after one’s own heart

Precisely to one’s liking. Considered a cliché since the late nineteenth century, this phrase appears in the Old Testament’s first Book of Samuel (13:14): “The Lord hath sought him a man after his own heart, and the Lord hath commanded him to be captain over his people.”

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afraid of one’s own shadow

Extremely timid, excessively fearful. In Richard III (c. 1513), Sir Thomas More wrote, “Who may lette her feare her owne shadowe,” although a few years later Erasmus cited Plato as having said the same thing in Greek hundreds of years before. Henry David Thoreau used the phrase to describe the timidity of Concord’s town selectmen in refusing to toll the parish bell at John Brown’s hanging (1859), and by then it had been in use for at least two centuries.

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a dog’s life

Miserable circumstances. The term has been traced to Erasmus, who pointed out the wretched subservient existence of dogs in the mid- sixteenth century, as well as to the seventeenth-century proverb, “It’s a dog’s life, hunger and ease.” It was certainly a cliché by the time Rudyard Kipling (A Diversity of Creatures, 1899) wrote, “Politics are not my concern. . . . They impressed me as a dog’s life without a dog’s decencies.” See also DIE LIKE A DOG.

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a dog’s age

A long time. An American slang term dating from about 1830, this expression doesn’t make a great deal of sense, since the average dog is not especially long-lived. It appeared in print in 1836: “That blamed line gale has kept me in bilboes such a dog’s age” (Knickerbocker magazine).

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add insult to injury, to

To make harm worse by adding humiliation. The phrase has been traced to a Greek fable in a bald man, trying to kill a fly on his head, misses and hits himself very hard, and the fly replies, “You wanted to kill me for merely landing on you; what will you do to yourself now that you have added insult to injury?” It has since been applied to countless situations by as many writers, and has long been a cliché.

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add fuel to the fire/flames, to

add fuel to the fire/flames, to To exacerbate an already inflammatory situation, increasing anger or hostility. The Roman historian Livy used this turn of phrase (in Latin) nearly two thousand years ago, and it was repeated (in English) by numerous writers thereafter, among them John Milton (Sam- son Agonistes, 1671): “He’s gone, and who knows how he may report thy words by adding fuel to the flame.”

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act your age

Don’t be childish or act foolish. This admonition appears to date from the 1920s. “Be your age” is the caption of a 1925 New Yorker car- toon; “act your age” appears in a 1932 issue of American Speech, a journal that chronicles current usage.

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