A Word In Your Shell-Like. Nigel Rees
would…sound the death-knell of ascendancy and West Britishism in this country’ – Dundalk Examiner (1895); ‘Boston’s union longshoremen have sounded the death knell of their traditional but unwieldy dock shape-up’ – Boston Sunday Herald (30 April 1967); ‘The Polish Parliament…yesterday voted…for a new trade union law that sounds the death knell of Solidarity’ – The Times (9 October 1982); ‘This announcement will almost certainly be the death-knell to the 25-square-mile site’ – The Scotsman (9 February 1995); ‘The European Union and Canada yesterday ended their six-week fishing dispute with a deal hailed in Ottawa as a “victory for conservation” but condemned in Spain as the “death knell for the fishing industry”’ – The Times (17 April 1995).
deathless prose/verse An (often ironical) description of writing, sometimes used self-deprecatingly about one’s own poor stuff. ‘He would embody the suggestion about the nose in deathless verse’ – Rudyard Kipling, ‘Slaves of the Lamp, Part 1’ (1897); ‘Robert Burns once expressed in deathless verse a Great Wish. His wish, translated into my far from deathless prose, was to the effect…’ – Collie Knox, For Ever England (1943); ‘A passionate devotion to your deathless prose’ – a 1963 letter from M. Lincoln Schuster to Groucho Marx in The Groucho Letters (1967); ‘No piece of prose, however deathless, is worth a human life’ – Kenneth Tynan in The Observer (13 March 1966). From an actor’s diary: ‘The writer…concentrates his most vicious verbal gymnastics [in these scenes]. After we’ve mangled the deathless prose we have another cup of tea’ – Independent on Sunday (13 May 1990).
(a/the) death of a thousand cuts (or by a thousand cuts) Meaning, ‘the destruction of something by the cumulative effect of snipping rather than by one big blow’. In February 1989, Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury, told the General Synod: ‘If the Government does not take the axe to the BBC, there is surely here the shadow of death by a thousand cuts.’ The allusion may be to a literal death of this kind, as shown in the proverbial saying from an English translation of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book (1966): ‘He who is not afraid of death by a thousand cuts dares to unhorse the emperor.’ An eastern source for the phrase may be hinted at in what Jaffar the villainous magician (Conrad Veidt) says in the 1940 film version of The Thief of Baghdad: ‘In the morning they die the death of a thousand cuts.’ Carry on Up the Khyber (1968) has the phrase, too.
(the) death sentence I.e. the spoken order for execution. In English law, it really was a sentence, but quite a long one, and capable of variation. When William Corder was found guilty of the murder of Maria Marten at the Red Barn, Polstead, Suffolk, the Lord Chief Baron said: ‘…that sentence is, that you be taken back to the prison from which you came, and that you be taken thence, on Monday next, to the place of execution, and there be hanged by the neck till you are dead, and that your body shall afterwards be dissected and anatomized, and the Lord God Almighty have mercy on your soul’ – reported in The Times (9 August 1828). By 1910, when Dr Harvey Crippen was being sentenced to death for the murder of his wife by poisoning, the Lord Chief Justice (Lord Alverstone), having assumed the black cap, was solemnly saying this: ‘The sentence of the Law is that you be taken from this place to a lawful prison, and thence to a place of execution, that you be there hanged by the neck until you are dead, and that your body be buried within the precincts of the prison in which you will be confined before your execution. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul!’ This formula had been adopted in 1903. Ultimately it derives from and expands the medieval death sentence – ‘Suspendatur per collum [Let him be hanged by the neck].’ Along the way, it had been able to accommodate all the grisly demands made by the Law. Thus, for example, in the 17th century: ‘The Court doth award that you be drawn upon a hurdle to the place of execution and there shall be hanged by the neck, and, being alive, shall be cut down and your entrails to be taken out of your body, and, you living, the same to be burnt before your eyes, and your head to be cut off, your body divided into four quarters, and head and quarters to be disposed of at the pleasure of the King’s Majesty: and the Lord have mercy on your soul.’ The last execution was ordered in Britain in 1964. The death penalty was abolished in 1970. The OED2 does not find the actual phrase ‘death sentence’ until 1943, but in Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (1843) he writes of ‘the dread sentence of death’.
death where is thy sting? The basic element here is from 1 Corinthians 15:55: ‘O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’ There is a parody: ‘The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling / For you but not for me, / Oh death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling, / Or grave, thy victory?’ This was notably used by Brendan Behan in Act 3 of his play The Hostage (1958), but he was, in fact, merely adopting a song popular in the British Army 1914–18. Even before that, though, it had been sung – just like this – as a Sunday School chorus. It may have been in a Sankey and Moody hymnal, though it has not been traced. ‘There was a death-where-is-thy-sting-fullness about her manner which I found distasteful’ – P. G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves, Chap. 9 (1934).
(a) death wish In the original, psychological sense of the phrase, it may be one’s own death that is being wished for. In 1913, Sigmund Freud suggested that people have an innate tendency to revert to their original state. This could be self-destructive, although the death wish towards parents might also be strong. Accordingly, the phrase in its psychological sense is a translation of the German Todeswunsch, although the two words had come together in English by 1896. The film Death Wish (US 1974) and its several sequels is concerned with the death of others by way of retribution. ‘Anyone who willingly jumps from an aeroplane at 3,000 feet might be accused of having a death wish. Or perhaps it might be because two successive defeats have undermined his club’s dream of promotion. Jim Duffy would argue differently. The fact of the matter is that the Dundee manager is neither a vicarious thrill-seeker nor a crackpot in urgent need of medical assistance’ – Daily Mail (3 May 1995).
(the) debate continues Concluding phrase from BBC radio news reports of parliamentary proceedings in the 1940s/50s. The Debate Continues was also used as the title of a programme in which pundits in the studio would pick over the subjects of parliamentary debates. Compare (the) case/hunt/ search continues at the conclusion of similar broadcast (and newspaper) reports on court proceedings, escaped prisoners and missing people.
decisions, decisions! What a harried person might exclaim over having to make even a trivial choice. This is listed among the ‘Naff Expressions’ in The Complete Naff Guide (1983). It is used precisely in this way as a headline in Punch (17 June 1970). Partridge/Catch Phrases offers about 1955 as a possible starting date. There is perhaps in it an echo of the perpetually fraught White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. Although he doesn’t utter this actual phrase, he does mutter: ‘Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it’s getting.’
deck See ALL HANDS.
decline and fall The title of the novel (1928) by Evelyn Waugh was ludicrously extended to Decline and Fall…of a Birdwatcher! when filmed (UK 1968). As with all such titles, the origin is The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1766–88) by Edward Gibbon. Compare the numerous variations on the rise and fall of—theme: The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (film US 1960); The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters – a book (1969) by John Gross; The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin –BBC TV comedy series (1976–80); The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (film UK 1970).
decus et tutamen This is the inscription to be found on the rim of the British one pound (£1) coin which replaced the banknote of that denomination in 1983. The same words, suggested by John Evelyn the diarist, had appeared on the rim of a Charles II crown of 1662/3 (its purpose then was as a safeguard against clipping). Translated as ‘an ornament and a safeguard’ – referring to the inscription rather than the coin – the words come from Virgil’s Aeneid (Bk 5) ‘Decus et tutamen in armis’. In its full form, this is the motto of the Feltmakers’ Company (incorporated 1604).
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