(an) action man A person who is given more to action than to thought, named after a boy’s doll that could be dressed in various military-type costumes with appropriate accoutrements. Prior to his marriage in 1981, Charles, Prince of Wales, was noted for his enthusiastic sporting activities in many fields. Coupled with his active service in the Royal Navy, such expenditure of energy caused him to be accorded this nickname. A report of a General Medical Council disciplinary inquiry in The Independent (29 March 1990) stated: ‘He told the hearing: “Mr Bewick is an Action Man, not a philosopher. Action Man’s advantage is that at the drop of a hat, he can go anywhere and do anything”.’
action this day Instruction phrase, for office use. ‘ACTION THIS DAY’, ‘REPORT IN THREE DAYS’ and ‘REPORT PROGRESS IN ONE WEEK’ were printed tags that Winston Churchill started using in February 1940 to glue on to memos at the Admiralty. Subtitled ‘Working with Churchill’, the book Action This Day (1968) is a collection of the reminiscences of those who had been closely associated with Churchill during the Second World War. ‘She [Margaret Thatcher] had the draft of that circular on her desk that night. She said “Action this day” and she got it. We didn’t stop to argue’ – Hugo Young, One of Us, Chap. 6 (1989).
(an) actor laddie An actor with the booming voice and declamatory manner of the Victorian and Edwardian stage. The expression presumably derives from the habit of adding the somewhat patronizing endearment ‘laddie’ when talking to junior members of their companies. The playwright Ronald Harwood singled out Frank G. Carillo as an example of the breed, from the early 1900s: ‘[He] intoned rather than talked, in a deep, trembling voice ideally suited to melodrama and he used it with equal fortissimo both on and off the stage.’ Sir Donald Wolfit, himself somewhat prone to this manner, described Carillo as one of the few actors he had actually heard use the word ‘laddie’.
actress See AS THE BISHOP.
act your age (also be your age)! Grow up, behave in a manner more befitting your years. Probably from the US and in use by the 1920s. An elaboration heard in the UK (1985) – act your age, not your shoe size (normal shoe sizes in the UK are in the range 4–12).
Adam’s rib The film Adam’s Rib (US 1949) is about husband and wife lawyers opposing each other in court and stars Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. It is also the title of a 1923 Cecil B. de Mille film about marriage, with biblical flashbacks. The phrase alludes to Genesis 2:21–2, which states that God made woman from one of Adam’s ribs. Compare SPARE RIB.
adjust See DO NOT.
(an) admirable Crichton A resourceful servant. Also applied – broadly – to anyone of intellectual accomplishment. The Admirable Crichton has been the title of a novel by Harrison Ainsworth (1837) and of J. M. Barrie’s play (1902; films UK 1918, 1957), the latter about a butler who succours his shipwrecked aristocratic employer on a desert island. The term had originally been applied to James Crichton (1560–85), Scottish traveller and scholar, by Sir Thomas Urquhart in The Jewel (1652).
adopt, adapt, improve Motto of the National Association of Round Tables of Great Britain and Ireland, from 1927 onwards. The Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) had said in a speech at the British Industries Fair in Birmingham (1927): ‘The young business and professional men of this country must get together round the table, adopt methods that have proved sound in the past, adapt them to the changing needs of the times and, whenever possible, improve them.’ The Round Table movement is a social and charitable organization for young professional and business men under the age of forty (after which age Rotary takes over).
adrift See CAST ADRIFT.
advance Australia Motto of the Commonwealth of Australia when the states united in 1901. In the 1970s and 1980s, as republicanism grew, it acquired the force of a slogan and was used in various campaigns to promote national pride (sometimes as ‘Let’s Advance Australia’). In 1984, ‘Advance Australia Fair’, slightly adapted, superseded ‘God Save the Queen’ as the country’s national anthem. This song, by Peter Dodds McCormick, had first been performed in Sydney in 1878, though the alliterative slogan ‘Advance Australia’ apparently existed earlier when Michael Massey Robinson wrote in the Sydney Gazette (1 February 1826): ‘“Advance Then, Australia”, / Be this thy proud gala /…And thy watch-word be “Freedom, For Ever!”’
advise and consent The title of Allen Drury’s novel about Washington politics Advise and Consent (1959; film US 1962) (not ‘advice’) is taken from US Senate Rule 38: ‘The final question on every nomination shall be, “Will the Senate advise and consent to this nomination?”’ In the US Constitution (Art. II, Sect. 2), dealing with the Senate’s powers as a check on the President’s appointive and treaty-making powers, the phrase includes the noun rather than the verb, ‘Advice and consent’. Originally, George Washington as President went in person to the Senate Chamber (22 August 1789) to receive ‘advice and consent’ about treaty provisions with the Creek Indians. Vice-President Adams used the words, ‘Do you advise and consent?’ Subsequent administrations have sent written requests.
(the) affluent society Label applied to Western society in the mid-20th century. John Kenneth Galbraith’s book The Affluent Society (1958) is about the effect of high living standards on economic theories that had been created to deal with scarcity and poverty. The resulting ‘private affluence and public squalor’ stemmed from an imbalance between private and public sector output. For example, there might be more cars and TV sets but not enough police to prevent them from being stolen. The Revd Dr Martin Luther King Jnr, in a 1963 letter from gaol, used the phrase thus: ‘When you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smouldering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society…then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.’ The notion was not new to the mid-20th century. Tacitus, in his Annals (circa AD 115) noted that ‘many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable’ and Cato the Younger (95–46 BC), when denouncing the contemporary state of Rome said: ‘Habemus publice egestatem, privatim opulentiam [public want, private wealth].’ The punning tag of the effluent society, a commonplace by the 1980s, had appeared in Stan Gooch’s poem ‘Never So Good’ in 1964, and indeed before that.
after I’ve shampooed my hair, I can’t do a thing with it (or I washed my hair last night – and now…)! Commonplace excuse for one’s less than good appearance and a domestic conversational cliché. In Are You a Bromide? (1907), the American writer Gelett Burgess castigated people who spoke in what he called ‘Bromidioms’, like this one. The second part is sometimes given as a chorused response as though anticipating the cliché involved.
after the Lord Mayor’s show comes the shit-cart A reference to the anti-climactic appearance of a dust-cart and operative to clean up the horse manure that is left behind after the Lord Mayor’s annual show (really a procession) in the City of London. Partridge/Catch Phrases suggests that it is a late 19th century Cockney observation and one that could be applied to other from-the-sublime-to-the-ridiculous situations.
after you, Claude! / no, after you, Cecil! Catchphrase exchange spoken by Horace Percival and Jack Train playing two over-polite handymen, Cecil and Claude, in the BBC radio show ITMA (1939–49). It still survives in pockets as an admirable way of overcoming social awkwardness in such matters as deciding who should go first through a door. In the early 1900s, the American cartoonist Fred Opper created a pair of excessively polite Frenchmen called Alphonse and Gaston who had the similar exchange: ‘You first, my dear Alphonse’ – ‘No, no, you first, my dear
