egg on one’s face, to have/wipe off the

To have made a fool of oneself. An Americanism of the mid-twentieth century, this self-evident metaphor for having made a mess of oneself soon crossed the Atlantic. (John Ciardi, how- ever, speculates it may derive from an entertainer’s being pelted with garbage, including raw eggs, by a dissatisfied audience.) The other version, to wipe the egg off one’s face, means the same thing, implying that one has made an embarrassing error (not that one is correcting it). See also LAY AN EGG.

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dead to the world

Asleep or unconscious, and hence oblivious to one’s surroundings. That deep sleep resembles death was noted in biblical times, but the precise expression does not surface in print until 1899 or so (“Our host is dead to the world,” George Ade, Doc’ Horne).

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cash in one’s chips, to

See CHIPS ARE DOWN.

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bark up the wrong tree, to

To waste one’s energy or efforts by pursu- ing  the  wrong  scent  or  path. The  term  comes  from  the  1820s, when  rac- coon-hunting  was  a  popular  American  pastime.  Raccoons  are  nocturnal animals  and  generally  are  hunted  on  moonlit  nights  with  the  help  of  spe- cially  trained  dogs.  Sometimes,  however,  the  dogs  are  fooled,  and  they crowd  around  a  tree, barking  loudly, in  the  mistaken  belief  that  they  have treed their quarry when it has actually taken a quite different route. “If you think  to  run  a  rig  on  me,” wrote T. C. Haliburton  (a.k.a. Sam  Slick), “you have  barked  up  the  wrong  tree” (Human  Nature,  1855). The  cliché  became especially common in detective stories in the 1940s, owing to the obvious analogy of hunter and hunted.

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an apple a day (keeps the doctor away)

A proverbial preventive rem- edy. Versions  of  this  saying  date  from  the  seventeenth  century  or  earlier, appearing in John Ray’s proverb collection of 1670 and elsewhere. A cliché by the late nineteenth century, it gave rise to numerous humorous versions, such as “A stanza a day to keep the wolf away” by the poet Phyllis McGinley.

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hammer and tongs, go at it

Engage with great vigor in work, a con- test, a fight, or some other undertaking. This metaphor from the black- smith’s tools—the hammer used to shape hot metal taken from the fire with tongs—replaced an earlier metaphor from the same source, “between the hammer and the anvil,” with a meaning similar to that of BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE. The current expression was in print by 1708 and has been a cliché since the mid-nineteenth century.

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get cracking/rolling

Begin, get busy, hurry up. The first of these collo- quialisms originated in Great Britain in the 1930s and appears to have crossed the Atlantic during World War II. It uses crack in the sense of “move fast,” a usage dating from the late nineteenth century, and is often put as an imperative, as in “Now get cracking before it starts to rain.” The synony- mous get rolling, dating from the first half of the 1900s, alludes to setting wheels in motion. It, too, may be used as an imperative, but is more often heard in such locutions as “Jake said it’s time to get rolling on the contracts.”

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false colors

See SAIL UNDER FALSE COLORS.

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egg in your beer, what do you want?

Why are you complaining? What special advantage do you think you’re entitled to? This American slang expression dates from the first half of the twentieth century and became popular in the armed forces during World War II, in reply to any kind of griping. The actual addition of an egg to a glass of beer is presumably viewed as some kind of enrichment; one writer suggests it was regarded as an aphrodisiac, enhancing potency. The traditional English wassail bowl con- tains porter, eggs, and sherry, and Thomas Hardy (in The Three Strangers, 1883) gives a recipe for mead that includes egg white, but few if any other recipes call for such a combination, and probably they have nothing to do with this cliché anyway.

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dead to rights

Absolutely without doubt; also, red-handed, in the act of doing something. The term originated in the United States in the mid- nineteenth century and was used mostly with reference to criminal activity. George Washington Marsell defined it in his Vocabulum or The Rogue’s Lexicon (1859): “Dead to rights [means] positively guilty and no way of getting clear.” It is heard less often today.

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cash on the barrelhead

Money paid immediately for a purchase, as in “I’ll give you $50 for that bike, cash on the barrelhead.” Why hard cash should be equivalent to putting money on the flat head of a barrel is unclear. In nineteenth-century America barrel was slang for money, especially for a slush fund provided for a political candidate, and a barrel of money signified a huge fortune. However, these usages are only loosely related to the cliché, which itself may be dying out.

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bark is worse than one’s bite

One sounds much fiercer than one actually is. Listed in the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, this saying dates back at least to the mid-seventeenth century and is used often enough to be a cliché.

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and then some

 A  great  deal  more, more  of  the  same. This  intensifier  is used in such contexts as “Their house needs new paint, a new roof, new land- scaping, and then some,” or “There were speeches by the president, vice-presi- dent, chief financial officer, general counsel, and then some.” The phrase dates from the early 1900s.

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half the battle

A  very  successful  start. This  expression  is  part  of  an older proverb, “The first blow is half the battle,” which dates from the eigh- teenth century. In Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy, She Stoops to Conquer (1773), two  men  wish  to  make  a  good  impression  on  their  host’s  daughter.  One says, “I have been thinking, George, of changing our travelling dresses,” and the  other  replies, “You’re  right:  the  first  blow  is  half  the  battle.  I  intend opening  the  campaign  with  the  white  and  gold  [waistcoat].”  During  the nineteenth  century  the  first  half  of  the  expression  was  dropped, and  with overuse the term became a cliché

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get away with, to

To escape the usual penalty. This Americanism origi- nated  in  the  second  half  of  the  nineteenth  century  and  at  one  point  also meant to get the better of someone. It was still considered slangy when it appeared in the Congressional Record in 1892: “[They] will have to be content with the pitiful $240,000 that they have already ‘got away with.’”

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fall short (of), to

To fail to attain a certain standard; to be insufficient. The expression comes from archery, horseshoes, and other activities in which a missile may fall to the ground before reaching the desired goal, or mark (it is sometimes put as falling short of the mark). The essayist William Hazlitt wrote, “Cavanagh’s blows were not undecided and ineffectual—lumbering like Mr. Wordsworth’s epic poetry, nor wavering like Mr. Coleridge’s lyric prose, nor short of the mark like Mr. Brougham’s speeches” (Table Talk, 1821–22).

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eat someone out of house and home, to

To  consume  a  great  deal. This  expression  is  at  least  two  thousand  years  old.  It  appeared  in  the Alexandrian  philosopher  Philo’s  De  Agricultura  (c.  A.D.  40)  as  well  as  in numerous   English   writings,   before   Shakespeare   used   it   for   Mistress Quickly’s  description  of  the  gluttonous  Falstaff: “He  hath  eaten  me  out  of house and home” (Henry IV, Part 2, 2.1).

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dead set against

Unutterably   opposed.  This  Americanism   probably comes from industry, where a machine is said to be dead set when it is fas- tened  so  that  it  cannot  be  made  to  move. The  transfer  to  firm  resolve  or hostility against some person, course of action, and so on, was made by the early  nineteenth  century. “A  dead  set  is  to  be  made  from  various  quarters against  the  abominable  innovation  of  publishing  Divisions  by  authority”

(General P. Thompson, 1836).

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carrot and the stick, the

Reward and punishment. The term alludes to dangling a carrot in front of a horse or donkey to get it to move, and threat- ening or beating it with a stick.  An essay about philosopher John Stuart Mill explains that for Mill’s father, “Praise and blame . . . were to man what car- rots or sticks are to a horse or an ass . . . It was this carrot and stick discipline

to which Mr. John Mill was subjected.” The term dates from the late 1800s.

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