A Word In Your Shell-Like. Nigel Rees
offences…it’s the all-singing all-dancing act.” The only thing it can’t do, it seems, is play the violin.’ And from a special report on computers in the same paper (24 June 1985): ‘I’m knocking these present notes together on the word-processor incorporated into Jazz, the all-singing, all-dancing “integrated” package from the Lotus Development Corporation.’ Partridge/Catch Phrases dates the start of the computing use to about 1970. The phrase is used every bit as much when writing about financial ‘packages’. From a special report in The Times (8 November 1985): ‘The City’s financial institutions have been busily preparing themselves for the changes. Many of the large stockbroking firms have forged links with banks: conceding their independence but benefiting from the massive capital injection which many believe will be necessary to cope with the new look all-singing-and-dancing exchange.’ The meaning is reasonably clear. What you should anticipate getting in each sphere is a multipurpose something or other, with every possible feature, that may or may not ‘perform’ well. A dictionary of jargon (1984) goes so far as to give the general business meaning as ‘super-glamorised, gimmicky, flashy’, when referring to a version of any stock product. As such, the phrase has been used in many other fields as well – not least in show business. The source? In 1929, when sound came to the movies, the very first Hollywood musical, MGM’s Broadway Melody, was promoted with posters bearing the slogan: ‘The New Wonder of the Screen! / ALL TALKING / ALL SINGING / ALL DANCING / Dramatic Sensation.’ Oddly enough, in that same year, two rival studios both hit on the same selling pitch. Alice White in Broadway Babes (using Warners’ Vitaphone system) was ‘100% TALKING, SINGING, DANCING’. And Radio Picture’s Rio Rita (with Bebe Daniels) was billed as ‘ZIEGFELD’S FABULOUS ALL-TALKING, ALL-SINGING SUPER SCREEN SPECTACLE’. It was natural that the studios should wish to promote the most obvious aspect of the new sound cinema but it is curious that they should all have used much the same phrase.
all Sir Garnet Meaning ‘all correct’, this phrase alludes to Sir Garnet Wolseley (1833–1913), a soldier noted for his organizational powers, who led several successful military expeditions 1852–5 and helped improve the lot of the Other Ranks. The expression was known by 1894. Wolseley is also celebrated as ‘The Modern Major-General’ in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance (1879). From the same source, Sir Garnet is the name of a boat in Coot Club, the novel (1934) by Arthur Ransome.
all sorts Street Talk (1986) defines this as ‘all sorts of people, things or activities. Often said pejoratively of people, as in, “You get all sorts in a neighbourhood like that”.’ The proverb ‘It takes all sorts to make a world’ was known by 1620. There may also be a modern allusion to Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts, the brand of confectionery that comes in many different colours and shapes.
all’s well that ends well The Reverend Francis Kilvert’s diary entry for 1 January 1878 noted: ‘The hind axle broke and they thought they would have to spend the night on the road…All’s well that ends well and they arrived safe and sound.’ Is the allusion to the title of Shakespeare’s play All’s Well That Ends Well (circa 1603) or to something else? In fact, it was a proverbial expression before Shakespeare used it. CODP finds ‘If the ende be wele, than is alle wele’ in 1381, and points to the earlier form ‘Wel is him that wel ende mai’. See also under WAR AND PEACE.
all systems go! In a state of readiness to begin an enterprise. From the US space programme of the 1960s.
all that heaven allows Peggy Fenwick’s script for the film with this title (US 1955) has widow Cary (Jayne Wyman) falling for her gardener, Ron (Rock Hudson), to the consternation of her class-conscious friends. Despite Wyman’s quoting a hefty chunk from Thoreau’s Walden, no hint is given as to where the title of the film comes from. In fact, it comes from the poem ‘Love and Life’ by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647–80). This was included in Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse (1900) – that great repository of quotations later to be used as film titles: ‘Then talk not of inconstancy, / False hearts, and broken vows; / If I by miracle can be / This live-long minute true to thee, / ‘Tis all that Heaven allows.’
all the news that’s fit to print This slogan was devised by Adolph S. Ochs when he bought The New York Times, and it has been used in every edition since – at first on the editorial page, on 25 October 1896, and from the following February on the front page near the masthead. It became the paper’s war cry in its 1890s’ battle against formidable competition in New York City from the World, the Herald and the Journal. At worst, it sounds like a slogan for the suppression of news. However, no newspaper prints everything. It has been parodied by Howard Dietz as ‘All the news that fits we print’.
all the President’s men Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward gave the title All the President’s Men to their first Watergate book (1974; film US 1976). It might seem to allude to the lines from the nursery rhyme ‘Humpty Dumpty’ (first recorded in 1803): ‘All the king’s horses / And all the king’s men, / Couldn’t put Humpty together again.’ There is also a Robert Penn Warren novel (1946; filmed US 1949), All the King’s Men, based on the life of the southern demagogue Huey ‘Kingfish’ Long. More directly, the Watergate book took its title from a saying of Henry Kissinger’s at the time of the 1970 Cambodia invasion: ‘We are all the President’s men and we must behave accordingly’ – quoted in Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger (1974).
all the world and his wife Meaning, ‘everybody’ – though the phrase is in decline now after the feminism of the 1970s. Christopher Anstey in The New Bath Guide (1766) has: ‘How he welcomes at once all the world and his wife, / And how civil to folk he ne’er saw in his life.’ Jonathan Swift included it in Polite Conversation (1738): ‘Who were the Company? – Why; there was all the World and his Wife.’ There is an equivalent French expression: ‘All the world and his father’. A letter from Lord Byron to Thomas Moore (29 February 1816) has: ‘I am at war with “all the world and his wife” or rather, “all the world and my wife” are at war with me.’ From F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Chap. 4 (1926): ‘On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages alongshore, the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby’s house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn.’
all the world loves a lover This modernish proverbial saying was used by James Agate in a speech on 17 December 1941 (reported in Ego 5, 1942). It would appear to be an adaptation of the established expression, ‘Everybody/all the world loves a lord’ (current by 1869) – not forgetting what the 1st Duke of Wellington apparently once said: ‘Soldiers dearly love a lord’. Almost a format saying: Stephen Leacock in Essays and Literary Studies (1916) has: ‘All the world loves a grafter – at least a genial and ingenious grafter – a Robin Hood who plunders an abbot to feed a beggar’; ‘All the world loves a dancer’ – the Fred Astaire character in the film Swing Time (US 1936).
all things bright and beautiful The popular hymn (1848) by Mrs Cecil Frances Alexander, of which this is the first line, is still notorious for its other famous lines about (THE) RICH MAN IN HIS CASTLE (THE POOR MAN AT HIS GATE. It also provided the author James Herriot with new titles for his collected volumes about life as a vet – books originally called It Shouldn’t Happen To a Vet, Let Sleeping Vets Lie, Vets Might Fly, etc. When these titles were coupled together in three omnibus editions especially for the US market (from 1972), Mrs Alexander’s hymn was plundered and they became All Things Bright and Beautiful, All Creatures Great and Small, and All Things Wise and Wonderful. The Lord God Made Them All was given to a further original volume.
all this and Heaven too As acknowledged in Rachel Fields’s novel with the title All This and Heaven Too (1939; film US 1940), Matthew Henry, the English Bible commentator (d. 1714), ascribed the saying to his minister father in his own Life of Mr Philip Henry (1698). Compare the film title All This and World War II (US 1976) and the classic Daily Express newspaper headline on Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation day (2 June 1953): ‘ALL THIS – AND