(1966) commented: ‘In England this sentence was ranked with Nelson’s last message. At the front, the prospect of staff officers fighting with their backs to the walls of their luxurious chateaux had less effect.’
back to basics John Major, the British Prime Minister, launched this ill-fated slogan in a speech to the Conservative Party Conference in 1993: ‘The message from this Conference is clear and simple. We must go back to basics…The Conservative Party will lead the country back to these basics, right across the board: sound money, free trade; traditional teaching; respect for the family and the law.’ A number of government scandals in the ensuing months exposed the slogan as hard to interpret or, at worst, suggesting rather a return to ‘the bad old days’. The alliterative phrase (sometimes ‘back to the basics’) may first have surfaced in the USA where it was the mid-1970s’ slogan of a movement in education to give priority to the teaching of the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic.
back to normalcy Together with ‘Return to normalcy with Harding’, this was a slogan effectively used by US President Warren G. Harding. Both were based on a word extracted from a speech he had made in Boston during May 1920: ‘America’s present need is not heroics but healing, not nostrums but normalcy, not revolution but restoration, not agitation but adjustment, not surgery but serenity, not the dramatic but the dispassionate, not experiment but equipoise, not submergence in internationality but sustainment in triumphant nationality.’ Out of such an alliterative bog stuck the word ‘normalcy’ – a perfectly good Americanism, though it has been suggested that Harding was actually mispronouncing the word ‘normality’. He himself claimed that ‘normalcy’ was what he had meant to say, having come across it in a dictionary.
back to square one Meaning ‘back to the beginning’, this phrase is sometimes said to have gained currency in the 1930s through its use by football commentators on British radio. Radio Times used to print a map of the football field divided into numbered squares to which commentators would refer. Thus: ‘Cresswell’s going to make it – FIVE. There it goes, slap into the middle of the goal – SEVEN. Cann’s header there – EIGHT. The ball comes out to Britton. Britton manoeuvres. The centre goes right in – BACK TO EIGHT. Comes on to Marshall – SIX’ (an extract from the BBC commentary on the 1933 Cup Final between Everton and Manchester City). The idea had largely been abandoned by 1940. Against this proposition is the fact that square ‘one’ was nowhere near the beginning. The game began at the centre spot, which was at the meeting point of squares three, four, five and six. On the other hand, when the ball was passed to the goal-keeper (an event far commoner than a re-start after a goal), then this would indeed have been ‘back to square one’ (though, equally, two, seven or eight). Indeed, Partridge/Catch Phrases prefers an earlier origin in the children’s game of hopscotch or in the board game Snakes and Ladders. If a player was unlucky and his or her counter landed on the snake’s head in Square 97 or thereabouts, it had to make the long journey ‘back to square one’.
(ah, well,) back to the drawing-board! Meaning ‘We’ve got to start again from scratch’, this is usually said after the original plan has been aborted. It is just possible this phrase began life in the caption to a cartoon by Peter Arno that appeared in The New Yorker (3 January 1941). An official, with a rolled-up engineering plan under his arm, is walking away from a recently crashed plane and saying: ‘Well, back to the old drawing board.’
back to the jungle A return to primitive conditions, nearly always used figuratively (as in ‘a return to the Dark Ages’). Winston Churchill, in a speech about post-Revolution Russia on 3 January 1920, referred to a recent visitor to that country: ‘Colonel John Ward…has seen these things for many months with his own eyes…[and] has summed all up in one biting, blasting phrase – “Back to the jungle”.’
back to the land The cry ‘Back to the land!’ was first heard at the end of the 19th century when it was realized that the Industrial Revolution and the transfer of the population towards non-agricultural work had starved farming of labour. From The Times (25 October 1894): ‘All present were interested in the common practice that it was desirable, if possible, to bring the people back to the land.’ At about this time, a Wickham Market farmer wrote to Sir Henry Rider Haggard, who was making an inventory of the decline, published as Rural England (1902): ‘The labourers “back to the land”. That is the cry of the press and the fancy of the people. Well, I do not think that they will ever come back; certainly no legislation will ever bring them. Some of the rising generation may be induced to stay, but it will be by training them to the use of machinery and paying them higher wages. It should be remembered that the most intelligent men have gone: these will never come back, but the rising generation may stay as competition in the town increases, and the young men of the country are better paid.’ By 1905, the Spectator (23 December) was saying: ‘“Back-to-the-land” is a cry full not only of pathos, but of cogency.’ In the 1970s, a British TV comedy series was called Backs to the Land, playing on the phrase to provide an innuendo about its heroines – ‘Land Girls’, members of the Women’s Land Army conscripted to work on the land during the Second World War (though the WLA had first been established in the First World War.)
(either) back us or sack us From a speech by James Callaghan, when British Prime Minister, at the Labour Party Conference (5 October 1977). This became a format phrase in British politics, usually spoken by an individual rather than a whole government. From The Independent (25 October 1989): ‘The Chancellor of the Exchequer [Nigel Lawson] was last night challenged by the Opposition to stand up to the Prime Minister, say “Back me or sack me” and end confusion over who is running the economy…“It is time to say (to the Prime Minister) either back me or sack me”…Mr Smith said.’ Compare PUT UP OR SHUT UP.
bacon See BRING HOME THE.
bad See ANYONE WHO; CAN’T BE.
bad egg See GOOD EGG.
badger See BALD AS A.
(a) bad hair day A day on which you feel depressed, possibly because – as it used to be put – you ‘can’t do a thing’ with your hair. American origin, early 1990s. ‘I’m fine, but you’re obviously having a bad hair day’ – line delivered by Kristy Swanson in the film Buffy, The Vampire Slayer (US 1992); ‘“Having a bad hair day”, in the fastchanging slang favoured by Californian teenagers, is how you feel when you don’t want to leave the house: out of sorts, ugly and a bit depressed…having a bad hair day is meant to be a metaphor for a bad mood’ – The Daily Telegraph (19 December 1992); ‘The Chanel public relations director is having what Manhattanites describe as a bad hair day. But, somewhat perversely, she is quite enjoying herself’ – The Times (13 January 1993); ‘[Hillary Clinton] stopped saying “two-fer-one” and “vote for him, you get me” – but still, one bad hair day was following the next. Soon she started making jokes about it with her campaign staff. “How ‘bout it?” she’d say. “Another bad hair day?”’ – The Guardian (19 January 1993).
bah, humbug! Dismissive catchphrase, derived from Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Stave 1 (1843): ‘“Bah,” said Scrooge. “Humbug!”’ Ebenezer Scrooge, an old curmudgeon, userer and miser, has this view of the Christmas spirit until frightened into changing his ways by the appearance of visions and a ghost. The derivation of the word ‘humbug’ meaning ‘deception, sham’ is uncertain but it suddenly came into vogue circa 1750.
(a) baker’s dozen Thirteen. In use by the 16th century, this phrase may have originated with the medieval baker’s habit of giving away an extra loaf with every twelve to avoid being fined for providing underweight produce. The surplus was known as ‘inbread’ and the thirteenth loaf, the ‘vantage
