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A Word In Your Shell-Like. Nigel Rees
Читать онлайн.Название A Word In Your Shell-Like
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007373499
Автор произведения Nigel Rees
Жанр Справочная литература: прочее
Издательство HarperCollins
battle-scarred (veterans) A mostly journalistic cliché. ‘Our leaders battle-scarred’ wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes in an open letter To General Grant (1865). In Nat J. Ferber, I Found Out (1939), it is related that once on the New York American the printing error ‘battle-scared hero’ was hastily corrected in a later edition and came out reading ‘bottle-scarred hero’. ‘Can a bunch of battle-scarred old pols…gang up to stop a brash young lawyer named Brian Mulroney?’ – Toronto Star (14 February 1976); ‘The man who made it possible – bringing a new lease of life to his own political career in the process – was Mr Peres, one of the most battle-scarred veterans of Israeli politics’ – The Sunday Telegraph (5 September 1993); ‘“Just be the benevolent old maestro, Bob, battle-scarred and wordly-wise in the ways of the biz,” Moir advised’ – Bob Monkhouse, Crying With Laughter (1993); ‘Battle-scarred veterans of the women’s movement can be forgiven for sighing wearily at some of this; like the youngsters who “think sex was invented the year they reached puberty,” she seems unaware that the Sixties movement was greatly about women’s right to love freely’ – The Observer (5 December 1993); ‘Okay, so he has more important priorities in life now like setting up a new wine bar with a partner, and the Dump Truck and his fellow young professional monsters will never have to worry about a 36-year-old battle-scarred dad-of-three from England, but he reckons he could make a sizeable mark in the amateur ranks for a couple of years’ – The Sunday Times (27 November 1994).
BBC See AUNTIE.
be afraid – be very afraid Slogan for film The Fly (US 1986) and also included as a line spoken by Geena Davis (Veronica) to a date of Seth Brundle’s (he is the man who half-turns into a fly): ‘No. Be afraid. Be very afraid.’
beam me up, Scotty! Catchphrase popularly associated with the US TV science-fiction series Star Trek (1966–9). According to Trekkers, however, Capt. Kirk (William Shatner) never actually said to Lt. Commander ‘Scotty’ Scott, the chief engineer, ‘Beam me up, Scotty!’ – which meant that he should transpose body into matter, or transport someone from planet to spaceship, or some such thing. In the fourth episode, however, he may have said, ‘Scotty, beam me up!’ The more usual form of the injunction was, ‘Enterprise, beam us up’ or, ‘Beam us up, Mr Scott.’
beans See AMOUNT TO.
Beanz meanz Heinz This slogan for Heinz Baked Beans in the UK (from 1967) is the type of advertising line that annoys teachers because it appears to condone wrong spelling. Johnny Johnson wrote the music for the jingle that went: ‘A million housewives every day / Pick up a tin of beans and say / Beanz meanz Heinz.’ ‘I created the line at Young & Rubicam,’ copywriter Maurice Drake stated in 1981. ‘It was in fact written – although after much thinking – over two pints of bitter in the Victoria pub in Mornington Crescent.’
bear See GLADLY MY CROSS-EYED.
(to) beard the lion in his den To confront a person with impunity. This phrase derives from the notion of taking a lion by the beard and partly from the use of the word ‘beard’ to mean the face. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 1, IV.i.12 (1591), has: ‘No man so potent breathes upon the ground, / But I will beard him’, but the ‘lion’ image seems first to have been employed in Tobias Smollet, Regicide, II.vii (1777): ‘Sooner wouldst thou beard The lion in his rage.’ W. S. Gilbert, Iolanthe (1882) has: ‘Beard the lion in his lair – None but the brave deserve the fair.’ R. D. Blackmore, Perlycross, II.iv.68 (1894), has the complete phrase: ‘Nothing less would satisfy her than to beard – if the metaphor applies to ladies – the lion in the den, the arch-accuser, in the very court of judgment.’
—bears eloquent testimony Pompous phrase used by writers of opinion columns and by speech-makers. Date of origin unknown. Listed in The Independent (24 December 1994) as a cliché of newspaper editorials and well established as such by that date. ‘Mr Hamilton said last night: “I entirely refute the allegations and the writ will make that perfectly clear.” When asked if there was any grain of truth in the Guardian report Mr Hamilton said: “My writ I think is eloquent testimony to the view that I have as to their veracity. Nobody issues a writ to launch a libel action for fun”’ – The Times (21 October 1994).
(the) beast of—Nickname formula. (1) The ‘Beast of Belsen’ was Josef Kramer, German commandant of the Belsen concentration camp during the worst period of its history from December 1944 to the end of the Second World War. He was executed for his crimes in 1945. (2) The ‘Beast/Bitch of Buchenwald’ was Ilse Koch (d. 1967), wife of the commandant of the concentration camp near Weimar. Infamous for having had lampshades made out of the skin of her victims. (3) The ‘Beast of Bolsover’ is Dennis Skinner (b. 1932), the aggressive and outspoken Labour MP for Bolsover in Derbyshire (since 1970). Noted for interrupting speeches and making loud comments in the House of Commons. (4) The ‘Beast of Jersey’ was E. J. L. (Ted) Paisnel, convicted of 13 sex offences against children and sentenced to 30 years imprisonment in 1971. The name was applied to him during the 11 years he evaded arrest on the island.
beasts of the field See BIRDS OF THE AIR.
(to) beat a path to someone’s door Sarah Yule claimed (1889) that she had heard Ralph Waldo Emerson say the following in a lecture: ‘If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, ‘tho he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.’ Elbert Hubbard also claimed authorship. Either way, this is a remark alluded to when people talk of ‘beating a path to someone’s door’ or a better mousetrap. In his journal for February 1855, Emerson had certainly entertained the thought: ‘If a man…can make better chairs or knives…than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.’
beaten the panel See IS IT BIGGER.
(the) Beat Generation ‘Beatniks’ were young people who opted out of normal society in the 1950s (first of all in the USA) because they were unable or unwilling to conform to conventional standards. Careless of appearance, critical of the Establishment, they were less intellectual than the average angry young man, but rebellious like the teddy boys who preceded them (in the UK) and the hippies who followed. The name with its Yiddish or Russian suffix (compare the Russian sputnik satellite orbiting the earth in 1957) derived from the phrase ‘Beat Generation’, coinage of which is usually credited to Jack Kerouac, although in his book The Origins of the Beat Generation, he admitted to borrowing the phrase from a drug addict called Herbert Huncke. In Randy Nelson’s The Almanac of American Letters (1981), there is a description of the moment of coinage. Kerouac is quoted as saying: ‘John Clellon Holmes…and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the lost generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said: “You know, this is really a beat generation,” and he leapt up and said: “That’s it, that’s right”.’ Holmes himself attributed the phrase directly to Kerouac in The New York Times Magazine of 16 November 1952.
beautiful See ALL THINGS; BUT MISS.
(the) beautiful game Football. This description is usually credited to the Brazilian player Pelé, and his autobiography (written with Robert L. Fish) has the English title My Life and the Beautiful Game (1977). But whether he said it first in Portuguese (o jogo lindo) or in English is not known. The Beautiful Game was the title of a musical (London 2000) about football and the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland (book by Ben Elton, music by Andrew Lloyd Webber). The phrase had much earlier been applied to cricket by Arnold Wall (1869–1966) in a poem called ‘A Time Will Come’ during the First World War.
(the)