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A Word In Your Shell-Like. Nigel Rees
Читать онлайн.Название A Word In Your Shell-Like
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isbn 9780007373499
Автор произведения Nigel Rees
Жанр Справочная литература: прочее
Издательство HarperCollins
(a) confederacy of dunces A phrase that comes from Jonathan Swift: ‘Many a true genius appears in the world – you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him’ – Thoughts on Various Subjects (1706). Hence, A Confederacy of Dunces, the title of a novel (1980) by John Kennedy Toole.
confirmed bachelor See NOT THE MARRYING SORT.
confusion to his enemies British naval toast to the king, possibly first used in the 17th century. A schedule of naval toasts included: ‘Monday Night – Our Ships at sea; Thursday Night – Confusion to our enemies, or, A bloody war, or, more selectively, Death to the French!’ Other versions are ‘Confusion to the enemy’ and ‘Confusion to the French’ (perhaps the original form). From Tom Higgs, 300 Years of Mitcham Cricket: ‘Lord Nelson, when watching the cricket match on Mitcham Green before travelling to Portsmouth, his ship “Victory” and the Battle of Trafalgar (October 1805), gave John Bowyer (aged fifteen) a shilling: “To drink confusion to the French”. The traditional song ‘Here’s a Health unto His Majesty’, continues: ‘With a fal lal la la la la la! / Confusion to his enemies / With a fal lal la la la la la!’ A nautical dictionary, this definition of a Fire Ship: ‘A ship which has been deliberately set on fire to cause damage and confusion to the enemy.’ Compare the infrequently sung second verse of ‘God Save the King’: ‘O Lord our God, arise, / Scatter his enemies…
conk See ARE YOU LOOKING; BIG CONK.
conquer See ALEXANDER WEEPING.
consent See ADVISE AND.
(a) conspiracy theory A belief that a happening (usually political) is the result of a group of people conspiring together rather than the activity of a lone individual or the result of sheer chance or accident. The phrase arose in the mid-1960s when arguments raged over whether the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy was the work of one man – Lee Harvey Oswald – working on his own or was the result of a plot by organized crime, the Soviet Union, the FBI, or any number of bodies. Now inevitably invoked whenever causes of events are being investigated. Sometimes people say that they prefer the ‘cock-up theory’ of history rather than conspiracies. ‘Conspiracy theories are often framed after the deaths of famous people. Like a kaleidoscope, the conspiracy theory can create satisfying shapes and patterns from even the most random details…Others said Lincoln had been killed on the orders of his cabinet, or by Roman Catholics or Southerners’ – The Times (12 November 1991); Conspiracy Theory – title of film (US 1997).
(to) contain the seeds of (something’s) own destruction (sometimes germs…) An allusion to Karl Marx’s observation: ‘Not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians’ – The Communist Manifesto, Pt I (1848). Or to this from Vol. 1, Chap. 32 of Das Kapital: ‘The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation…’ Compare ‘He bears the seed of ruin in himself’ – Matthew Arnold, Merope (1858).
continent isolated In Maurice Bowra’s Memories 1898–1939 (1966) he recalls how Ernst Kantorowicz, a refugee from Germany in the 1930s, ‘liked the insularity of England and was much pleased by the newspaper headline, “Channel storms. Continent isolated”, just as he liked the imagery in, “Shepherd’s Bush combed for dead girl’s body”.’ As an indicator of English isolationism, the ‘Continent isolated’ headline does indeed seem to have surfaced in the 1930s. John Gunther, Inside Europe (1938 edn), has: ‘Two or three winters ago a heavy storm completely blocked traffic across the Channel. “CONTINENT ISOLATED,” the newspapers couldn’t help saying.’ The cartoonist Russell Brockbank drew a newspaper placard stating ‘FOG IN CHANNEL – CONTINENT ISOLATED’ (as shown in his book Round the Bend with Brockbank, published by Temple Press, 1948). By the 1960s and 1970s, and by the time of Britain’s attempts to join the European Community, the headline was more often invoked as: ‘FOG IN CHANNEL. EUROPE ISOLATED.’
continong See MORNING ALL.
contributions See ALL.
cookie See THAT’S THE WAY.
(to go on a) Cook’s tour To travel in an organized manner, possibly on a tour of rather greater extent than originally intended (compare MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR). Thomas Cook was the founder of the world’s original travel agency. His first tour was in 1841 when he took a party of fellow teetotallers on a railway trip in the British Midlands. Alas, there has always been a certain amount of prejudice against the organized tour. Amelia B. Edwards, the Victorian Egyptologist, is suitably caustic in A Thousand Miles Up the Nile (1877): ‘[The newcomer in Cairo soon] distinguishes at first sight between a Cook’s tourist and an independent traveller’.
cool as a cucumber (Of a person) very calm and collected, not nervous. The first recorded use is in a poem (1732) by John Gay: ‘I, cool as a cucumber, could see the rest of womankind.’
cool as a mountain stream A slogan for Consulate (menthol) cigarettes, in the UK from the early 1960s.
cool Britannia Britain’s Labour Government (elected in 1997) briefly flirted with this concept slogan during its first year in office, then ditched it (perhaps mindful of how its predecessor’s BACK TO BASICS’ cry ultimately did it more harm than good). The idea had been to promote a more up-to-date image of Britain and not one of a country stuck in the past, a heritage theme park of castles and villages. The origin of the pun on ‘Rule Britannia’ was quickly located in the title and lyrics of Vivian Stanshall’s song for the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band record album Gorilla (1968): ‘Cool Britannia, Britannia you are cool, take a trip…/ Britons ever, ever, ever shall be hip (hit me, hit me!)’ However, a more pertinent and more recent cue for the phrase may have come from the name of a strawberry and chocolate ice manufactured by Ben & Jerry’s.
(a) cool hundred/thousand/million OED2 says drily that the ‘cool’ gives emphasis to the (large) amount. Is this because a large amount of money is rather chilling, lacking in warmth, or because of the calm way the money is paid out? Perhaps the word ‘cool’ in this context anticipates its more modern connection with jazz, as something thrilling, to be admired and approved of. In Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), we read: ‘Watson rose from the table in some heat and declared he had lost a cool hundred…’ In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861): ‘She had wrote a little [codicil]…leaving a cool four thousand to Mr Mathew Pocket.’ A Cool Million is the title of a satire by Nathaniel West (1934), and in Anthony Powell’s Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975), Lord Widmerpool comments on a smoke bomb let off at a literary prize-giving: ‘I wouldn’t have missed that for a cool million.’
corn in Egypt See OIL FOR THE.
(the) corridors of power A phrase that had become established for the machinations of government, especially in Whitehall, by the time C. P. Snow chose it for the title of his novel Corridors of Power (1964). Earlier, Snow had written in Homecomings (1956): ‘The official world, the corridors of power, the dilemmas of conscience and egotism – she disliked them all.’ ‘Boffins at daggers drawn in corridors of power’ – headline in The Times (8 April 1965).
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