may well have handwritten ‘babld’ and the printer read this as ‘table’ – a reminder that the text of the plays is far from carved in stone and a prey to mishaps in the printing process, as are all books and newspapers. The generally accepted version was inserted by Lewis Theobald in his 1733 edition. As the 1954 Arden edition comments: ‘“Babbled of green fields” is surely more in character with the Falstaff who quoted the Scriptures…and who lost his voice hallooing of anthems. Now he is in the valley of the shadow, the “green pasture” of Psalm 23 might well be on his lips.’ Francis Kilvert, the diarist, makes a pleasant allusion to the phrase in his entry for 15 May 1875: ‘At the house where I lodge there is a poor captive thrush who fills the street with his singing as he “babbles of green fields”.’
babes in the wood (1) Simple, inexperienced, trustful people who are easily fooled. Known by 1866. So called by way of allusion to ‘The Children in the Wood’, an old ballad based on the case of two Norfolk children whose uncle plotted to kill them in order to obtain their inheritance. But one of the ruffians employed to do the deed prevented it, and the children were left in a wood to perish. The story (sometimes held to be true and to have taken place in Wayland Wood near Watton) was published in Norwich by Thomas Millington in 1595. In ballad form, it is mentioned in a play by Rob Yarrington (1601) and in Percy’s Reliques (1765). The story also forms the basis of the popular British pantomime format, Babes in the Wood.
(2) The name has also been applied to Irish ruffians who ranged the Wicklow mountains and the Enniscorthy woods towards the end of the 18th century.
(3) It was also given to men in the (wooden) stocks or pillory.
babies See KILL YOUR DARLINGS.
baby See DON’T THROW.
---Babylon PHRASES. Used to describe groups of people or whole societies where high living and scandals abound. The link to the biblical Babylon is not direct. Although heathen, that was rather a place of magnificence and luxury. In 588BC, Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, took Jerusalem and carried away many of the inhabitants to Babylon where they became slaves. These somewhat stuffy Jews reacted strongly to the amorality of the Babylonians (described by Herodotus), and Babylon became a byword for cruelty and vice. When the Romans took Jerusalem in AD 70, some Jewish writers (including the author of the Book of Revelation) referred to Rome as Babylon. The modern connotation of Babylon probably goes back at least as far as Disraeli, who wrote in Lothair (1847): ‘London is a modern Babylon’. Dickens has Mr Micawber make the same comparison in David Copperfield (1850), but here Babylon is evoked only to signify a magnificent, big city. So Brewer (1894) may have been a touch off the mark in saying that ‘The Modern Babylon’ is ‘London…on account of its wealth, luxury and dissipation’. The key to why, since film-maker Kenneth Anger entitled his book of movie scandals Hollywood Babylon in 1975, we have had a spate of titles like Rock’n’Roll Babylon (1982), Washington Babylon (1996), TV Babylon (1997) and Hamptons Babylon (1997) seems to lie in the popularization of the idea of Babylon as a city of decadence promoted by D. W. Griffith in his film Intolerance (US 1916). The Anger book is prefaced by a poem by Don Blanding ‘as recited by Leo Carillo in the 1935 musical Star Night at the Cocoanut Grove’: ‘Hollywood, Hollywood…/ Fabulous Hollywood…/ Celluloid Babylon, / Glorious, glamorous…/ City delirious, / Frivolous, serious…/ Bold and ambitious, / And vicious and glamorous…’ This led to Gary Herman, for example, writing of the original Babylon in his preface to Rock’n’Roll Babylon: ‘[It] was the capital of a vast and profligate empire. [Similarly] in the rock world, its citizens may start from humble beginnings, but soon they are ushered into lush hanging gardens where there are no dreams of democracy and change, only dreams of power, wealth and the perfect tan.’ In a separate development, because the Babylonians had enslaved the Israelites, Afro-Caribbean people with a history of enslavement have taken to referring to their oppressors – and by extension prosperous and privileged members of racist white society – as ‘Babylon’. In particular, ‘The Babylon’ means the police. A No.1 hit of 1977 for Boney M, the West Indies group, was ‘Rivers of Babylon’, based on ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, and wept’ (Psalm 137:1) – which in the Book of Common Prayer is, ‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.’ But, equally, this Babylonic allusion has also been used in what would seem to be the more traditional sense: in 1945, Elizabeth Smart likened New York to Babylon in the title of her novel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, a short, account of a love affair written in ‘poetic prose’. Much earlier, in a letter of 12 June 1775, Horace Walpole wrote: ‘By the waters of Babylon we sit down and weep, when we think of thee, O America!’
(a) bachelor gay Someone who puts himself about in a way characteristic of the unmarried male. ‘A Bachelor Gay (Am I)’ is the title of a song by James W. Tate in The Maid of the Mountains (1917). An arch phrase, to be used only within quotation marks, even before the change in meaning of ‘gay’ from the 1960s onwards. ‘“He was a bachelor gay,” says Diana. “He left his first wife and small child, years before I knew him…After that he’d lived at separate times with two other women and walked out on both of them. He said to me: “You must appreciate I’ve been around a lot.” It was part of the appeal’ – Daily Mail (29 November 1993).
back See—IS BACK.
back burner See PUT (SOMETHING ON).
back in the knife-box, little Miss Sharp! A nannyism addressed to a person with a sharp tongue. Compare the similar you’re so sharp you’ll be cutting yourself. Casson/Grenfell also has: ‘Very sharp we are today, we must have slept in the knife box / we must have slept on father’s razor case / we must have been up to Sheffield’. Also there is Mr Sharp from Sheffield, straight out of the knife-box! Paul Beale found a homely example of the knife-box version in Donald Davie’s autobiographical study These the Companions (1982): ‘More than twenty-five years ago I [composed] a poem which has for epigraph what I remember my mother [in Barnsley, Yorkshire] saying when I was too cocky as a child: “Mr Sharp from Sheffield, straight out of the knife-box!”’ Earlier than all this, Murdstone referred to David – Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, Chap. 2 (1849) – as ‘Mr Brooks of Sheffield’, to indicate that he was ‘sharp’. There was indeed a firm of cutlery makers called Brookes of Sheffield – a city that has for centuries been the centre of the English cutlery trade.
back of a lorry See FELL OFF THE.
backroom boys Nickname given to scientists and boffins – and specifically to those relied on to produce inventions and new gadgets for weaponry and navigation in the Second World War. Compare The Small Back Room, the title of a novel (1943) by Nigel Balchin. The phrase was originated, in this sense, by Lord Beaverbrook as Minister of Aircraft Production when he paid tribute to his research department in a broadcast on 19 March 1941: ‘Let me say that the credit belongs to the boys in the backrooms [sic]. It isn’t the man who sits in the limelight who should have the praise. It is not the men who sit in prominent places. It is the men in the backrooms.’ In the US, the phrase ‘backroom boys’ can be traced to the 1870s at least, but Beaverbrook can be credited with the modern application to scientists and boffins. The inspiration quite obviously was his favourite film, Destry Rides Again (1939), in which Marlene Dietrich jumped on the bar of the Last Chance saloon and sang the Frank Loesser song ‘See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have’.
(with our) backs to the wall This expression, meaning ‘up against it’, dates back to 1535 at least but was memorably used when the Germans launched their last great offensive of the First World War. On 12 April 1918, Sir Douglas Haig, the British Commander-in-Chief on the Western Front, issued an order
