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A Word in Your Shell-Like
6,000 Curious & Everyday Phrases Explained
Nigel Rees
Table of Contents
‘Thou art a retailer of phrases, and dost deal in remnants of remnants’
William Congreve, The Way of the World (1700)
‘False English, bad pronunciation, old sayings and common proverbs; which are so many proofs of having kept bad and low company’
4th Earl of Chesterfield, Advice to his Son on Men and Manners (1775)
‘Sir, it [an earthquake] will be much exaggerated in popular talk; for, in the first place, the common people do not accurately adapt their thoughts to the objects; nor, secondly, do they accurately adapt their words to their thoughts: they do not mean to lie; but, taking no pains to be exact, they give you very false accounts. A great part of their language is proverbial, If anything rocks at all, they say it rocks like a cradle; and in this way they go on’
Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) – for 14 September 1777
‘Blank cheques of intellectual bankruptcy’
A definition of catchphrases attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–94)
‘What do I mean by a phrase? A clutch of words that gives you a clutch at the heart’
Robert Frost, interviewed in the Saturday Evening Post (16 November 1960)
A Word in Your Shell-like is an extensive examination of more than 6,000 phrases, detailing their origins, dates, meanings and use. But what is a ‘phrase’? Although it is technically possible for a phrase to consist of one word, I have mostly limited myself to clusters of two or more words and left analysis of single words to the etymologists and lexicographers. Within this definition of a phrase, however, fall idiomatic expressions, proverbial sayings, stock and format phrases, catchphrases, clichés, journalese, headline fodder, slogans, advertising lines, as well as titles of books and entertainments which either quote a specific source or themselves create a form of words. There is also a number of ‘short quotations’ – phrases derived from famous sayings that may be said to have a life of their own.
As to my choice of phrases for inclusion, I have simply concentrated on those about which there is something interesting to say with regard to their origins and use. I have not always restricted myself to phrases that have caught on in
