A Word In Your Shell-Like. Nigel Rees
was Mr Justice Darling whose own witticisms attracted much publicity.
Darth Vader Applied to any dark, menacing person, this name derives from a character in the film Star Wars (US 1977) and its prequels and sequels. He was a fallen Jedi knight who had turned to evil, appeared totally in shiny black, all skin hidden, and spoke with a distorted voice. ‘Mr Lorenzo, who in some circles is viewed as the “Darth Vader” of the industry, has shown nothing but contempt for Eastern [Airlines’] employees, both union and non-contract’ – Palm Beach Post (5 March 1989).
dash my wig! An archaic oath. The writer and jazz singer George Melly described on BBC Radio Quote…Unquote (27 May 1997) how his paternal grandmother exclaimed on being offered some (then rare) Danish Blue cheese in the late 1940s: ‘Dash me wig, where did you get that?’ This turned into a Melly family saying. When cheese was fancied, they said, ‘I’ll have a bit of dash-me-wig.’ OED2 has ‘dash my wig’ as a ‘mild imprecation’ by 1797. As ‘dash my vig’ the exclamation appears in R. S. Surtees, Handley Cross, Chap. 50 (1843). Brewer (1894) finds in addition ‘Dash my buttons!’ and explains: ‘Dash is a euphemism for a common oath; and wig, buttons, etc., are relics of a common fashion at one time adopted in comedies and by “mashers” of swearing without using profane language.’
(a) date with destiny Alliterative cliché. ‘Cheers and tears at Ark Royal’s date with destiny’ – headline in The Observer (12 January 2003). Compare: ‘They had a date with fate in…Casablanca’ – poster slogan for the film (US 1941).
dat’s my boy dat said dat See GOODNIGHT, MRS CALABASH.
daughter See DON’T GO NEAR.
(a) daunting prospect (or task) A very difficult prospect/task in prospect. Date of origin unknown, but this inevitable pairing of words was a cliché by the mid-20th century. ‘Reclaiming prostitutes was a daunting prospect for charitable women however tough-minded’ – F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth Century England (1980); ‘She’s always been honest with me. When I was about 21 I cooked dinner for her, which was a daunting prospect. I made a salmon souffle which I thought was rather good, but she said: ‘This is disgusting’ – Daily Mail (24 January 1995); ‘Owning a second home is an attractive, but daunting, prospect. However, a Scottish property firm believes that it has the answer at its holiday cottages in St Andrews in Fife and Drummore, near Portpatrick’ – The Herald (Glasgow) (22 February 1995); ‘Jane Forder rings to see whether I will still produce “HBR” diary entries to run alongside those of James Lees-Milne…It’s a very daunting task’ – National Trust Magazine (Summer 1995).
dawn See AT THE CRACK; CAME THE; DARKEST HOUR.
(the) dawn’s early light Phrase from ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ (1814) – latterly an American national anthem – by Francis Scott Key: ‘O, say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light, / What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming.’ Hence, also, So Proudly We Hail, title of a film (US 1943), and Twilight’s Last Gleaming, title of a film (US/West Germany 1977).
day See ALL; ANOTHER DAY; AS NIGHT; HAPPY AS THE.
day and age See IN THIS.
day for night A film-maker’s term for shooting a scene during the day and then tinting it dark to make it look like night. Hence, Day for Night – the English title given to François Truffaut’s film about film-making (1973) whose original title La Nuit Américaine [American Night], is the equivalent phrase in French film-making.
(a) day in the life ‘A Day in the Life’, the most remembered track from the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album (1967), presumably took its name from that type of magazine article and film documentary that strives to depict 24 hours in the life of a particular person or organization. In 1959, Richard Cawston produced a TV documentary that took this form, with the title This Is the BBC. The English title of a novel (1962; film UK 1971) by Alexander Solzhenitsyn was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s use of the phrase ‘A Day in the Life’ for the description of incidents in the life of a drug-taker may have led to the Sunday Times Magazine feature ‘A Life in the Day’ (running since the 1960s) and the play title A Day in the Death of Joe Egg by Peter Nichols (1967; film UK 1971).
(a) day late and a dollar short When describing people, this means they are unprepared and undependable, irresponsible and disorganized. By extension, to include those who habitually miss out on life’s opportunities. Confined almost exclusively to the USA, the expression seems to have arisen in the mid-20th century. There was a song, ‘Day Late and a Dollar Short’, recorded by Billy Barton in 1959. Terry McMillan wrote a novel, A Day Late and a Dollar Short, in 2001. A possible origin has been suggested – that the saying derives from field workers who were paid on a daily basis or at the end of their work period. If workers were too tired or too lazy to get in line, they lost out on that day’s wages. Compare, perhaps, TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE.
daylight robbery Flagrant over-charging – a phrase in use by the 1940s and building upon the simple ‘it’s robbery’ to describe the same thing, dating from the mid-19th century. Application of the phrase in Britain to the Window Tax (1691–1851) that led to the blocking up of windows – and thus to a literal form of daylight robbery – appears to be retrospective.
day of destiny See RENDEZVOUS.
daylight See BURN.
(the) day of the locust The relevance of the title The Day of the Locust to Nathanael West’s novel (1939) about the emptiness of life in Hollywood in the 1930s is not totally clear. Locusts are, however, usually associated with times when waste, poverty or hardship are in evidence. They also go about in swarms, committing great ravages on crops. The climax of the novel is a scene in which Tod, the hero, gets crushed by a Hollywood mob. In the Bible, Joel 2:25 has: ‘And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten’; Revelation 9:3: ‘There came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them we give power’; Revelation 9:4: ‘locusts give power to hurt only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads’.
days See HAPPIEST.
(the) days of wine and roses Ernest Dowson wrote the lines: ‘They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, / Love and desire and hate…/ They are not long the days of wine and roses; / Out of a misty dream / Our path emerges for a while, then closes / Within a dream’ in ‘Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetar Incohare Longam’ (1896). Hence, The Days of Wine and Roses, title of a film (US 1962) about an alcoholic (though the phrase is often used to evoke romance). Hence, also, The Weeping and the Laughter, the title of a novel (1988) by Noel Barber, and of autobiographies by J. Maclaren-Ross (1953) and Viva King (1976).
(the) day that the rains came down A line from the song ‘The Day the Rains Came’, written by Carl Sigman and Gilbert Bécaud. Jane Morgan had a hit with it in 1958.
(the) day war broke out A catchphrase from the Second World War radio monologues of the British comedian Robb Wilton (1881–1957): ‘The day war broke out…my missus said to me, “It’s up to you…you’ve got to stop it.” I said, “Stop what?” She said, “The war.”’ Later, when circumstances changed, the phrase became ‘the day peace broke out’.
dead See AIN’T IT; BRING OUT YOUR.
dead and gone See HERE’S A FUNNY.
dead – and never called me mother This line is recalled as typical of the threevolume sentimental Victorian novel, yet it does not appear in Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1861) as is often supposed. Nevertheless, it was inserted in one of the numerous