CASSELL DICTIONARY OF WORD AND PHRASE ORIGINS
by Nigel Rees
I must come clean. The hardback edition of this book has been in almost constant use here as an essential aid to answering queries ever since I bought it in 1996. Now a paperback edition has just been published. Its author is Nigel Rees, well known to British and BBC World Service radio listeners as the presenter of the quiz “Quote ... Unquote” and as the author of some 50 books.
What attracted me originally to this one, and why I should be sorry to be deprived of it, is that Mr Rees has done his homework well. He has searched out the origins of many common words and phrases whose origins are often abbreviated or even sometimes silently passed over by better established works of reference.
His is the only halfway-decent attempt I’ve seen, for example, at explaining the origins of Gordon Bennett and the full Monty, and ones on which I leant heavily in compiling my own summaries, though it’s probable that neither of us has got to the bottom of either phrase, nor likely to. Among other recentish phrases he investigates are fashion victim, gender bender, compassion fatigue, loose cannon, and bad hair day. He is good on the scatological origins of Brownie points, slightly mystified (as are we all) about the history of the whole nine yards, and gently scathing about ploughman’s lunch, mainstay of many a British pub meal but only invented, he asserts, in the 1970s as a marketing ploy by the English Country Cheese Council. (Just to restore the transatlantic balance, he’s also mildly sarcastic about the invention in California of the term blush wine.)
But he is full of interesting information on a large number of words and phrases current from earlier times: Peach Melba, self-fulfilling prophecy, the royal we, big girl’s blouse, dressed up to the nines, the man on the Clapham omnibus, deep six, Roaring Twenties, from the cradle to the grave, and let the cat out of the bag.
For example, he explains the origins of the phrase to steal someone’s thunder, to expropriate someone else’s ideas to one’s own advantage, often before they themselves can make use of them. The story goes that one John Dennis had invented a machine to make stage thunder, which he employed in his own play, Appius and Virginia, performed at Drury Lane Theatre in London in 1709. The play was not a success and was taken off in favour of a production of Macbeth. Dennis went to the opening night and was astonished to hear his thunder machine being used. He leapt to his feet and shouted “That is my thunder, by God; the villains will play my thunder but not my play!”.
Notwithstanding the book’s title, he has concentrated on phrases rather than words, though his article on gay is well worth having, as (to select a few more or less at random) are those on berk (from a very rude bit of rhyming slang), posh (in which he demolishes the “Port Out, Starboard Home” thesis), skiffle, grotty, and hooligan.
So far, I’ve not been able to fault him. And he’s found examples of several expressions that antedate those given in the Oxford English Dictionary. Recommended.
[Rees, Nigel The Cassell Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, Cassell, London, ISBN 0304 34965 8. Paperback, published on 7 May 1998. Retail price given of £9.99.]
