(3 May 1994); ‘At a time of year when students and staff used to be in the classroom, students are now wandering around like lost sheep while the staff burn the midnight oil trying to get marking completed in a week’ – letter to the editor, Times Higher Education Supplement (24 February 1995).
burn your bra! A feminist slogan from America, circa 1970, encouraging women to destroy an item of apparel quite clearly designed by a male chauvinist and likely to make a woman more of a sex object. There is an analogy with the burning of draft-cards as a protest against the Vietnam War.
(to) bury the hatchet Meaning, to settle an argument – after the American Indian ritual of burying two axes to seal a peace treaty. Recorded by 1680.
bush telegraph See HEAR SOMETHING ON.
(to do the) business See IT’S THE BUSINESS.
business as usual The standard declaration posted when a shop has suffered some misfortune like a fire or is undergoing alterations. However, in the First World War the phrase was adopted in a more general sense. Herbert Morgan, an advertising man, promoted the slogan – that had ‘quite a vogue till it fell terribly out of favour as being, firstly, terribly untrue and, secondly, hopelessly inappropriate’ – Eric Field, Advertising: the forgotten years (1959). In a Guildhall speech on 9 November 1914, Winston Churchill said: ‘The maxim of the British people is “Business as usual”.’ Rather curiously, a cartoon appeared in Punch on 12 August 1914 (i.e. just as war was breaking out) that showed a group of builders renovating a pub (and sitting around drinking thereat) with the caption: ‘BUSINESS AS USUAL DURING ALTERATIONS’. The first occurrence of the phrase (though not used in this way) appears to be in Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722): ‘…the Apprehensions of its being the Infection went also quite away with my Illness, and I went about my Business as usual.’ Dickens, Thackeray and Samuel Butler all used the phrase in the 19th century, but again not quite in this manner.
business before pleasure A golden rule, known by 1767, but in this precise form only since 1837.
(a) busman’s holiday A holiday or break spent doing much the same as you do for a living – as though a bus driver were to go on a motoring holiday. Recorded by 1893. Oddly, the word ‘busman’ has virtually no existence outside this phrase.
bustling nightlife ‘Bustling trade’ was probably the forerunner of this travel writer’s cliché. ‘Bustling nightlife’ was listed in The Independent ‘DIY travel writers’ cliché kit’ (31 December 1988). ‘I had now seen both sides of Ibiza – the bustling nightlife for which it is justly famed, and the less well-known northern coastline where white sandy beaches, hidden coves, beautiful countryside and clean shallow waters makes it an ideal family holiday haven’ – Today (8 May 1993); ‘Suffering businesses have hit on a plan to restore Asakusa’s bustling trade and jazzy nightlife. They have pooled £300,000 to open a geisha school’ – The Daily Telegraph (29 December 1993).
busy See AS BUSY.
(the) Butcher Nickname of Ulysses S. Grant (1822–85), commander-in-chief of Union forces in the American Civil War and 18th President of the US (1869–77). His opponents in the North called him this because they thought he was careless of the lives of men in his army. Critics opposed to tyrannical ways and his running for a third presidential term dubbed him American Caesar.
but I’m all right now Catchphrase from the BBC radio show ITMA (1939–49). Sophie Tuckshop (Hattie Jacques) was always stuffing herself and giggling and pretending to suffer. Then, with a squeal, she would say this.
(the) butler did it! The origins of this phrase – an (often ironic) suggested solution to detective stories in their 1920s and 30s heyday – remain a complete blank. A review of Edgar Wallace’s play The Man Who Changed His Name in Punch (28 March 1928) appears to be alluding to the idea: ‘For a long time, I must say, I thought the butler had something to do with it…I think the play would have been subtler if the unravelling of the mystery had included the butler.’ A possible earlier sighting was recalled by a correspondent (1983) who said he had heard it spoken by a member of the audience after a showing of the last episode of the film series The Exploits of Elaine at a London cinema in circa 1916. Joseph R. Sandy noted: ‘The detective was called Craig Kennedy and the butler’s name was Bennet. I do not remember who played the parts (except the heroine, who was Pearl White) or anything much more about the serial.’ Mary Roberts Rinehart, the American novelist (1878–1938), is sometimes credited with the phrase, though she does not actually use it in The Circular Staircase (1908) or The Door (1930) where butlers may be the guilty parties. The Georgette Heyer thriller Why Shoot a Butler? (1933) manages to avoid any mention of the phrase. Later, however, in Patricia Wentworth’s The Ivory Dagger (1951) the butler really does do it. The earliest use of the phrase it is possible to give chapter and verse for is the caption to a Punch cartoon by Norman Mansbridge in the issue of 14 September 1938. Two policemen are shown standing outside a cinema that is showing The Mansion Murder and on the posters it asks ‘Who killed the duke?’ One policeman is saying to the other: ‘I guessed the butler did it.’ In 1956, Robert Robinson made an allusion in his Oxford thriller Landscape With Dead Dons: ‘“Well, well,” said the Inspector, handing his coffee cup to Dimbleby, who was passing with a tray, “it always turns out to be the butler in the end”.’ The film My Man Godfrey (1957 – not the 1936 original), which is not even a whodunnit, contains the line: ‘The butler did it! He made every lady in the house, oh, so very happy!’ P. G. Wodehouse wrote The Butler Did It (1957), but this was known as Something Fishy in the UK.
but, Miss ---, you’re beautiful (without your glasses on)! Were these phrases (or something like them) ever actually delivered in a Hollywood movie – or only in later parodies of the situation where a boss or producer discovers that his glasseswearing secretary or auditionee is unexpectedly attractive when she takes them off? In Act 2 of William Inge’s 1953 play Picnic, a Mrs Potts delivers the following speech, having just seen the plainer of two teenage daughters get dressed up: ‘It’s a miracle, that’s what it is! I never knew Millie could look so pretty. It’s just like a movie I saw once with Betty Grable – or was it Lana Turner? Anyway, she played the part of a secretary to some very important businessman. She wore glasses and did her hair real plain and men didn’t pay any attention to her at all. Then one day she took off her glasses and her boss wanted to marry her right away! Now all the boys are going to fall in love with Millie!’ So, a search was on for a Turner or Grable movie that fitted the bill. In a pictorial history of Paramount, the plot of Thrill of a Lifetime (US 1937) is summarized as: ‘A prim secretary’s yearning for her playwright boss is unrequited until she takes off her glasses. (It was the boss, Leif Erickson, who needed them, considering she had been Betty Grable all along).’ But the script of the movie does not contain anything approaching the key line. Following an earlier glasses-off moment, Dick Powell says to Ruby Keeler in Footlight Parade (US 1933), ‘Oh, but what a change, you’re beautiful.’ Katharine Hepburn might seem to be alluding to the line when she comments to Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby (US 1938), ‘You’re so good-looking without your glasses.’ There is a particularly delicious moment between Humphrey Bogart and Dorothy Malone when, as a bookseller, she takes her glasses off and lets down her hair in The Big Sleep (US 1946), but the line itself is left unspoken. Indeed, the line only comes into its own when conscious allusions and parodies of the situation begin to occur in Hollywood movies – as, for example, in The Bandwagon (US 1953). In addition, a Peter Arno cartoon appeared in The New Yorker (20 May 1950) that shows a director on a movie set instructing an actor in his role viz-à-viz a hugely sexy actress: ‘You’ve never noticed her, see? She’s
