A Word In Your Shell-Like. Nigel Rees
can be found as far back as Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ (circa 1390): ‘When a thyng is shapen, it shal be.’ But what of this foreign version, as sung, for example, by Doris Day in her 1956 hit song ‘Whatever Will Be Will Be’? She also sang it in the remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much in the same year. Ten years later, Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band had a hit with a song entitled ‘Que Sera Sera’. So is it che or que? There is no such phrase as che sera sera in modern Spanish or Italian, though che is an Italian word and será is a Spanish one. What we have here is an Old French or Old Italian spelling of what would be, in modern Italian, che sara, sara. This is the form in which the Duke of Bedford’s motto has always been written.
(to grin like a) Cheshire Cat To smile very broadly. The Cheshire Cat is most famous from its appearances in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) – where it has the ability to disappear, leaving only its grin behind – but the beast had been known since about 1770. Carroll, who was born in Cheshire, probably knew that Cheshire cheeses were at one time moulded in the shape of a grinning cat. ‘British power was slowly disappearing during the Churchillian Era, leaving, like the Cheshire Cat, only a wide smile behind’ – Andrew Roberts, Eminent Churchillians (1994).
chew See HE CAN’T.
(to) chew the cud Meaning, ‘to think deeply about something, especially the past’. This figurative expression (in use by 1382) refers to the ruminative look cows have when they chew their ‘cud’ – that is, bring back food from their first stomachs and chew it in their mouths again. ‘Cud’ comes from Old English cwidu, meaning ‘what is chewed’.
(to) chew the rag ‘To chew something over; to grouse or grumble over something at length, to discuss matters with a degree of thoroughness’ (compare ‘to chew the fat’). Known by 1885. As in the expression ‘to chew something over’, the word ‘chew’ here means simply ‘to say’ – that is, it is something carried on in the mouth like eating. The ‘rag’ part relates to an old meaning of that word, in the sense ‘to scold’ or ‘reprove severely’. ‘Rag’ was also once a slang word for ‘the tongue’ (from ‘red rag’, probably).
chicken à la King Cooked chicken breast served in a cream sauce with mushrooms and peppers. No royal origin – rather, it is said to have been named after E. Clark King, a hotel proprietor in New York, where the dish was introduced in the 1880s. Another story is that it was dreamed up at Delmonico’s restaurant by Foxhall Keene, son of the Wall Street operator and sportsman J. R. Keene, and served as chicken à la Keene. Yet another version is that the dish was created at Claridge’s in London for J. R. Keene himself after his horse won the Grand Prix.
(a) chicken and egg situation A problem where cause and effect are in dispute, from the ancient question ‘Which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ The construction was known by 1959. ‘The chicken-and-egg attitude towards the home background of addicts’ – The Guardian (24 February 1967); ‘She sees no problem in finding enough readers; she sees the problem as a general lack of left-wing publishing in this country. “If you want a good read, you don’t think of buying a left magazine,” she says. “It is a chicken-and-egg situation. New Statesman is the only other independent around and they have welcomed Red Pepper. They think we will help to open up the market’ – The Guardian (4 May 1994); ‘The other members objected to this formula because, as a rule, UN member states will not volunteer troops unless there is a definite Security Council mandate. “It was a chicken and egg situation,” said one diplomat’ – The Independent (18 May 1994).
(the) chief cook and bottle-washer (sometimes head cook…) ‘A person put in charge of running something; a factotum’ (known by 1887). What may be an early form of the phrase occurs in Schikaneder’s libretto for Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, II.xix. (1791). Papageno says: ‘Here’s to the head cook and the head butler [Der Herr Koch und der Herr Kellermeister sollen leben]!’
(appeals to the) child in all of us A cringe-making assertion made about certain types of entertainment or about occasions like Christmas. Noticed with some frequency in the 1980s. ‘In Back to the Future, [Robert Zemeckis] scores by adhering to the first rule of [Steven] Spielbergism: appeal to the child in all of us’ – The Sunday Times (18 August 1985); ‘The Wind in the Willows appeals to the child in all of us, so we adults have accorded it the status of “a children’s classic”’ – The Sunday Times (22 June 1986); ‘Growing up tends to hurt. And the child in all of us wants a Daddy/Mummy figure to rub our legs and give us aspirin when growing pains become acute’ – The Guardian (28 July 1986).
children should be seen and not heard This proverbial expression was, according to CODP, originally applied to young women. ‘A mayde schuld be seen, but not herd’ was described as an ‘old’ saying in circa 1400. It was not until the 19th century that a general application to children of both sexes became common, though Thackeray in Roundabout Papers (1860–3) still has: ‘Little boys should not loll on chairs…Little girls should be seen and not heard.’
(the) children’s hour When the long-running and fondly remembered BBC radio programme Children’s Hour began in 1922, it was known as ‘The Children’s Hour’, which suggests that it ultimately derived from the title of a poem by Longfellow (1863): ‘Between the dark and the daylight, / When the night is beginning to lower, / Comes a pause in the day’s occupations, / That is known as the Children’s Hour.’ This became the name for the period between afternoon tea and dressing for dinner, particularly in Edwardian England. Lillian Hellman also wrote a play called The Children’s Hour (1934), variously filmed, about a schoolgirl’s allegations of her teachers’ lesbianism.
children’s shoes have far to go Slogan for Start-Rite children’s shoes in the UK, current by 1946. The idea of the boy and girl ‘twins’ walking up the middle of a road between rows of beech trees came to the company’s advertising agent as he drove back to London from a meeting at Start-Rite’s Norwich offices. He was reminded of the illustration in Kipling’s Just So Stories of ‘the cat who walked by himself’ and developed the idea from there – despite many subsequent suggestions from the public that walking down the middle of the road would not enable children, or their shoes, to get very far.
chill out! Calm down, act cool. Originally US black person’s slang of the 1970s. Latterly used by both black persons and whites. Whoopi Goldberg says it in the film Ghost (US 1990).
(to apply for the) Chiltern Hundreds Originally, a hundred was a division of a shire and long ago a steward was appointed to deal with robbers in three hundreds of the Chiltern Hills in southern England. Then, in the days when to hold an office of profit under the crown involved having to resign from the House of Commons, the process of applying for the stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds was used as a way of resigning from parliament because this had become necessary for some other reason – a scandal, for example. William Douglas-Home’s play entitled The Chiltern Hundreds (1947) was set on the day the Conservative Party lost the 1945 British General Election to Labour.
Chinese See DAMNED CLEVER.
Chinese whispers ‘Inaccurate gossip’ – a phrase deriving from the name of a children’s party game. Seated in a circle, the children whisper a message to each other until it arrives back at the person who started, usually with the meaning changed out of all recognition. An alternative name for the game is ‘Russian Scandal’, which OED2 finds in 1873, (or ‘Russian Gossip’ or ‘Russian Rumour(s)’). Presumably, Chinese and Russian are mentioned because of their exotic 19th-century connotations, the difficulty of both languages, and because the process of whispering might sound reminiscent of both the languages when spoken. ‘The words “Air Red, Air Red,” had become confused as they were passed down the line, and by the time they reached the end had been