A Word In Your Shell-Like. Nigel Rees
of Art’ (9 January 1882): ‘The English [artists’] models form a class entirely by themselves. They are not so picturesque as the Italian, nor so clever as the French, and they have absolutely no tradition, so to speak, of their order. Now and then some old veteran knocks at the studio door, and proposes to sit as Ajax defying the lightning, or as King Lear upon the blasted heath.’ The Ajax referred to in this is not the warrior of the siege of Troy but Ajax the Lesser who was at the siege nevertheless and raped Priam’s daughter Cassandra after dragging her from a statue of Athena. This so annoyed the goddess that she shipwrecked Ajax on his way home. He clung to a rock, defied the goddess, not to mention the lightning, and was eventually washed off and drowned by Neptune. So, how and when did the allusion turn into a phrase? In the description of Ajax’s death in Homer’s Odyssey, the lightning incident is not mentioned. So is it from a later re-telling? Virgil’s Aeneid (Bk 1, line 42-) does show him being dealt with by Zeus’s bolts. Earlier, the matter was mentioned, though less specifically, by Euripides in his Trojan Women and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Bk 14; translated by Dryden, Pope and others). There are a number of representations in art of Ajax the Lesser going about his rapes and so on, but the search is still on for the lightning-defying pose. Was there a particular painting or a sculpture of the event that so fixed the defiant image that it was readily evoked thereafter?
alarums and excursions (sometimes alarms…) Confused noise and activity after the varying use of the phrase in the stage directions of Shakespeare’s history plays, notably Henry VI, Part 3 and Richard III, especially during battle scenes. ‘Alarum’ is a form of ‘alarm’ (meaning a call to arms) and an ‘excursion’ is a sally against the enemy. Now used about any sort of confused situation. ‘I was a happy child, skipping through the fifties, a time of calm and convention for the middle classes, with parents thankful for routine and certainty after the alarms and excursions of war’ – Kate Adie, The Kindness of Strangers, Chap. 2 (2002).
(The) Albany Whether this is a phrase or not rests on one’s response to a supposed solecism: is it correct to use the ‘The’ or not to use the ‘The’ when talking about Albany, a grand apartment block in Piccadilly, London? Oscar Wilde uses the full phrase ‘The Albany’ no fewer than three times in The Importance of Earnest (1895). He also used it earlier in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chap. 3 (1890). The earliest use so far found of the ‘the’ being apparently correct usage is in the title of a novel by Marmion Savage, The Bachelor of the Albany (1848). Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington, Chap. 43 (1864), has: ‘Plantagenet Palliser…felt, as he sat in his chambers in the Albany, that something else was wanting to his happiness.’ Charles Dickens describes the character ‘Fascination’ Fledgeby as living there in Our Mutual Friend, Pt 2, Chap. 5 (1865): ‘He lived in chambers in the Albany, did Fledgeby, and maintained a spruce appearance’. A resident’s letterhead dating from 1888 is shown in Harry Furniss, Paradise in Piccadilly: the Story of Albany, but the title of that book (published in 1925) is – so far – the earliest example found of the ‘the’ being deliberately excluded. Later, Terence Rattigan (who lived in the chambers for a while) gave this description of the setting for Act 1 of his play While the Sun Shines (1943): ‘The sitting-room of Lord Harpenden’s chambers in Albany, London.’ So what was it that happened between 1898 and 1925 to give rise to the change? Indeed, what is one to make of the whole question? Perhaps H. Montgomery Hyde has the simplest explanation in The Annotated Oscar Wilde (1982): ‘The Albany refers to the exclusive apartments off Piccadilly, very popular with bachelors, that had been converted in the early nineteenth century from the Duke of York and Albany’s large private house. About the turn of the century it became the custom to allude to it as “Albany” instead of “the” Albany, probably because the latter sounded like a club or pub.’
Alexander weeping for want of worlds to conquer The allusion is, undoubtedly, to Plutarch’s wonderful vignette of Alexander the Great to be found in ‘Of the Tranquillity of the Mind’: ‘So reason makes all sorts of life easy, and every change pleasant. Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there was an infinite number of worlds, and his friends asking him if any accident had befallen him, he returns this answer: Do not you think it is a matter worthy of lamentation, that, when there is such a vast multitude of them, we have not yet conquered one? But Crates with only his scrip and tattered cloak laughed out his life jocosely, as if he had been always at a festival.’ So it was not so much that Alexander wept because he had run out of worlds to conquer but because he felt that he had not even managed to conquer this one.
(an) Alice-blue gown The colour of the garment, a light-greenish blue, takes its name from a particular Alice – daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt. The song ‘Alice-blue Gown’ was written for her by Joseph McCarthy and Harry Tierney in 1900, when she was sixteen, though apparently it was not published until 1919. In the late 1930s, there was another (British) song, called ‘The Girl in the Aliceblue Gown’.
Alice in Wonderland Quoted from almost as extensively as Shakespeare and the Bible, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1872), both by Lewis Carroll, are alluded to for their particular characters and incidents and as a whole, to denote a mad, fantastic world. From Chips: the Diaries of Sir Henry Channon, entry for 30 July 1940 (1967): ‘The big FO debate began with an absurd Alice in Wonderland wrangle about procedure which lasted from 3.45 until 5.30…in war time! it was ludicrous in the extreme.’
(is) alive and well and living in—This format phrase probably began in a perfectly natural way – ‘What’s happened to old so-and-so?’ ‘Oh, he’s still alive and well and living in Godalming’ etc. In the preface to His Last Bow (1917), Conan Doyle wrote: ‘The Friends of Mr Sherlock Holmes will be glad to learn that he is still alive and well…’ The extended form was given a tremendous fillip when the Belgian-born songwriter and singer Jacques Brel (1929–78) became the subject of an off-Broadway musical show entitled Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris (1968–72). Quite why M. Brel should have merited this WHERE ARE THEY NOW? treatment is not too apparent, but the format caught on. The Listener (3 October 1968), quoting the Daily Mail, stated: ‘The Goon Show is not dead. It is alive and well, living in Yorkshire and operating under the name of BBC Radio Leeds.’ The format had earlier probably been used in religious sloganeering, possibly prompted by Time Magazine’s famous cover (circa 1966), ‘IS GOD DEAD?’ The New Statesman (26 August 1966) quoted a graffito, ‘God is alive and living in Argentina’. This suggests that the formula might have been used originally in connection with Nazi war criminals who had escaped prosecution and lived unharmed in South America. Other graffiti have included: ‘God is not Dead – but Alive and Well and working on a Much Less Ambitious Project’ – quoted in The Guardian (27 November 1975); ‘Jesus Christ is alive and well and signing copies of the Bible at Foyles’ (quoted in 1980). In a letter to The Independent Magazine (13 March 1993), M. H. I. Wright wrote: ‘When I was a medical student and young house physician 50 years ago, we had to write very detailed case-sheets on every patient admitted. Under the heading “Family History”, we detailed each member of his family – for example, “Father, died of heart diseases in 1935; Mother, alive and well and living in London.” One pedantic consultant insisted we drop the word “alive” because, as he said, how could the relative be “dead and well”?’ On the other hand, a US film in 1975 was burdened with the title Sheila Devine Is Dead and Living in New York. ‘The last English eccentric is alive and well and living comfortably in Oakland’ – Time Magazine (5 September 1977); ‘The golden age detective story is alive and well’ – review in The Times of Ruth Rendell’s Put On By Cunning (1981); ‘Socialism is alive and well and living in Moscow’ –headline in The Independent (25 June 1990).
all aboard the Skylark See ANY MORE FOR THE SKYLARK.
all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others A fictional slogan from George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), his commentary on the totalitarian excesses of Communism. It had been anticipated: Hesketh