cock of the walk

The leader in a group, especially one who is quite con- ceited about the position. The term comes from animal husbandry, where an enclosure for domestic fowl was called a walk, and in that area they would fight for supremacy until only one remained—the supreme leader, or cock of the walk. The strutting pride of roosters had been transferred to bossy, conceited human beings for much longer, but the precise term cock of the walk in this sense dates only from the early nineteenth century.

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cock and bull story

A far-fetched tale, intended to deceive. This term dates from approximately 1600, but its origin is obscure. Some say it refers to the name of an English coaching inn, a wayside stop for travelers where such tales were often spun. Others believe it alludes to a fable or folktale about a cock and a bull. By the eighteenth century the term meant a tall tale.

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cobbler, stick to your last

Do not advise about or interfere with matters of which you know little or nothing. This turn of phrase comes from an anec- dote about a painter of ancient Greece named Apelles. One day a shoemaker saw a painting of his and pointed out that the shoe in the picture was not accurately portrayed. The painter corrected that part of the picture. Then the next day the shoemaker pointed out a mistake in the painting of a leg. But the painter replied, “Shoemaker, do not go above your last.” The story was repeated in various accounts and made its way into John Taverner’s transla- tion of Erasmus as “Let not the shoemaker go beyonde his shoe.” Although the cobbler’s day appears to be nearly over, at least in America, the cliché survives.

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coast is clear, the

The authorities aren’t looking; one can proceed with- out fear of getting caught. Several writers hold that this term comes from the days of piracy and smuggling, when it declared the absence of coast guards. However, one of the earliest references dates from 1530, appearing in J. Palsgrave’s book about the French language: “The kynge intendeth to go to Calays, but we must first clere the costes.” By the late sixteenth century the term was also being used figuratively. Eric Partridge regarded it as a cliché from the eighteenth century on.

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coals to Newcastle, to carry/bring

To do something that is unneces- sary or superfluous. The Newcastle referred to is the city of Newcastle- upon-Tyne, a seaport in northeastern England that was given a charter to mine coal by Henry III in 1239 and became a major coal center. By the sev- enteenth century this metaphor for bringing an unneeded thing was cur- rent, and it remained so in all English-speaking countries. There were (and are) equivalents in numerous languages. In French it is to carry water to a river.

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coals of fire

See HEAP COALS OF FIRE.

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bold-faced lie

See BAREFACED LIE.

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bold as brass

Shameless, impudent. This simile probably has the same source as brazen, which can mean either “made of brass” or “shameless,” “too bold.” The latter is older, dating at least from Shakespeare’s time (“What a brazen-faced varlet art thou!” King Lear, 2.2). The present cliché dates from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, although brass alone in the sense of “shameless” is older (sixteenth century). “Can any face of brass hold longer out?” wrote Shakespeare in Love’s Labour’s Lost (5.2), and Thomas Fuller (The Profane State, 1642) wrote still more explicitly, “His face is of brasse, which may be said either ever or never to blush.”

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boil down to, to

To simplify or abridge; to lead to the crux of the mat- ter. This figure of speech transfers the sense of a liquid being reduced and concentrated by the process of boiling to other processes or endeavors. It dates from the late nineteenth century.

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body language

Gestures, posture, and other movements made by a person that unconsciously convey his or her feelings or attitude. The term dates from about 1960 and, some authorities believe, originated as a translation of the French langage corporel. Tennis commentators on television often point to a player’s body language, usually inferring a discouraged or negative attitude. The term is also used for performers (actors, singers) who consciously use gesture and movement for their presentations.

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body count

The number of casualties from a given operation. Originating during the Vietnam War, where it denoted the number of troops killed, it later was extended to casualties of disasters such as fires and earthquakes.

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blue in the face, to be/until one is

To have made a great effort. The literal significance of being blue in the face is lack of oxygen, and indeed, this expression sometimes indicates that one has talked until one is breath- less. But it also has been extended to other kinds of effort, as in “I tried to open that sardine can until I was blue in the face.” It was current in the mid- nineteenth century, when Anthony Trollope wrote, “You may talk to her till you’re both blue in the face” (The Small House at Allington, 1864).

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blue funk, to be in a

In a sad or dejected mood. One writer suggests that the term may come from the Walloon in de fonk zum, which means “to be in the smoke,” but this etymology has not been verified. Eric Partridge believed funk came from the Flemish fonck, for “perturbation” or “disturbance,” and indeed, to be in a funk at first meant to be very nervous or terrified (early eighteenth century). Somehow it got changed, perhaps owing to the addition of blue, with its colloquial meaning of “sad.” A more recent variant is a deep funk, said, for example, of a deep decline in the stock market: “The market’s fallen into a deep funk.”

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blue blood

Of high or noble birth. The term is a translation of the Span- ish sangre azul, which was applied to Spain’s pure-blooded aristocrats, meaning those whose ancestors had not intermarried with the Moors. Con- sequently they were fairly light-skinned and their veins showed bluer through the skin than those in Spaniards of mixed blood. The expression was used in England from the early nineteenth century, and was, like so many, satirized by W. S. Gilbert (Iolanthe, 1882, where Lord Tolloller is complaining that the fair maid Phyllis is not impressed by his title): “Blue blood! blue blood! When virtuous love is sought thy power is naught, though dating from the Flood, blue blood!”

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blow(n) to smithereens

Smash, destroy. Again, blow here means “explode,” and smithereens probably means “little smithers,” a dialect word thought to mean “bits” or “pieces.” The term was appealing enough to be used often from the early nineteenth century on, even by that great word- smith James Joyce (“Crew and cargo in smithereens,” in Ulysses, 1922).

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blow the whistle (on) (someone), to

o give away, to betray. This expression originally (late nineteenth century) meant ending something suddenly, as though by the blast of a whistle, but by the 1930s it had its pre- sent meaning. “Now that the whistle had been blown on his speech,” wrote P. G. Wodehouse in 1934 (Right Ho, Jeeves).

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blow sky-high, to

To refute completely, to explode a thesis or idea. While this expression has a modern sound, it is not so very new. Andrew Jackson, in a letter of 1845, wrote, “Put your veto on them both, or you and your Secretary will be blown sky-high.”

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blow out of the water

Defeat completely, ruin. This term comes from naval warfare; an early citation (1860) defines it as blowing a craft out of the water with broadsides. A century later it was used figuratively, as in “These bad reviews will blow our show out of the water in no time.” See also BOWL OVER.

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blow one’s top/stack/fuse, to

To lose one’s temper. The first two terms allude to clearing the stack of a ship by blowing air through it; the last refers to the sudden power stoppage when a fuse blows. All are slang from the first half of the twentieth century. Jane Smiley wrote in Horse Heaven (2000), “‘It’s kind of fun in a way. At least I get to blow my stack a lot and they don’t mind. Blow- ing your stack is the way they do things here.’”

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blow one’s own horn/trumpet, to

To brag about one’s own accom- plishments or ability, to promote oneself. The term originated in Roman times, and was translated into English early on. “I will sound the trumpet of mine own merits,” wrote Abraham Fleming in 1576. It was a cliché by the mid-nineteenth century, according to Eric Partridge, and gave rise to one of W. S. Gilbert’s numerous puns (“The fellow is blowing his own strumpet,” he said of a manager who was bragging about his actress-mistress).

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blow one’s mind, to

To shock or surprise or astonish one; also, to lose one’s mind, to go crazy. This slangy phrase dates from the mid-1960s, when hippie culture and anti-establishment feelings were at their height, and when it also meant to have a drug-induced experience. By 2000 the most common usage involved amazement, as in “He managed to juggle eight oranges at a time—it blew my mind.” See also BLOW AWAY.

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blow off steam, to

To let out one’s frustration or anger, usually by shouting. The term comes from the early days of railroading, when locomo- tives had no safety valves. When the steam pressure built up, the engineer would pull a lever that would blow off steam and prevent an explosion. It was transferred to human wrath in the early nineteenth century. “The widow . . . sat . . . fuming and blowing off her steam,” wrote Frederick Marryat (The Dog-Fiend, 1837). See also LET OFF STEAM.

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blow hot and cold, to

To vacillate, to be indecisive. The expression comes from Aesop’s fable about a satyr and a traveler eating together on a cold day. The traveler blew on his hands to warm them and on his soup to cool it. Observing this, the satyr threw him out because he blew hot and cold with the same breath. The term then came to mean hypocrisy (“These men can blow hot and cold out of the same mouth to serve severall purposes,” wrote William Chillingworth about the Protestant religion in 1638). However, it also was used to describe simple indecision (“It is said of old, soon hot, soon cold, and so is a woman,” in Thomas Percy’s 1765 collection, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry).

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blow by blow

Described in minute detail. The term is American and comes from sportscasting, specifically the radio broadcaster’s description of a prizefight (“A left to the body, a right to the chin,” and so on). It dates from the first half of the twentieth century and soon was transferred to sim- ilarly explicit accounts of other events, private or public.

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blow away

Kill; also, surprise, impress, overwhelm. The first usage dates from the Vietnam War but it is the second, from the 1970s, that is more cur- rent today. The CBS television show This Morning had it on March 20, 1990: “We were just talking about how blown away we were by [violinist] Joshua Bell.” It is on its way to becoming a cliché. See also BLOW ONE’S MIND.

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bloody but unbowed

Wounded or scarred, but not defeated. The term, expressing fierce defiance, comes from the Victorian poet William Ernest Henley’s most famous work, “Invictus:” “Under the bludgeonings of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed.”

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blood, sweat, and tears

Hard work; enormous effort. The phrase is associated with one of the twentieth century’s finest speakers, Winston Churchill, who on becoming Britain’s prime minister in 1940 said, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, sweat and tears” (today the “toil” is often dropped when quoting him). The phrase was not original with Churchill. In 1611 John Donne wrote (First Anniversary), “. . . ’tis in vaine to dew, or mol- lifie it [this world] with thy teares, or sweat, or blood.” Among others who used similar phrases were Byron, Browning, and Gladstone.

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blood is thicker than water

Family ties mean more than friendship. The term is based on the idea that water evaporates without leaving a mark, whereas blood leaves a stain. It dates from the Middle Ages and appears figura- tively—that is, implying the importance of a blood relationship over all oth- ers—in John Ray’s proverb collection of 1670, as well as in numerous later writings.

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blood from a stone/turnip, one can’t get

This is a hopeless source of help (money, comfort, and so forth). Both stone and turnip date from the nineteenth century, and other versions exist in numerous languages. Dick- ens used the stone analogy a number of times, in David Copperfield, Our Mutual Friend, and other works, and health-food trends notwithstanding, it is more common today than turnip. However, Clive Cussler had the latter in Sahara (1992): “‘You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip,’ said Giordino. ‘It’s a miracle we made it this far.’”

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blithering idiot

A senseless babbler. This term owes its origin to the Scots dialect verb to blether, meaning to talk nonsense, with blither being a variant spelling. Combining it with “idiot” began in the late 1800s. It appeared in the British humor magazine Punch in 1889: “I’ll state pretty clearly that his son is a blithering idiot.”

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blind leading the blind, the

Those who try to teach or guide others, even though they know no more than their pupils. The phrase comes from the Bible, presented as one of Jesus’s teachings in the books of Matthew (15:14) and Luke (6:39). It is quoted by numerous writers thereafter and is a proverb in John Heywood’s collection in 1546: “Where the blynd leadth the blynd, both fall in the dike.”

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blind as a bat/beetle/mole

Totally blind, or, figuratively, unseeing. None of these animals is, by the way, truly blind. The bat flies about in the dark in seemingly erratic paths (see BATS IN ONE’S BELFRY), and the beetle and mole burrow through the ground. Nevertheless, these similes are quite old and have become clichés. The bat analogy dates from the sixteenth century at least (John Harvey); the mole and beetle similes come from Roman times and were cited in translations by Erasmus.

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down to the wire

At the very last minute; at the end. The term, an Americanism dating from the late nineteenth century, alludes to the prac- tice of stretching a wire across and above the track at the start and finish of a racecourse. Here “down to” actually means the same as “up to,” that is, all the way to the finishing line. It began to be transferred to occasions other than horse races about 1900, and appears in print in Down the Line (1901) by H. McHugh (pseudonym for George Vere Hobart): “Swift often told himself he could . . . beat him down to the wire.”

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down-to-earth

Practical, forthright, realistic. It is the opposite of having one’s HEAD IN THE CLOUDS. The adjectival use of this term dates from the first half of the twentieth century. The OED quotes a book review that appeared in the Canadian Forum in 1932: “This book is full of such ‘down to earth’ observations.”

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down the road

In the future, as in “He’d love to buy another store, but that’s down the road a ways,” or “Her doctoral degree is about three years down the road.” This colloquialism dates from the second half of the 1900s.

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down the hatch

Drink it down, a toast for drinkers. The allusion is to the naval hatch, an opening in a ship’s deck through which cargo, passen- gers, or crew can pass. The transfer to the human mouth or throat was made long before this slangy expression came into use. John Heywood’s 1546 proverb collection included, “It is good to haue a hatche before the durre,” meaning it is good to have some impediment to speaking before one opens one’s mouth, so as to have time to reflect. The metaphor also appears in Stephen Gosson’s The Schoole of Abuse (1579): “I wish that every rebuker shoulde place a hatch before the door.” The drinker’s meaning, however, is a twentieth-century expression, first appearing in print in the early 1930s, as in Malcolm Lowry’s Ultramarine (1933): “Well, let’s shoot a few whiskies down the hatch.”

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down the drain

Wasted resources. The term, alluding to water flowing down a drain, was transferred to expending effort or funds on a useless enterprise. “Well, fancy giving money to the Government! Might as well have put it down the drain,” wrote Sir Alan Patrick Herbert (1890–1971) in Too Much. To go down the drain means to become worthless. It was so used by W. Somerset Maugham (The Breadwinner, 1930): “All his savings are gone down the drain.”

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down on one’s luck

Short of cash or credit. A nineteenth-century description of financial embarrassment, usually of a temporary nature, this term implies, with down, that the person so described at one time had more resources. Thus Thackeray wrote, “The Chevalier was. . . . to use his own picturesque expression, ‘down on his luck’” (Pendennis, 1849).

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down memory lane

Looking back on the past. Often put in a nostalgic way, this term may have originated as the title of a popular song of 1924, “Memory Lane,” words by Bud de Sylva, and music by Larry Spier and Con Conrad. It was revived in the film In Society (1944), starring Abbott and Costello. That is where former movie actor, President Ronald Reagan, may have picked it up; he then used it in his 1984 speech accepting the Republican nomination, “Well, let’s take them [his opponents] on a little stroll down mem- ory lane.”

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down in the mouth

Sad, unhappy. The term refers to a mournful facial expression, with the corners of the mouth drawn down. Known by the mid- seventeenth century, it appears in print in Bishop Joseph Hall’s Cases of Con- science (1649): “The Roman Orator was down in the mouth, finding himselfs thus cheated by the moneychanger.” Occasionally it appeared with at instead of in (“He’ll never more be down-at-mouth,” Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Dante and His Circle, 1850), a usage that is now obsolete. See also DOWN IN THE DUMPS.

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down in the dumps, to be

To be sad or dispirited. The “dumps” referred to are not the modern rubbish heap but a heavy, oppressive mental haze or dullness (from the Dutch words domp and German dumpf). The expression was used several times by Shakespeare (Titus Andronicus 1.1; The Taming of the Shrew 2.1; Much Ado about Nothing 2.3) and was well known as “in the dumps” until the eighteenth century. See also DOWN IN THE MOUTH.

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down at the heels

Needy and therefore shabby. The expression alludes to the worn-out heels of shoes needing repair, and also to holes in one’s socks. Indeed, one of the earliest references in print is to the latter: “Go with their hose out at heles” (Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, 1588). The expression was common by 1700 and well worn enough to be a cliché by 1800.

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down and out

At the end of one’s resources, destitute. The term is believed to be an American colloquialism that comes from boxing, where a fighter who is knocked down and stays down for a given time is judged the loser of the bout. O. Henry transferred it to a more general sort of loser in No Story (1909): “I’m the janitor and corresponding secretary of the Down- and-Out Club.” The English writer George Orwell used it as a title, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), for a book about his experiences of poverty in those cities. The actor Orson Welles quipped, “When you are down and out something always turns up—and it is usually the noses of your friends” (New York Times, April 1, 1962).

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down and dirty

Unfair, vicious; also, coarse, explicit about unpleasant mat- ters. The first usage of this colloquialism dates from the mid-1900s, as in “The neighbors were furious about the new ordinance and waged a real down and dirty fight.” The second surfaced a decade or two later, as in the film entitled Down and Dirty (1976), a black comedy about a depraved family whose inter- ests include adultery, murder, revenge, and incest

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do unto others

The so-called golden rule, that is, behave toward others as you would have them behave toward you; also, the converse, do not do to others what you would not like done to yourself. The sources for this state- ment are manifold: Confucius, Aristotle, the New Testament, the Koran, the Talmud. It continued to turn up in such sources as McGuffey’s Reader (1837): “You know, my child, the Bible says that you must always do to other peo- ple, as you wish to have them do to you.” George Bernard Shaw, never one to be put off by age-old precepts, quipped, “Do not do unto others as you would they should unto you. Their tastes may not be the same” (Maxims for Revolutionists, 1902).

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doubting Thomas

A person who habitually questions every issue. The term alludes to Jesus’s disciple Thomas, who refused to believe in the resurrec- tion until he had solid evidence of it (recounted in the Book of John, 20:24–25). The term has been applied to similarly doubtful individuals ever since, although the exact wording dates only from the late 1800s. W. C. Wyckoff used it: “Doubting Thomases, who will only believe what they see, must wait awhile” (Harper’s Magazine, June 1883).

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double-edged sword

An argument, compliment, or other statement that cuts either way, that is, has a double meaning. “‘Your Delphic sword,’ the pan- ther then replied, ‘is double-edged and cuts on either side,’” wrote John Dry- den (The Hind and the Panther, 1686). See also LEFT-HANDED COMPLIMENT.

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dot the i’s and cross the t’s, to

To be precise and meticulous. The source of this expression, it is alleged, is the possibility of confusing these letters if they are carelessly penned, and presumably it began as an admoni- tion to schoolchildren and/or scribes. It was soon transferred to other affairs, and has been a cliché since the late nineteenth century.

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do the trick

Accomplish something, succeed. Dating from the early nineteenth century, this cliché uses “trick” in the sense of an accomplish- ment. For example, “Add some pepper to the sauce and that should do the trick.” The synonymous turn the trick, dating from the same period, is heard less often today. “A couple of college products turned the trick for the Whalers,” wrote a sports columnist (Springfield Daily News, April 22, 1976). To turn a trick, on the other hand, uses “trick” in the slangy sense of a prosti- tute’s customer and means to engage in a sexual act with such an individual. Also see THAT DOES IT.

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do the honors, to

To render courtesies to guests; to act as a host, mak- ing introductions, carving the turkey, and the like. This expression was being used by 1700. It appears in Alexander Pope’s Imitations of Horace (1737): “Then hire a Slave, or (if you will), a Lord, to do the Honours, and to give the Word.”

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do tell Is that really so?

This phrase, expressing either disbelief or sar- casm, has been around since the early nineteenth century. John Neal used it in The Down-Easters (1833), “George Middleton, hey?—do tell!—is that his name?”

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do someone proud, to

To make much of, to extend lavish hospitality. This turn of phrase dates from the nineteenth century. “You’ve done your- selves proud,” wrote Mark Twain in Innocents at Home (1872).

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