A Word In Your Shell-Like. Nigel Rees
Lane’ – John Walsh in The Independent (2 December 2000).
civilisation See END OF.
clanger See DROP.
clap hands, here comes Charley This apparently nonsensical catchphrase, popular at one time in Britain, appears to derive from a song used as the signature tune of Charlie Kunz (1896–1958). Born in the USA, Kunz became a feathery-fingered, insistently rhythmic pianist popular on British radio in the 1930s/40s. The song went, ‘Clap hands, here comes Charley…here comes Charley now.’ With lyrics by Billy Rose and Ballard MacDonald, and music by Joseph Meyer, it was first recorded in the USA in 1925. According to The Book of Sex Lists, the song was written ‘in honour of a local chorine, first-named Charline, who had given many of the music publishers’ contact men (song pluggers) cases of gonorrhoea – a venereal disease commonly known as “the clap”.’ Partridge/Slang adds that ‘to do a clap hands Charlie’ was 1940s’ RAF slang for flying an aircraft in such a way as to make its wings seem to meet overhead.
Claude See AFTER YOU.
clay See BALL OF.
cleanliness is next to godliness Although this phrase appears within quotation marks in Sermon 88 ‘On Dress’ by John Wesley, the Methodist evangelist (1703–91), it is without attribution. Brewer (1989) claims that it is to be found in the writings of Phinehas ben Yair, a rabbi (circa 150–200). In fact, the inspiration appears to be the Talmud: ‘The doctrines of religion are resolved into carefulness…abstemiousness into cleanliness; cleanliness into godliness.’ So the saying is not from the Bible, as might be supposed. Wesley might have found it, however, in Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Bk 2 (1605): ‘Cleanliness of body was ever deemed to proceed from due reverence to God.’ Thomas J. Barratt, one of the fathers of modern advertising, seized upon the phrase to promote Pears’ Soap, chiefly in the UK. On a visit to the USA in the 1880s, he sought a testimonial from a man of distinction. Shrinking from an approach to President Grant, he ensnared the eminent divine Henry Ward Beecher. Beecher happily complied with Barratt’s request and wrote a short text beginning: ‘If cleanliness is next to godliness…’ and received no more for his pains than Barratt’s ‘hearty thanks’.
cleans round the bend Harpic lavatory cleaner used this slogan in the UK from the 1930s onwards, but it is not the origin of the idiom ‘round the bend’, meaning ‘mad’. The OED2 cites F. C. Bowen in Sea Slang (1929) as defining that, thus: ‘An old naval term for anybody who is mad’.
clear and present danger A phrase taken from a ruling by the US Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr in the case of Schenk v. United States (1919). This concerned free speech and included Holmes’s claim that the most stringent protection of same would not protect a man who falsely shouted fire in a theatre and caused panic: ‘The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the evils that Congress has a right to prevent.’ A film with the title Clear and Present Danger (US 1994) was about a CIA agent in conflict with his political masters in Washington.
(as) clear as mud I.e. not clear at all. Current since the early 19th century.
(in a) cleft stick In a position from which it is impossible to advance or retreat – in a dilemma, fix or jam. ‘We are squeezed to death, between the two sides of that sort of alternative which is commonly called a cleft stick’ – in a letter from the poet William Cowper (1782). The word ‘cleft’ is of the same derivation as ‘cleave’ or ‘cloven’. A literal use of a ‘cleft stick’ – as a piece of wood with a hole chopped out – in which an African bearer might carry messages famously occurs in Evelyn Waugh, Scoop, Bk 2, Chap. 2, Pt 4, (1938): ‘She went over to the pile of cleft sticks. “How do you use these?” “They are for sending messages.”…Lord Copper said I was to send my messages with them”.’
clerk See ALL DRESSED.
clever See DAMNED.
(a) clever clogs (or clever boots) An overly clever person. Since the 1940s. It is not clear what the footware has to do with the cleverness. ‘Clever clogs fly BIA to Amsterdam’ – British Island Airways advertisement (mid-1970s).
(the) cleverest young man in England An unofficial title bestowed semi-humorously from time to time. In 1976, the recipient was Peter Jay (b. 1937), then an economics journalist on The Times. He was called this in an article so headed (with the saving grace of a question mark) by The Sunday Times Magazine (2 May). Two years earlier he had been included in Time Magazine’s list of the 150 people ‘most likely to achieve leadership in Europe’. He became Britain’s Ambassador to Washington at the age of 40, at which point people stopped calling him one of the most promising of his generation. In September 1938, at the League of Nations, Chips Channon had written in his diary of: ‘John Foster, that dark handsome young intellectual…Fellow of All Souls, prospective candidate, and altogether one of the cleverest young men in England.’ This was presumably the person who became Sir John Foster QC, a Tory MP. Punch (12 September 1874), in a cartoon caption, has: ‘Now look at Gladstone, the cleverest man in all England!’ Compare also Gladstone’s remark that Mary Sedgwick, mother of the fabulous Benson brothers – A. C., E. F. and so on – was ‘the cleverest woman in Europe’.
(the) climate of opinion The prevailing view that may dictate public decisions and actions. A phrase since 1661. ‘To us he [Freud] is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion’ – W. H. Auden, poem ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ in Another Time (1940); ‘He likes saving causes…he’s brilliant at forming what they call now “climates of opinion”’ – Angus Wilson, Hemlock and After (1952); ‘Mrs Thatcher as premier was more made by the anti-statist climate of opinion in the 1970s and 1980s than vice versa. It is a truth about her often overlooked, not least by her admirers’ – The Daily Telegraph (4 May 1994); ‘But the public can look, learn, comment, write and agitate if it feels like it, make its input as the project moves from winning entry to final design, and help create a climate of opinion that will affect future competitions’ – The Sunday Times (4 December 1994).
(to) climb aboard the gravy train To gain access to a money-spinning scheme. This was an American expression originally – DOAS suggests that it started in sporting circles. An alternative version is ‘to climb aboard the gravy boat’, which is a bit easier to understand. Gravy boats exist for holding gravy in and take their name from their shape. So, if money is perceived as being like gravy, it is not hard to see how the expression arose. According to Webster’s Dictionary, the ‘train’ and ‘boat’ forms are equally popular in the USA (and have been since the 1920s). ‘Boat’ is probably less popular in the UK.
(to) climb on the bandwagon (or jump on the bandwagon) To join something that is already an established success. Principally in the USA, circuses had bandwagons. They had ‘high decks so that musicians could be seen and heard by street crowds’, according to Flexner (1982). Barnum and Bailey had an elaborately decorated one in 1855 for use in circus parades. Politicians in the USA also had bandwagons which would lead the procession when votes were being canvassed. Those who jumped, climbed or hopped aboard were those who were leading the support for the candidate. Since then, a slight shift in meaning has bandwagon-jumpers as people who give support once success has been assured.
clinging to the wreckage Clinging to the Wreckage was the title of the autobiography (1982) of the playwright, novelist and lawyer (Sir) John Mortimer. He explained its significance in an epigraphic paragraph or two: ‘A man with a bristling grey beard [a yachtsman, said:] “I made up my mind, when I bought my first boat, never to learn to swim…When you’re in a spot of trouble, if you can swim you try to strike out for the shore. You invariably drown. As I can’t swim, I cling to the wreckage