A Word In Your Shell-Like. Nigel Rees
a mistake crept into “Puzzle Corner” one night,’ Waldman recalled in 1954, ‘and when Broadcasting House was besieged by telephone callers putting us right, Harry Pepper [the producer] concluded that such “listener participation” was worth exploiting as a regular thing. “Let’s always put in a deliberate mistake,” he suggested.’ Waldman revived the idea when he himself presented ‘Puzzle Corner’ as part of Kaleidoscope on BBC Television in the early 1950s, and the phrase ‘this week’s deliberate mistake’ has continued to be used jokingly as a cover for ineptitude.
die See BETTER TO.
die another day When the makers of the James Bond movies finally exhausted the title phrases supplied by Ian Fleming, the character’s creator, some tantalizing new ones emerged (see TOMORROW NEVER DIES; WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH). As for Die Another Day (UK/US 2002), it might just be a quotation from A. E. Housman’s poem A Shropshire Lad, No. 56 (1896): ‘But since the man that runs away / Lives to die another day…’
(the) die is cast The fateful decision has been made, there is no turning back now. Here ‘die’ is the singular of ‘dice’, and the expression has been known in English since at least 1634. When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he is supposed to have said ‘Jacta alea est’ – ‘the dice have been thrown’ (although he actually said it in Greek). ‘At 4 a.m. on June 5 the die was irrevocably cast: the invasion would be launched on June 6 [1944: the D-Day landings in Normandy]’ – Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War (Vol. 5, 1952); ‘Making reality take over in takeovers…Whatever finance directors may argue, the die is cast and they will have to comply from next year’ – The Times (22 September 1994); ‘Ardiles might still be at Tottenham – in one capacity or another – had he buried his pride and accepted a sideways shift after the 3–0 Coca-Cola Cup humiliation at Notts County last Wednesday that, he conceded, ended his Spurs career; “the die was cast” even before Saturday’s home win over West Ham’ – The Guardian (2 November 1994).
(to) die with one’s boots on (sometimes die in one’s boots/shoes) Meaning, to die violently or to be hanged summarily. Used in England by the 18th century and in the American West by the 1870s. From Mark Twain, Roughing It, Chap. 48 (1872): ‘They killed each other on slight provocation, and hoped and expected to be killed themselves – for they held it almost shame to die otherwise than “with their boots on,” as they expressed it.’ The American Western use was firmly ensconced in the language by the time of the 1941 Errol Flynn film They Died With Their Boots On, about General Custer and his death at Little Big Horn. The title of a porn film with Vivien Neves was She Died With Her Boots On (UK 1970s). In one sense, the phrase can suggest an ignominious death (say, by hanging) but in a general way it can refer to someone who dies ‘in harness’, going about his work, like a soldier in the course of duty. ‘To die with one’s boots off‘ suggests, rather, that one dies in bed.
different See AND NOW FOR; AS DIFFERENT.
(to march to a) different drummer To act in a way expressive of one’s own individualism. The concept comes from Henry David Thoreau in Walden (1854): ‘If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.’ Hence, presumably: Different Drummer, a ballet (1984) choreographed by Kenneth MacMillan; The Different Drum (1987), a work of popular psychotherapy by M. Scott Peck; and Different Drummer, a BBC TV series (1991) about eccentric American outsiders.
different strokes for different folks This means ‘different people have different requirements’. The proverb is repeated several times in the song ‘Everyday People’ (1968) sung by Sly and the Family Stone. Diff’rent Strokes was the title of a US TV series (from 1978 onwards) about a widowed millionaire who adopts two black boys. Wolfgang Mieder in Proverbs Are Never Out of Season (1993), welcoming this relatively new coinage from the southern USA of the 1950s, comments: ‘It expresses the liberating idea that people ought to have the opportunity to live their lives according to their own wishes. For once we have a proverb that is not prescriptive or didactic. Instead, it expresses the American worldview that individuals have the right to at least some free choice.’
(the) difficult we do immediately – the impossible takes a little longer Bartlett (1980) reported that the motto, now widespread in this form, was used by the US Army Service Forces. The idea has, however, been traced back to Charles Alexandre de Calonne (d. 1802), who said: ‘Madame, si c’est possible, c’est fait; impossible, impossible? cela se fera [Madame, if it is possible, it is done; if it is impossible, it will be done].’ Henry Kissinger once joked: ‘The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer’ – quoted in William Shawcross, Sideshow (1979).
dig for victory Shortage of foodstuffs was an immediate concern in the UK upon the outbreak of the 1939–45 war. On 4 October 1939, Sir Reginald Dorman Smith, the Minister of Agriculture, broadcast these words: ‘Half a million more allotments, properly worked, will provide potatoes and vegetables that will feed another million adults and one-and-a-half million children for eight months out of twelve…So, let’s get going. Let “Dig for victory” be the motto of everyone with a garden and of every able-bodied man and woman capable of digging an allotment in their spare time.’ A poster bearing the slogan showed a booted foot pushing a spade into earth. Consequently, the number of allotments rose from 815,000 in 1939 to 1,400,000 in 1943.
dignity in destiny See RENDEZVOUS.
(the) dignity of labour This phrase refers especially to manual labour, but citations have proved a touch elusive. In his 1887 short story ‘The Model Millionaire’, Oscar Wilde has the artist Alan Trevor say: ‘Why, look at the trouble of laying on the paint alone, and standing all day long at one’s easel! It’s all very well, Hughie, for you to talk, but I assure you that there are moments when Art almost attains to the dignity of manual labour.’ At the close of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chap. 1 (1890), Lord Henry Wotton congratulates himself on missing an engagement: ‘Had he gone to his aunt’s, he would have been sure to have met Lord Goodbody there, and the whole conversation would have been about the feeding of the poor…The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift, and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour.’ Wilde also states in his essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ (1891) that ‘a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour’. Booker T. Washington, the Afro-American writer, alludes to the notion in Up from Slavery (1901): ‘No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.’ Bernard Shaw, in his play Man and Superman, Act 2 (1903), has the exchange: ‘I believe most intensely in the dignity of labour’ / ‘That’s because you never done any, Mr Robinson.’ Dorothy L. Sayers has the exact phrase in Gaudy Night, Chap. 3 (1935). The similar honest toil is almost as elusive. Thomas Gray in his ‘Elegy’ (1751) spoke of the useful toil of the ‘rude forefathers’ in the countryside. ‘Useful Work versus Useless Toil’ was the title of a lecture by William Morris (1880s). Useful Toil was the title of a book comprising ‘autobiographies of working people from the 1820s to the 1920s’ (published 1974). The OED2 finds ‘honest labour’ in 1941. Thomas Carlyle spoke of ‘honest work’ in 1866. ‘Honourable toil’ appears in the play Two Noble Kinsmen (possibly by John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, published 1634).
dim See AS DIM.
diminishes See HIS DEATH.
dinner See ALL GONG; DOG’S.
dinners See AS MANY.
dire straits Meaning, ‘desperate trouble, circumstances’. A cliché phrase by the early 1980s when this inevitable coupling was compounded by the name Dire Straits being taken by a successful British pop group. ‘In fact, as a Mori survey in one of the Sunday newspapers