A Word In Your Shell-Like. Nigel Rees
used the words earlier, on 18 July, when broadcasting in Spain. Emiliano Zapata (circa 1877–1919), the Mexican guerilla leader, had used the expression long before her in 1910: ‘Men of the South! It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees […Es mejor preferible morir a pie que vivir en rodillas]!’ Franklin D. Roosevelt later picked up the expression in his message accepting an honorary degree from Oxford University (19 June 1941): ‘We, too, are born to freedom, and believing in freedom, are willing to fight to maintain freedom. We, and all others who believe as we do, would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.’
Betty See ALL MY EYE.
between a rock and a hard place In a position impossible to get out of, literally or metaphorically. Popular in the 1970s and almost certainly of North American origin, despite its almost biblical resonance. The UK/Canada group Cutting Crew had a song with the title, ‘(Between a Rock) And A Hard Place’, in 1989. An early appearance is in John Buchan, The Courts of the Morning (1929), but the phrase was being discussed in Dialect Notes, No. 5 (1921), where it was defined as ‘to be bankrupt…Common in Arizona in recent panics; sporadic in California’. Some have attempted to suggest that it is a modern version of between Scylla and Charybdis where Scylla was a sea monster on a rock and Charybdis was a whirlpool – two equal dangers one could not avoid. This is not the meaning of ‘between a rock and a hard place’ – besides, a whirlpool is not exactly a ‘hard’ place, except in the sense of a problematical one to get out of. A few years ago, the late King Hussein of Jordan (or P.L.K. = Plucky Little King) was said to be ‘Between Iraq and a Hard Place.’
between you and me and the gatepost (or bedpost or doorpost) Confidentially – a phrase suggesting (lightly and not very seriously) that a secret is about to be imparted and that it should be kept. Known by 1832. Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, Chap. 10 (1839), has: ‘Between you and me and the post, sir, it will be a very nice portrait.’ The previous year, Dickens had written in a letter: ‘Between you and me and the general post.’
betwixt the devil and the deep blue sea Meaning, ‘having two courses of action open to one, both of them dangerous’ (as with the classical Scylla and Charybdis, see just above). The phrase should not be taken too literally. The ‘devil’ here may refer to the seam of a wooden ship’s hull or to a plank fastened to the side of a ship as a support for guns. Either of these was difficult of access, a perilous place to be, but better than in the deep blue sea. An earlier form was ‘between the devil and the Dead Sea’ (known by 1894).
bet you can’t eat just one A slogan for Lay’s potato chips in the USA (quoted in 1981). By 1982, bet you can’t eat three was being used by the cricketer Ian Botham to promote Shredded Wheat in the UK.
Beulah – peel me a grape! A catchphrase expressing dismissive unconcern, first uttered by Mae West to a black maid in the film I’m No Angel (1933), after a male admirer has stormed out on her. It has had some wider currency since then but is nearly always used as a conscious quotation.
be upstairs ready, my angel See BURMA.
beware Greeks bearing gifts A warning against trickery, this is an allusion to the most famous Greek gift of all – the large wooden horse that was built as an offering to the gods before the Greeks were about to return home after besieging Troy unsuccessfully for ten years. When it was taken within the city walls of Troy, men leapt out from it, opened the gates and helped destroy the city. Virgil in the Aeneid (II.49) has Laocoön warn the Trojans not to admit the horse, saying ‘timeo Danaos et dona ferentes [I still fear the Greeks, even when they offer gifts].’ ‘Upon my admiring some gooseberry wine at dinner, she turned to the Butler, and ordered him to send half-a-dozen to the Parsonage the following day, which I did all I could to decline, under the old feeling, Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes’ – Reverend John Skinner, diary entry for 28 April 1822 (Journal of a Somerset Rector 1803–1834, pub. 1930/1971).
beyond See ABOVE AND.
beyond the Fringe Beyond the Fringe was the title of a trend-setting, somewhat satirical, revue (London 1961 and then on Broadway). It had first been shown, however, at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival as part of the main programme of events, where it was ‘beyond’ the unofficial series of theatrical manifestations at Edinburgh known as the ‘Fringe’. Note also an allusion to the following:
beyond the pale Meaning, ‘outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour’. The Pale was the area of English settlement around Dublin in Ireland, dating from the 14th century, in which English law had to be obeyed, but there have also been areas known as pales in Scotland, around Calais and in Russia. The derivation is from the Latin palus, meaning ‘a stake’. Anyone who lived outside this fence was thought to be beyond the bounds of civilization. The allusive use does not appear earlier than the mid-19th century.
BFN – ‘bye for now See MORNING ALL.
bicycle See AS SURE.
(the) Big Apple As a nickname for New York City, this expression seems to have arisen in the 1920s/30s. There are various possible explanations: the Spanish word for a block of houses between two streets is manzana which is also the word for apple; in the mid-1930s there was a Harlem night club called ‘The Big Apple’, which was a mecca for jazz musicians; there was also a jitterbugging dance from the swing era (circa 1936) that took its name from the nightclub; ‘big apple’ was racetrack argot, and New York City had a good reputation in this field – hence, the phrase was used to describe the city’s metropolitan racing (as in a column ‘On the Big Apple’ by John J. Fitzgerald in the Morning Telegraph, mid-1920s.) OED2 has ‘Big Apple’ for New York City in 1928 before the dance explanation, but Safire plumps for the jazz version, recalling a 1944 jive ‘handbook’ defining ‘apple’ as: ‘the earth, the universe, this planet. Any place that’s large. A big Northern city’. Hence, you called New York City the Big Apple if you considered it to be the centre of the universe. In 1971, Charles Gillett, president of the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau, attempted to revitalize NYC’s economy by re-popularizing it as ‘the Big Apple’ (compare I LOVE NEW YORK). In the 18th century, Horace Walpole had called London ‘The Strawberry’ because of its freshness and cleanliness in comparison with foreign cities.
(a) big boy did it and ran away The classic child’s excuse when insisting that something which has happened is not its fault. Hence, A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away, the title of a novel (2001) by Christopher Brookmyre.
Big Brother is watching you A fictional slogan from George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). In a dictatorial state, every citizen is regimented and observed by a spying TV set in the home. The line became a popular catchphrase following a sensational BBC TV dramatization of the novel in 1954. Aspects of the Ministry of Truth in the novel were derived not only from Orwell’s knowledge of the BBC (where he worked) but also from his first wife Eileen’s work at the Ministry of Food, preparing ‘Kitchen Front’ broadcasts during the Second World War (circa 1942–4). From 2000, Channel 4 in the UK showed an annual series of Big Brother, a so-called ‘reality’ TV programme in which the behaviour of a group of people contained in a house was continuously recorded and shown in edited excerpts.
(a) big butter and egg man This description of a small-town businessman trying to prove himself a big shot in the city was much used by Texas Guinan, the US nightclub hostess (d. 1933). Cyril Connolly in his Journals (1983) characterized the man in question as a small-town success, often a farmer who produced such commodities as butter and eggs, and who attempted to pass for a sophisticate in the big city. Finding it first in the 1920s, OED2 emphasizes that the man in question – ‘wealthy, unsophisticated’ – spends his money freely. The Butter and Egg Man was the title of a play (1925) by George S. Kaufman.
big conk, big cock (or big nose, big