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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
don’t you pour that tea, there will be ginger twins! Injunction expounding the curious superstition that the person who has made a pot of tea should be the one to pour it out. If it was poured by another it would bring ginger twins into the family. There are, in fact, several superstitions concerning the pouring out of tea, especially if it involves two people. Another is that it is bad luck for two people to pour out of the same pot. The journal Folklore (in 1940) reported this as follows: ‘I have often heard…that two women should not catch hold of a teapot at once or one of them will have ginger-headed twins within the year.’
doodah See ALL OF.
doolally tap Mad, of unbalanced mind. ‘Tap’ here is in the sense of ‘heat, fever’ and ‘doolally’ is the spoken form of the Marashtra (India) word ‘deolali’. Fraser & Gibbons, Soldier & Sailor Words (1925), state: ‘Deolali tap (otherwise doolally tap), mad, off one’s head. Old Army.’ Street (1986) describes Deolali as ‘a turn-of-the-century Bombay sanatorium where many British soldiers were detained before being shipped home.’
doom and gloom (or gloom and doom) (merchants) The basic rhyming phrase became especially popular in the 1970s/80s and a cliché almost simultaneously. ‘Doom and gloom merchants’ was part of the ‘travel scribes’ armoury’ compiled from a competition in The Guardian (10 April 1993). An early appearance was in the musical Finian’s Rainbow (1947; film US 1968) in which Og, a pessimistic leprechaun, uses it repeatedly, as in: ‘I told you that gold could only bring you doom and gloom, gloom and doom.’ ‘It was only last month that Mr Alex Park, chief executive of British Leyland, was attacking the news media for “pouring out gloom and doom about the car industry”’ – BBC Radio 4, Between the Lines (9 October 1976); ‘Amongst all the recent talk of doom and gloom one thing has been largely overlooked…’ – Daily Telegraph (7 November 1987); ‘The doom-and-gloom merchants would have us convinced that only an idiot would ever invest another hardearned penny in property’ – Daily Record (7 March 1995); ‘Yet athletics usually gets its own back on the doom-and-gloom merchants, and can do so here when people such as Privalova and Johnson take the stage’ – The Guardian (10 March 1995).
doomed See MANY MANY TIMES.
(to) do one’s own thing A 1960s’ expression, meaning ‘establish your own identity/follow your own star’, which is said to have been anticipated by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), the American poet and essayist. The passage from his ‘Essay on Self Reliance’ actually states: ‘If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it…under all these screens, I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are…But do your […] thing, and I shall know you.’ ‘With surpassing ease and a cool sense of authority, the children of plenty have voiced an intention to live by a different ethical standard than their parents accepted…To do one’s own thing is a greater duty than to be a useful citizen’ – Time Magazine (29 August 1969).
doornail See DEAD AS A.
doors See BEHIND CLOSED.
(the) doors of perception Phrase from William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (circa 1790): ‘If the doors of perception [i.e. the senses] were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.’ This view was seized upon by proponents of drug culture in the 1960s. The Doors of Perception had been the title given to Aldous Huxley’s book (1954) about his experiments with mescalin and LSD. From the phrase was also derived the name of the US vocal/instrumental group The Doors.
Dorothy See IS SHE A.
do that thing (or small thing)! ‘How nice of you to offer to do that!’ Or, ‘Please go ahead!’ Or ‘Thanks, yes!’ Current in the UK 1950s/60s.
do the right thing Do the Right Thing was the title of a film (US 1989) about Afro-American people in a Brooklyn slum. From Harper’s Index (January 1990): ‘Number of times the phrase “do the right thing” has been used in Congress since Spike Lee’s film was released last June: 67 / Number of times the phrase was used in reference to congressional pay rise: 16 / Number of times it was used in reference to racial issues: 1.’ The British English equivalent would be do the decent thing (known by 1914), although ‘do the right thing’ seems almost as well established (known by the 1880s). Is there a connection with First World War epitaphs, ‘He trusted in God and tried to do the right’ or with the older motto ‘Trust in God, and do the Right’?
do they know it’s Christmas? Referring to those suffering from famine. This was the question posed in the title of a song written by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure in 1984. Performed by Band Aid – an ad hoc group of pop singers and musicians – it became the UK Christmas No. 1 record in 1984 and again in 1989. In 1984, by drawing attention to those suffering in the Ethiopian civil war and famine, it gave rise to the Band Aid concert in July 1985.
(a) Double Diamond works wonders Slogan for Double Diamond beer in the UK, from 1952. The double alliteration may have a lot to do with it, but it was surely the singing of the slogan to the tune of ‘There’s a Hole in my Bucket’ that made it one of the best-known of all beer slogans.
(a) double whammy A two-part or twopronged blow, difficulty or disadvantage. Until the General Election of 1992, few people in Britain were familiar with the phrase. Then the Conservative Party introduced a poster showing a boxer wearing two enormous boxing gloves, labelled ‘1. More tax’ and ‘2. Higher prices’. The overall slogan was ‘LABOUR’S DOUBLE WHAMMY’. This caused a good deal of puzzlement in Britain, though the concept of a ‘double whammy’ had been known in the USA since the 1950s. DOAS traces the word to Al Capp’s ‘L’il Abner’ comic strip where a ‘whammy’ was the evil-eyed stare of the character Eagle Eye Feegle. He was able to render people motionless and speechless merely by looking at them. A stare with one eye was called a ‘whammy’, but in emergencies he could use both eyes, hence ‘double whammy’.
double your pleasure, double your fun
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