A Word In Your Shell-Like - Nigel Rees

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this Government: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’ Ever since then, people have had difficulty getting the order of his words right. The natural inclination is to put ‘blood’, ‘sweat’ then ‘tears’ together – as did Byron in 1823 with ‘blood, sweat and tear-wrung millions’ and as did the Canadian/US rock group Blood Sweat and Tears in the late 1960s and 70s. Much earlier, however, there had been yet another combination of the words in John Donne’s An Anatomy of the World (1611): ‘’Tis in vain to do so or to mollify it with thy tears, or sweat, or blood.’ Churchill seemed consciously to avoid these configurations. In 1931, he had written of the Tsarist armies: ‘Their sweat, their tears, their blood bedewed the endless plain.’ Having launched his version of the phrase in 1940, he referred to it five more times during the course of the war.

      bloody See CAN A BLOODY.

      bloody but unbowed Often used as an unascribed quotation, meaning ‘determined after having suffered a defeat’. From W. E. Henley’s poem ‘Invictus. In Memoriam R.T.H.B.’ (1888): ‘In the fell clutch of circumstance, / I have not winced nor cried aloud: / Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody but unbowed.’ ‘Bloody but unbowed, veteran discount retailers Gerald and Vera Weisfeld have hit out at the new £56m rescue deal agreed between struggling Poundstretcher owner Brown & Jackson and South African group Pepkor’ – Daily Mail (10 May 1994); ‘Bloody but unbowed, Dungannon had several heroes. Johns lorded the lineouts; while Beggs and Willie Dunne scrapped for everything’ – The Irish Times (17 October 1994); ‘Charles Scott, acting chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi, now renamed Cordiant, survived his first shareholders’ meeting since the upheavals at the top of the advertising combine bloody but unbowed, with investors’ vitriol shared out fairly equally between him, the Saatchi brothers and David Herro, the Chicago investor’ – The Times (17 March 1995).

      (the) bloody deed was done The provenance of this phrase has proved elusive. In Shakespeare, the phrase ‘bloody deed’ occurs several times and, what with Macbeth’s ‘I have done the deed’ and the almost immediate references to ‘blood’, not to mention Rosse’s ‘Is’t known who did this more than bloody deed?’ (II.iv.22), might well have produced this conflation. The nearest one gets is Richard III, IV.iii.1(1592–3): ‘The tyrannous and bloody act is done’ – which is what Tyrrel says about the murder of the Princes in the Tower. As with ‘the bloody dog is dead’ from the end of the same play (V.v.2), we are almost there, but the exact phrase remains untraced – except in the works of lesser poets of the 17th to 19th centuries: ‘Here through my bosom run / Your sword, and when the bloody deed is done, / When your steel smoaks with my hearts reeking Gore, / Bid me be well as e’re I was before’ – from Anon., Sophonisba, or Hannibal’s Overthrow: a Tragedy, Act 2, Sc 1 (1676); ‘Pallid grew every face; and man on man, / Speechless with horror, looked; for well they knew / The bloody deed was done’ – Edwin Atherstone, The Fall of Nineveh, Bk 24 (1868). These quotations, taken together, encourage one to think that the original coinage will not be found: it is simply a proverbial expression.

      Bloody Sunday As with BLACK FRIDAY, there have been a number of these. On 13 November 1887, two men died during a baton charge on a prohibited socialist demonstration in Trafalgar Square, London. On 22 January 1905, hundreds of unarmed peasants were mown down when they marched to petition the Tsar in St Petersburg. In Irish history, there was a Bloody Sunday on 21 November 1920 when, among other incidents, fourteen undercover British intelligence agents in Dublin were shot by Sinn Fein. More recently, the name was applied to Sunday 30 January 1972 when British troops killed thirteen Catholics after a protest rally in Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Perhaps the epithet sprang to mind readily on this last occasion because of the film Sunday Bloody Sunday (UK 1971). This story had a screenplay by Penelope Gilliatt. It was about a ménage à trois and, although not explained explicitly, the title probably referred to the pivotal day on which the relationships ran further into the sand. Since the 19th century there has been the exclamation ‘Sunday, bloody Sunday!’ to express the gloom and despondency of the day. In 1973, the UK/US group Black Sabbath released an album with the title Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.

      blooming See AIN’T IT.

      (to) blot one’s copybook To make a serious blunder, misdemeanour or gaffe that affects one’s hitherto good record – as though one had spilled ink on a copybook, which was an aid to learning handwriting much in use until the mid-20th century. The student would imitate writing sentences in the correct style, in spaces below what was printed on the page. A ‘copy book’ is mentioned in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (1588) and Dorothy L. Sayers has the expression in Gaudy Night, Chap. 5 (1935): ‘Now, it was the College that had blotted its copybook and had called her in as one calls in a specialist.’

      (a) blot on one’s escutcheon A stain on one’s character or reputation. An escutcheon is a shield with armorial bearings on it. The earliest appearance would seem to be in John Dryden, Virgil, II, ‘Dedication’ (1697): ‘The banishment of Ovid was a blot in his escutcheon.’ A Blot In the ‘Scutcheon is the title of a play (1843) by Robert Browning. In W. S. Gilbert, The Sorcerer, Act 1 (1877), Sir Marmaduke Pointdextre says: ‘Aline is rich, and she comes of a sufficiently old family, for she is the seven thousand and thirty-seventh in direct descent from Helen of Troy. True, there was a blot on the escutcheon of that lady – that affair with Paris – but where is the family, other than my own, in which there is no flaw?’

      (a) blot on the landscape Anything that spoils or disfigures a view in an unsightly way (not least a person), or, figuratively, that is simply objectionable. Since the 16th century, ‘blot’ on its own was used in this sense. The first citation to have the whole phrase is in a letter from T. E. Lawrence (dated 20 February 1938): ‘His two Kufti people…will be rather a blot on the landscape.’ A Baumer cartoon in Punch uses it (25 April 1934). From P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves in the Offing, Chap. 1 (1960): ‘“And a rousing toodle-oo to you, you young blot on the landscape,” she replied cordially.’ Tom Sharpe’s novel Blot on the Landscape (1975) features a character called ‘Blott’. ‘Their makeshift shanties have always been a blot on the landscape (they creep right up to the hard shoulder of the motorway that brings visitors in from the airport) and they are now not only a blot on the conscience but a blot, too, on the immediate scrutiny of the immaculate dream to which some whites still subscribe’ – The Times (9 December 1995). ‘It is a blot on the landscape – and it’s lost its flavour. Now Wrigley, the chewing-gum manufacturer, is trying to teach Britain’s estimated 22 million chewers where not to stick the gluey residue’ – The Sunday Telegraph (11 February 1996).

      blouse See BIG GIRL’S.

      blow See DON’T BLOW.

      (to) blow a raspberry To make a farting noise by blowing through the lips. This is rhyming slang, raspberry tart = fart. From Barrère & Leland, Dictionary of Slang (1890): ‘The tongue is inserted in the left cheek and forced through the lips, producing a peculiarly squashy noise that is extremely irritating. It is termed, I believe, a raspberry, and when not employed for the purpose of testing horseflesh, is regarded rather as an expression of contempt than of admiration.’

      (to) blow hot and cold Meaning ‘to vacillate between enthusiasm and apathy’, this expression has been known in English since 1577 and is to be found in one of Aesop’s Fables. On a cold day, a satyr comes across a man blowing his fingers to make them warm. He takes the man home and gives him a bowl of hot soup. The man blows on the soup, to cool it. At this, the satyr throws him out, exclaiming that he wants nothing to do with a man who can ‘blow hot and cold from the same mouth’.

      (to) blow one’s own trumpet Meaning, ‘to boast of one’s own achievements’. This is sometimes said to have originated with the statue of ‘Fame’ on the parapet of Wilton House, near Salisbury. The figure – positioned after a fire in 1647 – originally held a trumpet in each hand. But why does one need a precise origin? Besides, the OED2

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