association with weddings, saints’ days, and holy days’.
Calcutta See BLACK HOLE; OH!
call See ANSWER THE; DON’T CALL US.
(to) call a spade a spade To speak bluntly, to call things by their proper names without resorting to euphemisms. But why a spade? Said to have arisen when Erasmus mistranslated a passage in Plutarch’s Apophthegmata where the object that ‘Macedonians had not the wit to call a spade by any other name than a spade’ was rather a trough, basin, bowl or boat in the original Greek. The phrase was in the English language, however, by 1539.
calling all cars, calling all cars! What the police controller says over the radio to patrolmen in American cop films and TV series of the 1950s. For some reason, it is the archetypal cop phrase of the period, and evocative. However, the formula had obviously been known before this if the British film titles Calling All Stars (1937), Calling All Ma’s (1937) and Calling All Cars (1954) are anything to go by. Indeed, the phrase appears in an American advertisement for Western Electric radio equipment, dated 1936.
call me madam When Frances Perkins was appointed Secretary of Labor by President Roosevelt in 1933, she became the first American woman to hold Cabinet rank. It was told that when she had been asked in Cabinet how she wished to be addressed, she had replied: ‘Call me Madam.’ She denied that she had done this, however. It was after her first Cabinet meeting when reporters asked how they should address her. The Speaker-elect of the House of Representatives, Henry T. Rainey, answered for her: ‘When the Secretary of Labor is a lady, she should be addressed with the same general formalities as the Secretary of Labor who is a gentleman. You call him “Mr Secretary”. You will call her “Madam Secretary”. You gentlemen know that when a lady is presiding over a meeting, she is referred to as “Madam Chairman” when you rise to address the chair’ – quoted in George Martin, Madam Secretary – Frances Perkins (1976). Some of the reporters put this ruling into Perkins’s own mouth and that presumably is how the misquotation occurred. Irving Berlin’s musical Call Me Madam was first performed on Broadway in 1950, starring Ethel Merman as a woman ambassador appointed to represent the USA in a tiny European state. It was inspired by the case of Pearl Mesta, the society hostess whom Harry Truman had appointed as US Ambassador to Luxembourg.
(the) call of the unknown (or challenge…) Not recorded in OED2. Found in the speech that the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen gave when he was installed as Rector of the University of Aberdeen in November 1926: ‘We will find in the lives of men who have done anything, of those whom we call great men, that it is this spirit of adventure, the call of the unknown, that has lured and urged them along on their course…’
(a) callow youth An immature, inexperienced young person (in slightly archaic use). ‘One overhears a callow youth of twenty address a still fascinating belle of forty’ – A. M. Binstead, More Gal’s Gossip (1901); ‘There is a slightly awkward father-and-son relationship here between the gullible, disapproving, callow youth who lived and the sophisticated man who writes, and it is the open unresolvability of this tension which makes the book so recognisable and so true’ – The Guardian (17 May 1994); ‘On his first ever visit to the regal ski resort of St Moritz, King Farouk of Egypt, then a callow youth, felt a sartorial fool. He had arrived at the Suvretta House Hotel wearing a black morning suit and nervelessly flicked back the tails as he helped his mother’ – Daily Mail (24 December 1994).
(the) camera cannot lie (or does not lie or never lies) A 20th-century proverb, though its origins have not been recorded. In the script for the commentary of a film (‘Six Commissioned Texts’, I., 1962), W. H. Auden wrote: ‘The camera’s eye / Does not lie, / But it cannot show / The life within.’ ‘The camera cannot lie. But it can be an accessory to the untruth’ – Harold Evans, Pictures on a Page (1978).
camel See EYE OF.
came the dawn (or comes the dawn) A stock phrase of romantic fiction in the early 20th century – also reported to have been a subtitle or inter-title from the early days of cinema. C. A. Lejeune wrote that it was one of the screen title captions illustrated by Alfred Hitchcock in his early days in the cinema, ‘in black letters on a white ground.’ This is confirmed by François Truffaut’s Hitchcock (English version, 1968) in which Hitchcock refers to it as ‘narrative title’. He also mentions a similar title phrase: ‘The next morning…’ ‘Came the Dawn’ was the title of a P. G. Wodehouse short story reprinted in Mulliner Omnibus (1927). The phrase is spoken by Tony Cavendish in the George S. Kaufman/Edna Ferber play The Royal Family (1927), in which he is a swashbuckling silent film actor, given to speaking in the clichés of screen titling. Again, the line is spoken in the film The Bad and the Beautiful (US 1952) to describe the change of scene the morning after a party and a gambling loss. It is quoted as ‘Comes the Dawn’ in Flexner (1982). Before the coming of film sound, it was possible for a catchphrase to emerge from this kind of use. In A Fool There Was (US 1914), Theda Bara ‘spoke’ the inter-title kiss me, my fool, and this was taken up as a fad expression. Similarly, Jacqueline Logan ‘said’ harness my zebras in Cecil B. De Mille’s King of Kings (US 1925). This became a fad expression for ‘let’s leave’ or as a way of expressing amazement – ‘Well, harness my zebras!’
(as) camp as a row of tents Extremely affected, outrageous, over the top. A pun on the word ‘camp’, which came into general use in the 1960s to describe the manner and behaviour of (especially) one type of homosexual male. As it happens, one of the suggested origins for the word ‘camp’ in this sense is that it derives from ‘camp followers’, the female prostitutes who would accompany an army on its journeyings to service the troops in or adjacent to their tents.
can a (bloody) duck swim! (sometimes does/will a fish swim!) This is said by way of meaning ‘You bet!’, ‘Of course, I will’. ODP has ‘Will a duck swim?’ in 1842. Winston Churchill claimed he said the ‘can’ version to Stanley Baldwin when the Prime Minister asked if he would accept the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1924 government. Lady Violet Bonham Carter spoke the phrase to Churchill when he asked her to serve as a Governor of the BBC in 1941. After this, he referred to her as his ‘Bloody Duck’, and she had to sign her letters to him, ‘Your BD’.
(he/she) can dish it out but can’t take it in Said of people who are unable to accept the kind of criticism they dispense to others. A reader’s letter to Time Magazine (4 January 1988) remarked of comedienne Joan Rivers’s action in suing a magazine for misquoting her about her late husband: ‘For years she has made big money at the expense of others with her caustic remarks. Obviously Rivers can dish it out but can’t take it in.’ The idiomatic phrase was established by the 1930s. In the film Little Caesar (US 1931), Edward G. Robinson says, ‘He could dish it out but he couldn’t take it in.’ In the film 49th Parallel (1941), Raymond Massey, as a Canadian soldier, apparently plays with the phrase when he says to a Nazi, ‘When things go wrong, we can take it. We can dish it out, too.’
candle See CARE OF; HOLD A.
(a) candle in the wind The song ‘Candle in the Wind’ (1973) has words by Bernie Taupin and music by Elton John. The opening words ‘Goodbye Norma Jean’ refer to Marilyn Monroe (who was born Norma Jean Mortenson/Baker): ‘It seems to me you lived your life / Like a candle in the wind. / Never knowing who to cling to / When the rain set in. / And I would have liked to have known you / But I was just a kid / That candle burned out long before / Your legend ever did.’ Elton John sang a revised version of the song at the funeral of
