dirt cheap

Very inexpensive. The idea of something being as cheap as dirt dates back at least to Roman times. Petronius’s Satyricon (A.D. 60) says, “In those days food could be had for dirt” (Illo tempore annoma pro luto erat). It may already have been a cliché by the time Dickens used it in Oliver Twist (1838): “I sold myself ... cheap, dirt cheap!”

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enough said

No further amplification is needed. Although Plautus’s Dixi satis (in Rudens, c. 200 B.C.) has been so translated, the expression in English became current only in the nineteenth century, on both sides of the Atlantic. It was well known enough in America to acquire what Eric Par- tridge called a “comic perversion,” that is, the variant nuff said, which the OED editors traced back as far as 1840 in a U.S. newspaper. Its most emphatic use appeared in Gertrude Stein’s poem, Enough Said (1935), which in its entirety consists of this expression repeated five times.

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dire straits, in

In an awful situation, terrible circumstances. The adjec- tive “dire,” which dates from the mid-1500s, is rarely heard today except in this cliché and one other phrase, dire necessity, which uses it more or less hyperbolically (as, for example, in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1836 letter, “The dire necessity of having every window in the house open . . .”). In con- trast, the cliché describes a genuine difficulty or danger, as in “The stock- market crash left him in dire straits financially.”

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enough rope, to give (someone)

To allow someone to continue behav- ing badly until he or she reaps the consequences. The rope in question alludes to enough rope to hang oneself, which is how the phrase is often completed. It was well enough known by the mid-seventeenth century to appear in four slightly different forms in John Ray’s English Proverbs (1678), the most common being “Give him rope enough and he’ll hang himself.”

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dime a dozen, a

Readily available, so cheap as to be without value. The dime being an American coin, declared the ten-cent piece by the Continen- tal Congress in 1786 (the word comes from the French dime, for “tithe,” or one-tenth), this expression is obviously American in origin and probably owes its long life to alliterative appeal. Inflation has further degraded the meaning. Early in the twentieth century a dime could buy a paperback book (dime novel) or a cup of coffee and a doughnut; “Brother, can you spare a dime?” was the universal cry for a handout during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

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enough is enough

That is sufficient, no more is needed or wanted. “There is now enough” appeared in the works of numerous Roman writers (Horace, Martial, Plautus, and others), and “Enough is enough” was already a proverb by the time John Heywood amassed his 1546 collection. Versions in other Euro- pean languages—Italian, French, Dutch—append the notion that not only is enough sufficient, but that too much is bad. In any event, the expression was well on its way to being a cliché by the time Robert Southey wrote (The Doctor, 1834), “As for money, enough is enough; no man can enjoy more.” Wallis Warfield, Duchess of Windsor (1896–1986) reportedly disagreed, saying, “You can never be too rich or too thin” (attributed). A much more recent syn- onym is the interjection enough already, a translation of theYiddish genug shoyn.

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different strokes for different folks

See NO ACCOUNTING FOR TASTES

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