A Word In Your Shell-Like. Nigel Rees
(in use by 1968), referring to the number of enemy dead. In 1981, the American horror film Friday the 13th Part II was promoted with the line, ‘The body count continues’. From Time Magazine (15 April 1985): ‘In the field, the Americans were encouraged to lie about their “body counts” (measuring progress in the war by lives taken, not land taken).’ Later, used less literally to describe the number of people (not necessarily dead) in a specific situation.
body fascism In July 1980, Anna Ford, then a television newcaster with ITN, popularized this phrase in a speech given to the Women in Media group in London. Attacking the obsession with the looks and clothes of women who appear on television, she added: ‘Nobody takes pictures of Richard Baker’s ankles or claims that Peter Woods only got his job because of the bags under his eyes.’ Ford did not invent the feminist phrase, however. It is not a very clear one, except that ‘fascism’ is often invoked simply to describe something that the speaker dislikes. ‘Sexism’ and ‘lookism’ would have conveyed what Ford meant; possibly even ‘glamour-abuse’.
body odour (or BO) This worrying concept was used to promote Lifebuoy soap, initially in the USA, and was current by 1933. In early American radio jingles, the initials ‘BO’ were sung basso profundo, emphasizing the horror of the offence: ‘Singing in the bathtub, singing for joy, / Living a life of Lifebuoy – / Can’t help singing, ‘cos I know / That Lifebuoy really stops BO.’ In the UK, TV ads showed pairs of male or female friends out on a spree, intending to attract partners. When one of the pair was seen to have a problem, the other whispered helpfully, ‘BO’.
(the) body politic The nation in its corporate character, the state-organized society. In a legal document of 1532, in the reign of King Henry VIII, there is the usage: ‘This Realm of England is an Empire…governed by one supreme Head and King…unto whom a Body politick, compact of all Sorts and Degrees of people…’ Compare the soul politic, a phrase used by Margaret Thatcher in speeches in the 1980s. But Thomas Carlyle had anticipated her in Signs of the Times (1829).
boets and bainters The ODQ has long had the remark ‘I hate all Boets and Bainters’ ascribed to King George I (1660–1727), finding it in Lord Campbell, Lives of the Chief Justices (1849). However, as it is said that George I never learned to speak English (even German-accented), a more believable account is that George II (1683–1760), who did speak English, was the one who actually said it. And as it is given that, whichever George it was, he was discussing Hogarth’s print ‘The March to Finchley’ at the time – a picture not published until 1750/1 – this would square better with the dates. John Ireland’s Hogarth Illustrated (2nd edn, 1793) specifically records that the picture was brought to George II: ‘Before publication it was inscribed to his late Majesty, and the picture taken to St James’s, in the hope of royal approbation. George the Second was an honest man, and a soldier, but not a judge of either a work of humour, or a work of art…[Hence] his disappointment on viewing the delineation. His first question was addressed to a nobleman in waiting – “Pray, who is this Hogarth?” “A painter, my liege.” “I hate bainting and boetry too! neither the one nor the other ever did any good! Does the fellow mean to laugh at my guards?”’ The print was returned to Hogarth, who dedicated it instead to the King of Prussia. Obviously this was a story that could have been aimed at both father and son (in Lord Campbell’s Lives of the Justices, George I has ‘I hate all Boets and Bainters’ attached to him in the context of a poem being read), but Ireland’s anecdote is rooted in a particular circumstance and is written closer to the events described, so it is to be favoured.
bog standard Average. From the 1980s on. Tony Thorne defines ‘bog-standard’ in his Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (1990) as, ‘Totally unexceptional, normal and unremarkable. Bog is here used as an otherwise meaningless intensifier.’ It has been suggested that before the Second World War, ‘bog’ was an acronym for ‘British Or German’, as a mark of distinction in a product, but there is no confirmation of this unpromising theory.
(the) bohemian life Life as lived by artists and writers, often poverty-stricken and amoral. Puccini’s opera La Bohème (1896) was based on Henry Murger’s novel Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (1847), set in the Latin Quarter of Paris. At first, the term ‘Bohemian’ was applied to gypsies because they were thought to come from Bohemia (in what is now the Czech Republic) or, at least, because the first to come to France had passed through Bohemia. The connection between the irregular life of gypsies and that of artists is just about understandable – they are on the margins of society.
boil your head See GO AND.
bold See OH HELLO.
(as) bold as brass Very bold indeed, possibly also reflecting that brass was sometimes looked upon as a cheap substitute for gold. Obviously the alliteration is attractive, but the word brass may have been chosen because of its connection with ‘brazen’, meaning ‘flagrant, shameless’ (the Old English word braesen actually means brass). The OED2’s earliest citation is from 1789, which is interesting because there is a colourful explanation that the phrase derives from a Lord Mayor of London called ‘Brass Crosby’ who died in 1793. He was sent to the Tower for refusing to sentence a printer for the unlawful act of publishing Parliamentary debates and, some believe, ‘bold as brass’ became a popular turn of phrase for the way he supported reforms. There may, however, be no connection.
boldness be my friend Used as the title of a book (1953) by Richard Pape about his exploits in the Second World War, this phrase is taken from what Iachimo says when he sets off to pursue Imogen in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, I.vii.18 (1609–10): ‘Boldness be my friend! / Arm me, Audacity, from head to foot’. In 1977, Richard Boston wrote a book called Baldness Be My Friend, partly about his own lack of hair.
bomb See BAN THE; GO DOWN A.
bombshell See BLONDE.
BOMFOG An acronym for a pompous, meaningless generality. When Governor Nelson Rockefeller was competing against Barry Goldwater for the US Republican presidential nomination in 1964, reporters latched on to a favourite saying of the candidate – ‘the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God’ – and rendered it with the acronym BOMFOG. In fact, according to Safire, they had been beaten to it by Hy Sheffer, a stenotypist on the Governor’s staff who had found the abbreviation convenient for the previous five or six years. The words come from a much quoted saying of John D. Rockefeller: ‘These are the principles upon which alone a new world recognizing the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God can be established…’ Later, BOMFOG was used by feminists to denote the use of language that they thought demeaned women by reflecting patrician attitudes. The individual phrases ‘brotherhood of man’ and ‘fatherhood of God’ do not appear before the 19th century. In As We Are, Chap. 13 (1932), E. F. Benson has: ‘The Fatherhood of God fared no better than the brotherhood of man…His protective paternity had proved that these privileges must be heavily paid for in advance.’
--- bonanza PHRASES A journalistic cliché, used to describe any wildly lucrative deal. Of American origin and known since the 1840s, the derivation is from the Spanish word for ‘fair weather, prosperity’. Initially used by miners with reference to good luck in finding a body of rich ore. Used figuratively, a good deal later. Specifically ‘pay bonanza’ is listed as a cliché to be avoided by Keith Waterhouse in Daily Mirror Style (1981). ‘The show is still, as topical entertainment, a real bonanza’ – The Listener (10 January 1963); ‘Jobs bonanza for ex-ministers…Former Cabinet ministers who served under Margaret Thatcher and John Major hold a total of 125 directorships and 30 consultancies’ – The Independent (2 May 1995).
bonce See BODGER ON THE.
(the) Boneless Wonder A spineless character named after a fairground freak, notably evoked by Winston Churchill in an attack on Ramsay MacDonald in the House of Commons (28 January 1931). During a debate on the Trades Disputes