‘by some means or another’. In fact, the only real theory is the one about peasants in feudal times being allowed to take for firewood only those tree branches that they could pull down ‘by hook or by crook’ – ‘crook’ here meaning the hooked staff carried by shepherds (and also, symbolically, by bishops). ‘By hook or by crook I’ll be last in this book’ is the cliché you append to the final page of an autograph book when asked to contribute a little something more than your signature.
by jingo! Now a mild and meaningless oath, this phrase derived its popularity from G. W. Hunt’s notable anti-Russian music-hall song ‘We Don’t Want to Fight (But By Jingo If We Do…)’ (1877). The song gave the words ‘jingo’ and ‘jingoism’ their modern meaning (excessive patriotism), but the oath had existed before this. Punch (3 February 1872) had a cartoon caption, ‘Ghosts, by Jingo!’ Motteux in his translation of Rabelais in 1694 put ‘by jingo’ for ‘par dieu‘, and there is some evidence to show that ‘jingo’ was conjuror’s gibberish dating from a decade or two before.
by Jove, I needed that! Used by several comedians, as though after consuming long-awaited alcoholic refreshment. Ken Dodd said it (1960s/70s) after a quick burst on the banjo to relieve tension. It may also have been used in the BBC radio Goon Show.
by their fruits shall ye know them Meaning, ‘you can judge people by the results they produce’. A direct quotation from Matthew 7:20 in the part of the Sermon on the Mount about being wary of false prophets.
by the pale moonlight (sometimes in the pale moonlight) Poetic phrase, first found in Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto 2, St. 1 (1805): ‘If thou would’st view fair Melrose aright, / Go visit it by the pale moonlight.’ Next, ‘in the pale moonlight’ occurs in Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, Chap. 43 (1840). Then from the song ‘Who Were You With Last Night?’ (1912), written by the British composer of music-hall songs Fred Godfrey (1889–1953) with Mark Sheridan: ‘Who were you with last night? / Out in the pale moonlight’. John Masefield’s ‘Captain Stratton’s Fancy’ (1903) has: ‘And some are all for dancing by the pale moonlight’; and from the much later film Batman (US 1989): ‘Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?’
(to get/have someone) by the short and curlies To have someone in a metaphorical position from which it is impossible to escape – from the fact that if someone is holding you by the short (and sometimes curly) hairs on the back of the neck, it is very painful. The phrase probably does not have anything to do with pubic hairs. Recorded by Eric Partridge as British forces’ slang in 1948 and dated by him to about 1935. This would seem to be an extension of to get/have someone by the short hairs, which dates from 1905 at least and possibly back to the 1890s.
by the sword divided Consciously archaic phrase devised for the title of the BBC TV historical drama By the Sword Divided (1983–5). Set in the English Civil War, this series was created by John Hawkesworth who commented (1991): ‘When I first wrote down the idea for a story about the Civil War I called it The Laceys of Arnescote…[but] I decided the title didn’t convey the sort of Hentyish swashbuckling style that we were aiming at, so I thought again. The title By the Sword Divided came to me as I was walking along a beach in Wales.’ Earlier, in dealing with the Civil War period, Macaulay had written in his History of England, Chaps. 1–2 (1848): ‘Thirteen years followed during which England was…really governed by the sword’; ‘the whole nation was sick of government by the sword’; ‘anomalies and abuses…which had been destroyed by the sword’.
cabbage-looking See I’M NOT SO.
Cabbage Patch Kids Millions of soft, ugly dolls with this name were sold in 1983–4. Created by American entrepreneur Xavier Roberts, they became a craze around the world. People did not purchase them but, tweely, ‘adopted’ them. Whereas, in Britain, babies that are not delivered by the stork are found under a gooseberry bush, in the USA, they are found in ‘cabbage patches’. The ‘stork’ and ‘cabbage-patch’ theories of childbirth were known by 1923; the ‘gooseberry-bush’ by 1903. Compare Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1901), the title of a US children’s novel by Alice Hegan Rice.
cabbages and kings Phrase from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Walrus and the Carpenter’ episode in Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, Chap. 4 (1871): ‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, / ‘To talk of many things: / Of shoes – and ships – and sealing-wax – / Of cabbages and kings…’ The American writer O. Henry took Cabbages and Kings as the title of his first collection of short stories (1904), and there is a book, Of Kennedys and Kings: making sense of the Sixties by Harris Wofford (1980). However, the alliterative conjunction of ‘cabbages’ and ‘kings’ predates Carroll. In Hesketh Pearson’s Smith of Smiths, a biography of the Reverend Sydney Smith (d. 1845), he quotes Smith as saying about a certain Mrs George Groce: ‘She had innumerable hobbies, among them horticulture and democracy, defined by Sydney as “the most approved methods of growing cabbages and destroying kings”.’
cads See PLAY THE GAME.
Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion An example of this phrase occurs in Lord Chesterfield’s letters (circa 1740): ‘Your moral character must be not only pure, but, like Caesar’s wife, unsuspected.’ Originally, it was Julius Caesar himself who said this of his wife, Pompeia, when he divorced her in 62 BC. In North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives – which is how the saying came into English in 1570 – Caesar is quoted thus: ‘I will not, sayd he, that my wife be so much as suspected.’ Pompeia was Caesar’s second wife, and, according to Suetonius, in 61 BC she took part in the women-only rites of the Feast of the Great Goddess. But it was rumoured that a profligate called Publius Clodius attended, wearing women’s clothes, and that he committed adultery with Pompeia. Caesar divorced Pompeia and at the subsequent inquiry into the desecration was asked why he had done so. ‘Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion,’ he replied. He later married Calphurnia.
ça ira…à la lanterne ‘Ah! Ah! ça ira, ça ira / Les aristocrates à la lanterne’ is the refrain of the French revolutionary song, first heard when the Parisians marched on Versailles (5–6 October 1789). Ça ira, though almost impossible to translate, means something like ‘That will certainly happen’, ‘It will go’, ‘Things will work out.’ À la lanterne is the equivalent of the modern ‘string ‘em up’ (lanterne being a street lamp in Paris useful for hanging aristocrats from). The inspiration for the first line of the refrain may have been Benjamin Franklin’s recent use of the phrase in connection with the American Revolution of 1776. After the French Revolution, the phrase Ça ira caught on in Britain.
cakes and ale A synonym for ‘enjoyment’, as in the expression ‘life isn’t all cakes and ale’. On 4 May 1876, the Reverend Francis Kilvert wrote in his diary: ‘The clerk’s wife brought out some cakes and ale and pressed me to eat and drink. I was to have returned to Llysdinam to luncheon…but as I wanted to see more of the country and the people I decided to let the train go by, accept the hospitality of my hostess and the cakes and ale which life offered, and walk home quietly in the course of the afternoon’ – a neat demonstration of the literal and metaphorical uses of the phrase. Cakes and Ale is the title of a novel (1930) by W. Somerset Maugham. The phrase comes from Sir Toby Belch’s remark to Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, II.iii.114 (1600): ‘Does thou think, because thou art virtuous,
