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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