alive (live) and kicking (well)

Very much alive and alert; still surviving. The term originated with fishmongers who thus described their wares, mean- ing that they were extremely fresh. By the mid-nineteenth century it was con- sidered a cliché. A more recent version is alive and well, which originated as a denial to a false report of someone’s death. It was given a boost by the French singer Jacques Brel, whose show and recording, translated as Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, became immensely popular in the 1970s.

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albatross around one’s neck, an

A burden or curse. The figurative mean- ing comes straight from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), a narrative poem in which a young sailor who shot an albatross, considered an extremely unlucky action, was punished by having the dead bird hung around his neck.

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ain’t it the truth

That’s definitely so. This slangy phrase dates from about 1900. It is often put regretfully—That’s so but I wish it weren’t—as in “‘I’ll have to lower the price if I want to sell it fast.’—‘Ain’t it the truth.’”

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aid and abet, to

To assist and promote or encourage something or some- one. The pairing of these nearly synonymous verbs, always in this order, comes from criminal law, where it denotes helping, facilitating and promoting the commission of a crime. The verbs themselves are quite old, aid dating from about 1400 and abet from about 1300. Although the term still is principally used in relation to criminal actions, it gradually crept into more general speech, as in “The influx of Canada geese on the golf course, aided and abetted by people feeding them . . .”

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ahead of the pack

In advance of the rest of a group, doing better than the others. The noun pack has been used for a group of persons since the 1400s, although for about 400 years it had a derogatory connotation, as in “a pack of thieves.” That sense is not implied in the cliché. The act of advancing beyond the others is called breaking out of the pack.
A related phrase is ahead of the game, meaning in a position of advantage, usually financial advantage. The game here alludes to gambling, but the term is applied to any endeavor.

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age before beauty

Defer to the older person. This phrase is traditionally used when inviting another individual to pass through a doorway before one. Eric Partridge described it as a mock courtesy uttered by a young woman to an older man. Currently it is used only ironically or sarcastically. According to an old story, it was said rather snidely by Clare Boothe Luce when ushering Dorothy Parker through a doorway, and Parker replied, “Pearls before swine.” A related cliché is after you, Alphonse—no, after you,Gaston, repeated a number of times (in Britain, after you, Claude—no, after you, Cecil). The American version is based on a comic strip by Frederick Burr Opper, Alphonse and Gaston, which was popular in the early 1900s, and pokes fun at exaggerated politeness.

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against the grain, to go

“There was something about Prohibition that went against the American grain,” a high school history teacher once said, quite innocent of her pun on this phrase, which means contrary to expecta- tions, custom, or common sense. The literal meaning, against the natural direction of the fibers in a piece of wood, was turned figurative by Shake- speare in Coriolanus (“Preoccupied with what you rather must do than what you should, made you against the grain to voice him consul”). By the time Dickens used it in Edwin Drood (1870) it probably was already a cliché.

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