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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
beauty See AGE BEFORE; AHA, ME.
beauty and the beast The story of the beast who insists on marrying a beautiful princess is one of the classic fairy tales. One version is that of Marie Leprince (or Le Prince) de Beaumont, a French governess working in London, who published Le Magasin des enfans (1756–7), a booklet in French with dialogues meant for educating young girls. The fifth dialogue of Vol. 1 is ‘La Belle et la Bête’. The title and version (though much shortened) were mostly taken from another French author, Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve in Les Contes Marins (1740), which in turn harks back to Straparola’s telling in Piacevoli Notti (1550) and the traditional story of Amor and Psyche. The Villeneuve story (which was the first with the title La Belle et la Bête) was not apparently intended for children. Where the Leprince version has the Beast saying, ‘Would you be my wife?’, Villeneuve has him saying he wants to go to bed with her. When she finally agrees, all the Beast does is sleep and snore, and wake up as a beautiful prince. Jean Cocteau made a film version of the story, as La Belle et la Bête (France 1946), and a Disney animated musical Beauty and the Beast (US 1991) has kept the story alive. The phrase might now be used to describe a couple where the woman is good-looking and the man is definitely not.
beauty sleep ‘Sleep before midnight, supposedly conducive to good looks and health’, according to Partridge/Slang. Apparently, this phrase appeared in Frank Smedley’s novel, Frank Fairleigh (1850). It was certainly in Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago (1857).
Beaver! (1) The cry identifying a man with a beard appears to have been common among children in the 1910s and 1920s, though it is now obsolete. In 1922, Punch had several jokes and cartoons on the theme and noted (19 July) in a caption: ‘To Oxford is attributed the credit of inventing the game of “Beaver” in which you score points for spotting bearded men.’ But why beaver? Flexner (1976) notes the use of the animal’s name to describe a high, sheared-fur hat in the USA. The beaver’s thick dark-brown fur, he says, also refers ‘to a well-haired pudendum or a picture showing it, which in pornography is called a “beaver shot”.’ Beaver for beard may derive rather from the Middle Ages when the ‘beaver’ was the part of a soldier’s helmet that lay around the chin as a face-guard (the ‘vizor’ was the bit brought down from the forehead). In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I.ii.228 (1600), the Prince asks: ‘Then saw you not his face?’ (that of his father’s ghost). Horatio replies: ‘O yes, my lord, he wore his beaver up.’ (2) Nickname of William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook (1879–1964), newspaper magnate and politician in Britain. He took his title from the town in New Brunswick, Canada, where he had a home. Called ‘Max’ by his friends, he was known to his staff as ‘the Beaver’, a name explained by Tom Driberg (his first ‘William Hickey’ columnist on the Daily Express) as being a ‘zoological symbol of tireless industry’.
be British! Jingoistic phrase. In 1912, Captain Edward Smith reputedly said, ‘Be British, boys, be British’ to his crew some time in the hours between his command, the Titanic, hitting the iceberg and his going down with the ship. Michael Davie in his book on the disaster describes the evidence for this as ‘flimsy’, but the legend was rapidly established. ‘Be British! was the cry as the ship went down’ is the first line of a commemorative song, ‘Be British’, written and composed by Lawrence Wright and Paul Pelham. In 1914, when a statue to Smith was erected in Lichfield, it had ‘Be British’ as part of the inscription.
because I’m worth it! Phrase from TV commercial for L’Oréal. ‘Shamelessly vainglorious claim voiced by a succession of blandly pretty actresses (and the French football Adonis, David Ginola) on a TV commercial to justify, implicitly, the shockingly exorbitant price of L’Oréal hair products’ – John Walsh in The Independent (2 December 2000). By October 2002, in the UK, there was a poster ad proclaiming, ‘Discover the beauty of science. Because you’re worth it. L’Oréal.’ The French version, seen in 2003, was: ‘Les progrès de la science se reflètent dans vos cheveux. Parce que vous le valez bien.’
because it’s there As a flippant justification for doing anything, this makes use of a phrase chiefly associated with the British mountaineer George Leigh Mallory (1886–1924). He disappeared on his last attempt to climb Mount Everest. The previous year, during a lecture tour in the USA, he had frequently been asked why he wanted to achieve the goal. He replied, ‘Because it is there.’ The saying has become a catchphrase in situations where the speaker wishes to dismiss an impossible question about motives and also to express acceptance of a challenge that is in some way daunting or foolish. There have been many variations (and misattributions). Sir Edmund Hillary repeated it regarding his own successful attempt on Everest in 1953. From Private Eye (circa April 1962): ‘Someone once asked me why I married the Queen. And I replied “Because she was there”’ – caption to a cartoon of the Duke of Edinburgh.
because the scenery is better An overworked and inevitable argument in promoting the superior imaginative qualities of radio as a medium. It supposedly originated in a letter to Radio Times in the 1920s, quoting a child who had said rather: ‘The pictures are better’. A cliché by the 1970s. ‘Do you ever listen [to the radio]? I do. I like it best. As a child I know says: “I see it much better on radio than on TV”’ – Joyce Grenfell in a letter of 22 September 1962 and included in An Invisible Friendship (1981); ‘“I like the wireless better than the theatre,” one London child wrote in a now legendary letter, “because the scenery is better”’ – Derek Parker, Radio: The Great Years (1977); ‘By way of illustration a young lad was quoted as saying he preferred radio to television – because the scenery is better. A proof of the power of imagination!’ – Prayer Book Society Newsletter (August 1995).
Becket See DO A THOMAS.
bed See AND SO TO; HE CAN LEAVE.
bedpost See BETWEEN YOU AND ME.
(to have) been and gone and done it Emphatic form of expression suggesting that one has finally done something and from which there may be no escape – for example, getting married. P. G. Wodehouse describes it as ‘language of the man of the street’ in his Tales of St Austin’s (1903). Even earlier, W. S. Gilbert has: ‘The padre said, “Whatever have you been and gone and done?”’ in The Bab Ballads, ‘Gentle Alice Brown’ (1869).
(to have) been there To have shared in or to have knowledge of some experience – often of an emotional nature. Of American origin. ‘Some reasons why I left off drinking whiskey, by one who has been there’ – headline in the Saturday Evening Post (1877). Whether the title of the film Being There (US 1980) is related is not clear. ‘The agony and ecstasy of La bohème are the agony and ecstasy of adolescence…one reason why we weep harder at La bohème than at any other opera is that we were all there once’ – Germaine Greer, quoted in Glyndebourne Festival Opera programme (2003). As for, been there, done that…: ‘Michael Caine was once asked if he had a motto: “Yeah – Been There, Done That. It’ll certainly be on my tombstone. It’ll just say, ‘Been There, Done That’”’ – quoted in Elaine Gallagher et al,