a beaten path to his door.’ Elbert Hubbard also claimed authorship. Either way, this is a remark alluded to when people talk of ‘beating a path to someone’s door’ or a better mousetrap. In his journal for February 1855, Emerson had certainly entertained the thought: ‘If a man…can make better chairs or knives…than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.’
beaten the panel See IS IT BIGGER.
(the) Beat Generation ‘Beatniks’ were young people who opted out of normal society in the 1950s (first of all in the USA) because they were unable or unwilling to conform to conventional standards. Careless of appearance, critical of the Establishment, they were less intellectual than the average angry young man, but rebellious like the teddy boys who preceded them (in the UK) and the hippies who followed. The name with its Yiddish or Russian suffix (compare the Russian sputnik satellite orbiting the earth in 1957) derived from the phrase ‘Beat Generation’, coinage of which is usually credited to Jack Kerouac, although in his book The Origins of the Beat Generation, he admitted to borrowing the phrase from a drug addict called Herbert Huncke. In Randy Nelson’s The Almanac of American Letters (1981), there is a description of the moment of coinage. Kerouac is quoted as saying: ‘John Clellon Holmes…and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the lost generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said: “You know, this is really a beat generation,” and he leapt up and said: “That’s it, that’s right”.’ Holmes himself attributed the phrase directly to Kerouac in The New York Times Magazine of 16 November 1952.
beautiful See ALL THINGS; BUT MISS.
(the) beautiful game Football. This description is usually credited to the Brazilian player Pelé, and his autobiography (written with Robert L. Fish) has the English title My Life and the Beautiful Game (1977). But whether he said it first in Portuguese (o jogo lindo) or in English is not known. The Beautiful Game was the title of a musical (London 2000) about football and the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland (book by Ben Elton, music by Andrew Lloyd Webber). The phrase had much earlier been applied to cricket by Arnold Wall (1869–1966) in a poem called ‘A Time Will Come’ during the First World War.
(the) beautiful people Coinage of this term is credited in Current Biography (1978) to the American fashion journalist Diana Vreeland (circa 1903–89). Whether she deserves this or not is open to question, although she does seem to have helped launch the similar term SWINGING LONDON. The earliest OED2 citation with capital letters for each word is from 1966, though there is a Vogue use from 15 February 1964 that would appear to support the link to Vreeland. The OED2 makes the phrase refer primarily to ‘“flower people”, hippies’ though the 1981 Macquarie Dictionary’s less narrow definition of ‘a fashionable social set of wealthy, well-groomed, usually young people’ is preferable. The Lennon and McCartney song ‘Baby You’re a Rich Man’ (released in July 1967) contains the line ‘How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?’ William Saroyan’s play The Beautiful People had first been performed long before all this, in 1941, and Oscar Wilde in a letter to Harold Boulton (December 1879) wrote: ‘I could have introduced you to some very beautiful people. Mrs Langtry and Lady Lonsdale and a lot of clever beings who were at tea with me.’
beauty See AGE BEFORE; AHA, ME.
beauty and the beast The story of the beast who insists on marrying a beautiful princess is one of the classic fairy tales. One version is that of Marie Leprince (or Le Prince) de Beaumont, a French governess working in London, who published Le Magasin des enfans (1756–7), a booklet in French with dialogues meant for educating young girls. The fifth dialogue of Vol. 1 is ‘La Belle et la Bête’. The title and version (though much shortened) were mostly taken from another French author, Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve in Les Contes Marins (1740), which in turn harks back to Straparola’s telling in Piacevoli Notti (1550) and the traditional story of Amor and Psyche. The Villeneuve story (which was the first with the title La Belle et la Bête) was not apparently intended for children. Where the Leprince version has the Beast saying, ‘Would you be my wife?’, Villeneuve has him saying he wants to go to bed with her. When she finally agrees, all the Beast does is sleep and snore, and wake up as a beautiful prince. Jean Cocteau made a film version of the story, as La Belle et la Bête (France 1946), and a Disney animated musical Beauty and the Beast (US 1991) has kept the story alive. The phrase might now be used to describe a couple where the woman is good-looking and the man is definitely not.
beauty sleep ‘Sleep before midnight, supposedly conducive to good looks and health’, according to Partridge/Slang. Apparently, this phrase appeared in Frank Smedley’s novel, Frank Fairleigh (1850). It was certainly in Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago (1857).
Beaver! (1) The cry identifying a man with a beard appears to have been common among children in the 1910s and 1920s, though it is now obsolete. In 1922, Punch had several jokes and cartoons on the theme and noted (19 July) in a caption: ‘To Oxford is attributed the credit of inventing the game of “Beaver” in which you score points for spotting bearded men.’ But why beaver? Flexner (1976) notes the use of the animal’s name to describe a high, sheared-fur hat in the USA. The beaver’s thick dark-brown fur, he says, also refers ‘to a well-haired pudendum or a picture showing it, which in pornography is called a “beaver shot”.’ Beaver for beard may derive rather from the Middle Ages when the ‘beaver’ was the part of a soldier’s helmet that lay around the chin as a face-guard (the ‘vizor’ was the bit brought down from the forehead). In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I.ii.228 (1600), the Prince asks: ‘Then saw you not his face?’ (that of his father’s ghost). Horatio replies: ‘O yes, my lord, he wore his beaver up.’ (2) Nickname of William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook (1879–1964), newspaper magnate and politician in Britain. He took his title from the town in New Brunswick, Canada, where he had a home. Called ‘Max’ by his friends, he was known to his staff as ‘the Beaver’, a name explained by Tom Driberg (his first ‘William Hickey’ columnist on the Daily Express) as being a ‘zoological symbol of tireless industry’.
be British! Jingoistic phrase. In 1912, Captain Edward Smith reputedly said, ‘Be British, boys, be British’ to his crew some time in the hours between his command, the Titanic, hitting the iceberg and his going down with the ship. Michael Davie in his book on the disaster describes the evidence for this as ‘flimsy’, but the legend was rapidly established. ‘Be British! was the cry as the ship went down’ is the first line of a commemorative song, ‘Be British’, written and composed by Lawrence Wright and Paul Pelham. In 1914, when a statue to Smith was erected in Lichfield, it had ‘Be British’ as part of the inscription.
because I’m worth it! Phrase from TV commercial for L’Oréal. ‘Shamelessly vainglorious claim voiced by a succession of blandly pretty actresses (and the French football Adonis, David Ginola) on a TV commercial to justify, implicitly, the shockingly exorbitant price of L’Oréal hair products’ – John Walsh in The Independent (2 December 2000). By October 2002, in the UK, there was a poster ad proclaiming, ‘Discover the beauty of science. Because you’re worth it. L’Oréal.’ The French version, seen in 2003, was: ‘Les progrès de la science se reflètent dans vos cheveux. Parce que vous le valez bien.’
because it’s there As a flippant justification for doing anything, this makes use of a phrase chiefly associated with the British mountaineer George Leigh Mallory (1886–1924). He disappeared on his last attempt to climb Mount Everest. The previous year, during a lecture tour in the USA, he had frequently been asked why he wanted to achieve the goal. He replied, ‘Because it is there.’ The saying has become a catchphrase in situations where the speaker wishes to dismiss an impossible
