every dog will have his day

Even the lowliest will eventually have their revenge. Erasmus traced this metaphor to a Macedonian proverb about the death of Euripides in 406 B.C. While on a visit to the king of Macedonia, the Greek playwright was attacked and killed by dogs that a rival had set upon him. John Heywood included it in his 1546 proverb collection (“As euery man saith, a dog hatha daie”), and George Bernard Shaw used it as well (“Every dog has his day, and I have had mine,” Caesar and Cleopatra, 1897).

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every cloud has a silver lining

The worst situation has some element of hope or some redeeming quality. John Milton appears to have been the originator of this metaphor, in Comus (1634): “A sable cloud turns forth its silver lining on the night.” It was adopted by numerous later writers and so was already a cliché by the time it appeared in the popular World War I song, “Keep the Home Fires Burning” (Ivor Novello and Lena Guilhert, 1915): “There’s a silver lining through the dark clouds shining.” Noël Cow- ard played on it in a song of the 1930s: “Every silver lining has its cloud.”

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et tu, Brute!

You, my so-called friend, are also betraying me. This expression is generally credited to Shakespeare, who used the exact Latin locution (literally, “and you, Brutus”) in Julius Caesar (3.1) in 1599. How- ever, Shakespeare actually was loosely quoting the real Julius Caesar, who reportedly said, “You too, my child?” when Marcus Brutus stabbed him in 44 B.C. Caesar made this dying remark in Greek (according to Suetonius’s account). Incidentally, “Brute” did not signify “brute” in the sense of animal; it simply is the proper Latin case for this name. A more recent version, with friends like that/you, who needs enemies, became current in America in the 1960s. It usually is a response to a far less dire betrayal—a tactless remark by a friend, for example.

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eternal triangle, the

A threesome of lovers, either two men involved with or vying for one woman or two women and one man. “Eternal” here simply means that this situation has occurred over and over through the ages. The term has been traced to a book review appearing in the London Daily Chronicle in 1907, describing a novel that “deals with the eternal trian- gle, which, in this case, consists of two men and one woman.”

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dog eat dog

Ruthless competition. Although this saying dates from the sixteenth century, it was at first put very reluctantly, because a much older observation has it that dog does not eat dog (a Latin proverb). Thus Thomas Fuller (Gnomologia, 1732) pointed out that “dogs are hard drove, when they eat dogs.” The transfer to human affairs had it otherwise, however. “Dog won’t eat dog, but men will eat each other up like cannibals,” wrote C. H. Spurgeon (John Ploughman, 1869).

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dog days

The hottest days of summer. This cliché is a literal translation from the Latin caniculares dies. The ancient Romans ascribed the apex of summer heat to the ascendancy of the dog star, or Sirius. The brightest star in the heavens, it is located in the constellation Canis Major, meaning “big dog.” Although modern meteorologists may scoff, the term has survived for nearly two thousand years.

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does

See entries beginning with DO; DON’T.

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