A Word In Your Shell-Like. Nigel Rees
said to have provoked the Python use of the phrase. It was first delivered by Eric Idle in the second edition of Python (12 October 1969), though it had also featured in some of the same team’s earlier series, At Last the 1948 Show, on ITV (1967), where it was uttered by ‘the lovely Aimi Macdonald’ in her introductions.
and now, her nibs, Miss Georgia Gibbs! The standard introduction to the singer of that name on the US radio show The Camel Caravan (1943–7).
and pigs might fly (or a pig may fly). An expression of the unlikelihood or impossibility of something actually taking place. Thomas Fuller, the proverb collector, had ‘That is as likely as to see an hog fly’ in 1732 though, earlier, The Spectator (2 April 1711) was bemoaning absurd inn signs including ‘flying Pigs’, which would seem to refer to this saying. From Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chap. 9 (1865): ‘“I’ve a right to think,” said Alice…“Just about as much right,” said the Duchess, “as pigs have to fly”.’
and so forth ‘And similarly, and then onwards’ – now mostly used after breaking off a list or quotation. This is a very old phrase indeed. Aelfric was writing ‘And swa forþ’ circa AD 1000 (see YE OLDE TEA SHOPPE). A would-be humorous elaboration of it, dating from the mid-20th century, is and so forth and so fifth!
and so it goes Mildly irritated or amused and philosophical phrase used when presented with yet another example of the way things are in the world. A catchphrase in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). So It Goes was the title of a British TV pop show devoted mainly to punk (by 1976). ‘And so it goes: hassle, hassle, hassle, one horrible death after another, and yet the put-upon lad’s soul is a butterfly that transmutes (on the spiritual sphere, you understand) into an Airfix Spitfire. By MTV standards, Hirst could be the next Francis Ford Coppola’ – The Observer (25 February 1996); ‘Sausages are brilliant all-rounders, everyone knows that. Fried up for breakfast, sandwiched between two slices of bread at lunch, grilled with mustard and mash for supper, cold on sticks at children’s parties, hot on sticks with a spicy dip at grown-up dos, and so it goes’ – The Sunday Times (25 February 1996).
and so to bed Samuel Pepys’s famous signing-off line in his diary entries appears first on 15 January 1660. However, on that particular occasion, they are not quite his last words. He writes: ‘I went to supper, and after that to make an end of this week’s notes in this book, and so to bed.’ Then he adds: ‘It being a cold day and a great snow, my physic did not work so well as it should have done’. And So To Bed was the title of a play (1926) by J. B. Fagan, which was then turned into a musical by Vivian Ellis (1951).
and so we say farewell…The travelogues made by James A. Fitzpatrick (1902–80) were a supporting feature of cinema programmes from 1925 onwards. With the advent of sound, the commentaries to ‘Fitzpatrick Traveltalks’ became noted for their closing words: ‘And it’s from this paradise of the Canadian Rockies that we reluctantly say farewell to Beautiful Banff…/ And as the midnight sun lingers on the skyline of the city, we most reluctantly say farewell to Stockholm, Venice of the North…/ With its picturesque impressions indelibly fixed in our memory, it is time to conclude our visit and reluctantly say farewell to Hong Kong, the hub of the Orient…’ Frank Muir and Denis Norden’s notable parody of the genre – ‘Bal-ham – Gateway to the South’ – first written for radio circa 1948 and later performed on a record album by Peter Sellers (1958) accordingly contained the words, ‘And so we say farewell to this historic borough…’
and still they come…Phrase for the remorseless oncoming of those you (probably) don’t like. From John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem ‘The King’s Missive’ (1881): ‘The pestilent Quakers are in my path! / Some we have scourged, and banished some, / Some hanged, more doomed, and still they come.’ The chorus from ‘The Astronomer’ in Jeff Wayne’s musical album The War of the Worlds (1978) is: ‘The chances of anything coming from Mars / Are a million to one, but still, they come…’ The title of a book by Elliott Barkan is And Still They Come: Immigrants and American Society, 1920 to the 1990s (1998). One is also reminded of Lewis Carroll’s lines about the oysters in ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’: ‘And thick and fast they came at last, / And more, and more, and more.’ Then there is this from Shakespeare, Macbeth, V.v.1 (1606): ‘Hang out our banners on the outward walls; / The cry is still, “They come!”’ ‘One million. And still they came’ – headline over peace march report in The Observer (16 February 2003).
and that ain’t hay! Meaning, ‘And that’s not to be sniffed at/that isn’t negligible’ – often with reference to money. The title of the 1943 Abbott and Costello film that is said to have popularized this (almost exclusively US) exclamation was It Ain’t Hay. But in the same year Mickey Rooney exclaimed ‘And that ain’t hay!’ as he went into the big ‘I Got Rhythm’ number (choreographed by Busby Berkeley) in the film Girl Crazy (the scene being set, appropriately, in an agricultural college).
and that, my dears, is how I came to marry your grandfather As though at the end of a long and rambling reminiscence by an old woman. Also used by the American humorist Robert Benchley (1889–1945) – possibly in capsule criticism of the play Abie’s Irish Rose – and so quoted by Diana Rigg in No Turn Unstoned (1982).
and that’s official Journalistic formula used when conveying, say, the findings of some newly published report. The aim, presumably, is to dignify the fact(s) so presented but also to do it in a not too daunting manner. A cliché condemned by Keith Waterhouse in Daily Mirror Style (1981). ‘Yes, the Prime Minister’s condition is “satisfactory” – and that’s official!’ – Private Eye (1962); ‘In America, there are no bad people, only people who think badly of themselves. And that’s official. California has a state commission to promote self-esteem, there is a National Council for Self-Esteem with its own bulletin…’ – Independent on Sunday (8 May 1994).
and that’s the way it is The authoritative but avuncular TV anchorman Walter Cronkite (b. 1916) retired from anchoring the CBS TV Evening News after nineteen years – for most of which he had concluded with these words. On the final occasion, he said: ‘And that’s the way it is, Friday March 6, 1981. Goodnight.’
and the band played on…Things went on as usual, no notice was taken. A phrase from a song, ‘The Band Played On’, written by John F. Palmer in 1895. A non-fiction book by Randy Shilts about the first years of AIDS was called And the Band Played On and filmed (US 1993). This title presumably alludes to the earlier play by Mart Crowley, The Boys in the Band, also about male homosexuals (filmed US 1970).
and the best of luck! Ironic encouragement. Frankie Howerd, the British comedian (?1917–92), claimed in his autobiography, On the Way I Lost It (1976), to have given this phrase to the language: ‘It came about when I introduced into radio Variety Bandbox [late 1940s] those appallingly badly sung mock operas starring…Madame Vera Roper (soprano)…Vera would pause for breath before a high C and as she mustered herself for this musical Everest I would mutter, “And the best of luck!” Later it became, “And the best of British luck!” The phrase is so common now that I frequently surprise people when I tell them it was my catchphrase on Variety Bandbox.’ Partridge/Catch Phrases suggests, however, that the ‘British luck’ version had already been a Second World War army phrase meaning the exact opposite of what it appeared to say and compares it with a line from a First World War song: ‘Over the top with the best of luck / Parley-voo’.
and the next object is ---In the radio panel game Twenty Questions, broadcast by the BBC from 1947 to 1976, a mystery voice – most memorably Norman Hackforth’s – would inform listeners in advance about the object the panellists would then try to identify by asking no more than twenty questions. Hackforth would intone in his deep, fruity voice: ‘And the next object is “The odour in the larder” [or some