To become infected with a cold. This hyperbolic phrase, often used as a warning (“Wear your hat or you’ll catch your death”), dates from the late 1800s.
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catch more flies with honey than vinegar, one can
One can accom- plish more by being nice than by being nasty. A version of this term appears in Cervantes’s Don Quixote (“Make yourself into honey and the flies will
devour you”), and a more precise version appears about 100 years later, in
Thomas Fuller’s Gnomologia: “More Flies are taken with a Drop of Honey
than a Tun of Vinegar.” It is a proverb in most European languages
catch as catch can
By any method that can be used; without any specific plan or order. Variants of this term go back as far as the fourteenth century
(“Was none in sight but cacche who that cacche might,” John Gower, c.
1394) and appeared in John Heywood’s 1546 collection of proverbs (“Catch
that catch may”). More specifically, it is the name of both a children’s game
and a style of wrestling (also called freestyle) in which the wrestlers may get
a hold on each other anyhow and anywhere.
catbird seat, (sitting) in the
Being in a position of advantage or superi- ority. The term originated in the American South, where the catbird is quite common. It is thought to allude to the bird’s habit of singing from a very high perch in trees. It came into common usage in the 1940s when Mississippi- born sportscaster Red Barber would use it, for example, for a pitcher who was almost certain to strike out all the batters. Barber said he himself first heard the term in a poker game where he had bluffed all but one player into dropping out, but the remaining player, who had said from the start that he was sitting in the catbird seat, proved to have an ace and an ace in the hole. James Thurber used the expression as the title of a short story about a mild- mannered accountant who was so irritated by a colleague using this and other terms that he planned to murder her.
beauty is (only) skin-deep
A lovely appearance has no relation to more profound good qualities. “All the carnall beauty of my wife is but skin- deep,” wrote Sir Thomas Overbury (c. 1613). Of course this observation was hardly new, having been made by many ancient poets long before
(Vergil wrote, O formose puer, nimium ne crede colori, “O my pretty boy, trust not too much in your looks”). Although only skin deep, observed William Cobbett (Advice to Young Men, 1829), “It [beauty] is very agreeable for all that,” whereas H. H. Munro (Saki) punned “I always say beauty is only sin deep” (Reginald’s Choir Treat, 1904).
beauty is in the eye of the beholder
What one person considers ugly may seem beautiful to another. The idea is very old and was stated in various ways from the sixteenth century on. Shakespeare’s version is close to the modern: “Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye” (Love’s Labour’s Lost,
2.1). Possibly the first exact statement of the cliché in print was in Mar- garet Hungerford’s Molly Bawn (1878).
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