and Well and working on a Much Less Ambitious Project’ – quoted in The Guardian (27 November 1975); ‘Jesus Christ is alive and well and signing copies of the Bible at Foyles’ (quoted in 1980). In a letter to The Independent Magazine (13 March 1993), M. H. I. Wright wrote: ‘When I was a medical student and young house physician 50 years ago, we had to write very detailed case-sheets on every patient admitted. Under the heading “Family History”, we detailed each member of his family – for example, “Father, died of heart diseases in 1935; Mother, alive and well and living in London.” One pedantic consultant insisted we drop the word “alive” because, as he said, how could the relative be “dead and well”?’ On the other hand, a US film in 1975 was burdened with the title Sheila Devine Is Dead and Living in New York. ‘The last English eccentric is alive and well and living comfortably in Oakland’ – Time Magazine (5 September 1977); ‘The golden age detective story is alive and well’ – review in The Times of Ruth Rendell’s Put On By Cunning (1981); ‘Socialism is alive and well and living in Moscow’ –headline in The Independent (25 June 1990).

all aboard the Skylark See ANY MORE FOR THE SKYLARK.

all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others A fictional slogan from George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), his commentary on the totalitarian excesses of Communism. It had been anticipated: Hesketh Pearson recalled in his biography of the actor/manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1956) that Tree wished to insert one of his own epigrams in a play by Stephen Phillips called Nero, produced in 1906. It was: ‘All men are equal – except myself.’ In Noël Coward’s This Year of Grace (1928), there is this exchange – Pellet: ‘Men are all alike.’ Wendle: ‘Only some more than others.’ The saying alludes, of course, to Thomas Jefferson’s ‘All men are created equal and independent’, from the Preamble to the American Declaration of Independence (1776). It has, perhaps, the makings of a format phrase in that it is more likely to be used to refer to humans than to animals. Only the second half of the phrase need actually be spoken, the first half being understood: ‘You-Know-Who [Mrs Thatcher] is against the idea [televising parliament]. There aren’t card votes at Westminster, but some votes are more equal than others’ – The Guardian (15 February 1989).