A Word In Your Shell-Like - Nigel Rees

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or at least ungentlemanly, behaviour had broken out. Appropriately enough, the phrase is used literally in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I.303 (1776–88): ‘Such was the public consternation when the barbarians were hourly expected at the gates of Rome.’ Compare, from the journal Queen (5 September 1914): ‘Stand up and meet the war. The Hun is at the gate!’

      (the) Bard of Avon One of several sobriquets for William Shakespeare and alluding to the river running through the town of his birth, Stratford in Warwickshire. Ben Jonson called Shakespeare ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’ (in a verse prefacing the First Folio of plays, 1623), and David Garrick, who excelled in Shakespearean parts at the Drury Lane Theatre, London, felt intimate enough to nickname him ‘Avonian Willy’. The Bard on its own is also, unfortunately, common, though anything is better than the assumed familiarity, chiefly among actors, of ‘Will’ or ‘Bill’ Shakespeare. ‘Pen introduced [the topic of Shakespeare because he] professed an uncommon respect for the bard of Avon’ – William Thackeray, Pendennis, Chap. 6 (1848–50); ‘But there may well be more subtle influences at work than the Bard of Avon was aware of. An American scientist has recently published results which suggest that the rate at which human beings procreate is influenced by variations in terrestrial magnetism no matter how constant the human or animal attractiveness may be’ – Irish Times (3 October 1994); ‘This man who killed two people in his former life as a numbers racketeer in Cleveland…acquired the rudiments of a classical education. I once heard him react to an English accent with the line: ‘As yo’ great Bard of Avon truly said, “To be or not to be – that’s what they askin’, baby”’ – The Mail on Sunday (26 March 1995).

      barefaced cheek Assertive behaviour that is accomplished without a blush of embarrassment. A cliché by the late 1980s. Barefaced Cheek – title of book about Rupert Murdoch by Michael Leapman (1983); ‘Garden-rustling is Britain’s fastestgrowing crime, as thieves twig that all you need to nurture a flourishing fortune is a spade – and a wheelbarrow-load of barefaced cheek’ – Today (25 May 1993); ‘When it was announced recently that HM the Q had graciously consented to allow taxpayers to view their own property for £8 a head…It was left to newspaper cartoonists to characterize it as the kind of barefaced cheek which could only happen in a country which, as Cobbett observed, has a Royal Mint but a National Debt’ – The Observer (6 June 1993).

      (the) bare necessities The minimum requirements needed to keep alive – food, drink and possibly a roof over one’s head. Known by 1913, when Punch (10 December) referred to ‘The Bare Necessity Supply Association [having] the honour to announce their list of Daintiest Recencies for the Yule-Tide Season’. A cliché not so much in its original form but as a veiled allusion to the song ‘Bare Necessities’ in the Walt Disney film of Kipling’s The Jungle Book (US 1967) – which was sung by a bear. ‘Profits in the bare necessities of life’ – headline in The Independent (13 May 1995).

      Barkis is willing A catchphrase that derives from Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, Chap. 5 (1850). Mr Barkis, a Yarmouth carrier, asks young David Copperfield to convey his willingness to marry Peggotty, in the words, ‘Barkis is willin’.’ Eventually they do marry.

      (to) bark up the wrong tree This phrase meaning ‘to follow a false scent’ is of US origin (by 1832) and is said to come from racoon hunting. As this activity is done at night (racoons being nocturnal animals) and as, if chased, racoons run up trees, it would be quite possible for a dog to bark mistakenly under the wrong tree.

      barmy See I’VE GOT A LETTER.

      (to) bash the bishop (or flog the bishop) Meaning, ‘to masturbate’. Partridge/Slang dates this from the late 19th century and suggests it derives from the resemblance between the penis and a chess bishop or a bishop in ecclesiastical mitre. It was unfortunate, therefore, that Labour MPs should have accused the Conservative minister, John Selwyn Gummer MP, of bishop-bashing when he was involved in criticisms of various Anglican bishops in March 1988. The—bashing phrases had been used before, of course – as in the practice of Paki-bashing circa 1970 (i.e. subjecting Pakistani immigrants to physical assault) and as in the old ‘square-bashing’ (army slang for drill).

      basics See BACK TO.

      (a) basket case This phrase now has two applications – firstly, to describe a mental or physical cripple and, secondly, a totally ruined enterprise. Either way, it seems to be an American term, and the OED2’s earliest citation is from the U.S. Official Bulletin (28 March 1919) in the aftermath of the First World War: ‘The Surgeon General of the Army…denies…that there is any foundation for the stories that have been circulated…of the existence of “basket cases” in our hospitals.’ Indeed, another definition of the term is ‘a soldier who has lost all four limbs’ – thus, presumably, requiring transportation in something like a basket. To complicate matters, Flexner (1976) describes this as being originally British Army slang. It has been suggested, probably misguidedly, that the association with mental disability comes from the fact that basket-weaving is an activity sometimes carried out in mental hospitals. The second meaning was established by about 1973 and is still frequently used in business journalism when describing doomed ventures: ‘On a continent that is full of economic basket cases, the small, landlocked nation is virtually debt free’ – Newsweek (11 January 1982). Here, one might guess that the original phrase has been hi-jacked and the implication changed. What the writer is now referring to is something that is so useless that it is fit only to be thrown into a waste-paper basket.

      bath See DON’T THROW.

      (to have) bats in the belfry Meaning ‘to be mentally deficient, harmlessly insane, mad, batty’, this expression conveys the idea that a person behaves in a wildly disturbed manner, like bats disturbed by the ringing of bells. Stephen Graham wrote in London Nights (1925): ‘There is a set of jokes which are the common property of all the comedians. You may hear them as easily in Leicester Square as in Mile End Road. It strikes the unwonted visitor to the Pavilion as very original when Stanley Lupino says of some one: “He has bats in the belfry.” It is not always grasped that the expression belongs to the music hall at large.’ Attempts have been made to derive ‘batty’, in particular, from the name of William Battie (1704–76), author of a Treatise on Madness, though this seems a little harsh, given that he was the psychiatrist and not the patient. On the other hand, there was a Fitzherbert Batty, barrister of Spanish Town, Jamaica, who made news when he was certified insane in London in 1839. The names of these two gentlemen merely, and coincidentally, reinforce the ‘bats in the belfry’ idea – but there do not seem to be any examples of either expression in use before 1900.

      (a) bat’s squeak of sexuality Use of this phrase probably derives from Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Chap. 3 (1945): ‘As I took the cigarette from my lips and put it in hers, I caught a thin bat’s squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me’ (Charles Ryder of Lady Julia). A later use of ‘bat’s squeak’, not otherwise much recorded: at the Conservative Party Conference in 1981, a then upwardly rising politician called Edwina Currie was taking part in a debate on law and order. To illustrate some point, she held aloft a pair of handcuffs. Subsequently, the Earl of Gowrie admitted to having felt ‘a bat’s squeak of desire’ for Mrs Currie at that moment.

      (the) Battle of Britain The urge to give names to battles – even before they are fought and won – is well exemplified by Winston Churchill’s coinage of 18 June 1940: ‘What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.’ It duly became the name by which the decisive overthrowing of German invasion plans by ‘the Few’ is known. The order of the day, read aloud to every pilot on 10 July, contained the words: ‘The Battle of Britain is about to begin. Members of the Royal Air Force, the fate of generations is in your hands.’ Another Churchill coinage – ‘The Battle of Egypt’ (speech, 10 November 1942) – caught

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