this is what you do See MORNING ALL.
and this is where the story really starts…Catchphrase from BBC radio’s The Goon Show (1951–60), usually uttered by the announcer/narrator, Wallace Greenslade, and especially in ‘Dishonoured – Again’ (26 January 1959).
and this too shall pass away Chuck Berry spoke the words of a ‘song’ called ‘Pass Away’ (1979) that told of a Persian king who had had carved the words ‘Even this shall pass away’. George Harrison had earlier called his first (mostly solo) record album ‘All Things Must Pass’ (1970). These musicians were by no means the first people to be drawn to this saying. As Abraham Lincoln explained in an address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (1859): ‘An Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him with the words, “And this, too, shall pass away”. How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!’ But who was the oriental monarch? Benham (1948) says the phrase was an inscription on a ring – ‘according to an oriental tale’ – and the phrase was given by Solomon to a Sultan who ‘desired that the words should be appropriate at all time’. In 1860, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in The Marble Faun of the ‘greatest mortal consolation, which we derive from the transitoriness of all things – from the right of saying, in every conjuncture, “This, too, will pass away”.’
and when did you last see your father? There can be few paintings where the title is as important as (and as well known as) the actual picture. This one was even turned into a tableau at Madame Tussaud’s where it remained until 1989. It was in 1878 that William Frederick Yeames RA first exhibited his painting with this title at the Royal Academy; the original is now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. The title of the painting has become a kind of joke catchphrase, sometimes used nudgingly and often allusively – as in the title of Christopher Hampton’s 1964 play When Did You Last See My Mother? and the 1986 farce by Ray Galton and John Antrobus, When Did You Last See Your…Trousers? Tom Lubbock writing in the Independent on Sunday (8 November 1992) commented on the fact that the title tends to be remembered wrongly: ‘But the And matters. It turns the title from an abrupt demand into a slyly casual inquiry…[But] the title will probably outlast the image, just as a form of words that rings some distant bell. On green cashpoint screens you now find the query “When did you last update your insurance?” I’m sure the forgotten Yeames is ultimately responsible.’
and with that, I return you to the studio! Catchphrase from the BBC radio show Beyond Our Ken (1958–64). Hugh Paddick played Cecil Snaith, a hush-voiced BBC outside broadcasts commentator. After some disaster in which he had figured, he would give this as the punchline, in a deadpan manner. The show’s host, Kenneth Horne, apparently suggested the line. In its straight form, many TV and radio news reporters use the phrase in live spots even today.
(the) Angel of Death A nickname bestowed in the Second World War upon Dr Joseph Mengele, the German concentration camp doctor who experimented on inmates – ‘for his power to pick who would live and die in Auschwitz by the wave of his hand’ (Time Magazine, 17 June 1985). ‘Angel of death’ as an expression for a bringer of ills is not a biblical phrase and does not appear to have arisen until the 18th century. Samuel Johnson used it in The Rambler in 1752.
angels dancing on the head of a pin Benham (1948) went into this thoroughly but did not provide an actual example of what it gives as a head phrase, namely, ‘A company of angels can dance on the point of a needle’. Nevertheless, it glosses the phrase thus: ‘Saying attrib. with variations to St Thomas Aquinas (circa 1227–74) [who] in Summae Theologiae devotes superabundant space to fanciful conjectures about the nature of angels…“Whether an angel can be in several places at once”…“Whether several angels can be in one place at the same time”…He expends much laboured argument on this and similar problems.’ Correspondents in The Times (20/21 November 1975) seemed to suggest that the attribution to Thomas Aquinas had been mistakenly made by Isaac Disraeli. Mention was made of the 14th-century tractate Swester Katrei – wrongly ascribed to Meister Eckhart – which contains this passage: ‘Doctors declare that in heaven a thousand angels can stand on the point of a needle.’ Mencken (1942) has ‘How many angels can dance upon the point of a needle?’ – ‘ascribed to various medieval theologians, c. 1400.’
angels one five In Royal Air Force jargon, ‘angels’ means height measured in units of a thousand feet; ‘one five’ stands for fifteen; so ‘20 MEs at Angels One Five’ means ‘Twenty Messerschmitts at 15,000 feet’. Angels One Five was the title of a film (UK 1952) about RAF fighter pilots during the Second World War.
Anglo-Saxon attitudes Typically English behaviour. The title of Angus Wilson’s novel (1956) about a historian investigating a possible archaeological forgery comes from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Chap. 7 (1872). Alice observes the Messenger ‘skipping up and down, and wriggling like an eel, as he came along’. When she expresses surprise, the King explains: ‘He’s an Anglo-Saxon Messenger – and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes.’ Harry Morgan Ayres in Carroll’s Alice (1936) suggests that the author may have been spoofing the Anglo-Saxon scholarship of his day. He also reproduces drawings of Anglo-Saxons in various costumes and attitudes from the Caedmon manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
(the) Angry Decade A decade label for the 1950s though it is not certain that this had any wide circulation beyond being the title of Kenneth Allsopp’s book – a cultural survey (1958). Obviously it derived from:
(an) angry young man Label for any writer in the mid-1950s who showed a social awareness and expressed dissatisfaction with conventional values and with the Establishment – John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and Colin Wilson among them. Leslie Paul, a social philosopher, had called his autobiography Angry Young Man in 1951, but the popular use of the phrase stems from Look Back in Anger, the 1956 play by John Osborne that featured an anti-hero called Jimmy Porter. The phrase did not occur in the play but was applied to the playwright by George Fearon in publicity material sent out by the Royal Court Theatre, London. Fearon later told The Daily Telegraph (2 October 1957): ‘I ventured to prophesy that [Osborne’s] generation would praise his play while mine would, in general, dislike it…“If this happens,” I told him, “you would become known as the Angry Young Man.” In fact, we decided then and there that henceforth he was to be known as that.’
anguish turned to joy (and vice versa) A journalistic cliché noticed as such by the 1970s: ‘A young mother’s anguish turns to joy…’ and so on. ‘Joy has turned to anguish for the parents of British student Colin Shingler aged 20, who was trapped in the Romano during the earthquake. Only hours after hearing that he had been rescued they were told that surgeons had to amputate his left hand’ – The Times (23 September 1985); ‘Meanwhile, that anguish had turned to joy among the 250 Brechin fans at Hamilton. The players took a salute and then it was Clyde’s turn to be acclaimed, with the championship trophy being paraded round the ground’ – The Herald (Glasgow) (17 May 1993).
animal, vegetable and mineral Not a quotation from anyone in particular, merely a way of describing three types of matter. And yet, why does the phrase trip off the tongue so? Edward Phillips, The New World of English Words (ed. Kersey) (1706) has: ‘Chymists…call the three Orders of Natural Bodies, viz. Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral, by the name of Kingdoms.’ But why not ‘animal, mineral, vegetable’? Or ‘vegetable, animal, mineral’? Perhaps because these variants are harder to say, although in W. S. Gilbert’s lyrics for The Pirates of Penzance (1879), Major-General Stanley does manage to sing: ‘But still in matters vegetable,
