as such from ancient times but in English by 1597.
dog eat dog Ruthless, cut-throat competition. Significantly, Brewer (1923) only has the expression ‘dog don’t eat dog’ and compares it to ‘there’s honour among thieves.’ CODP has ‘dog does not eat dog’ in English by 1543 and in Latin – canis caninam non est – in Varro, De Lingua Latina. So, the principal proverb is well established and ‘dog eat dog’ a modern development to describe a situation that is so bad, a dog would eat dog in it. OED2’s earliest citation is from 1931. ‘What makes a man turn animal on a Rugby field when off it he’s gentle and softly spoken? Clarke explains: “Rugby League is a game of survival. It’s dog eat dog”’ – Sunday People (24 November 1974).
dogged determination An alliterative inevitable, meaning ‘grimly tenacious’ (like a dog holding on to something). Known by 1902. A cliché by the mid-20th century. ‘Before Boycott’s appointment can be confirmed, the problem of reconciling his media role with the coaching job needs to be resolved. Given his dogged determination, no one should be surprised if he manages to juggle both roles – unlike his future boss, Illingworth, who had to give up his column in the Daily Express’ – The Sunday Telegraph (30 April 1995); ‘As opinion polls provided the relentless message of a ruling party up to 30 points behind Labour, a dogged determination reigned at Conservative Central Office’ – Financial Times (4 May 1995).
(to be in the) dog house To be in disgrace, out of favour. An American expression (known by 1932), as is shown by the use of ‘dog house’ rather than ‘kennel’. It seems to be no more than coincidence that in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Wendy (1911), it is said of Mr Darling, who literally ends up in a dog house: ‘In the bitterness of his remorse he swore that he would never leave the kennel until his children came back.’
(a) dog in the manger Someone who will not allow another to use something that he has, although he does not use it himself. The allusion is to the fable (in Aesop) about the dog who occupied a manger and would not allow an ox or horse to come and get its hay. One version: ‘A dog, lying in a manger, would neither eat the barley herself nor allow the horse, which could eat it, to come near it.’ It is one of the shortest of the fables and does not even have a moral attached. ‘We find Eamonn de Valera, then the Irish Prime Minister, playing dog-in-the-manger by pointing out a change to the monarchy would require the sanction of the Irish Free State, still a dominion’ – The Independent (30 January 2003).
(the) dogs bark – but the caravan passes by Meaning ‘critics make a noise, but it does not last’. Sir Peter Hall, the theatre director, was given to quoting this ‘Turkish proverb’ during outbursts of public hostility in the mid-1970s. In Within a Budding Grove – the 1924 translation of Marcel Proust’s A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs (1918) – C. K. Scott Moncrieff has: ‘The fine Arab proverb, “The dogs may bark; the caravan goes on!”’ In the film The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (US 1934), ‘Mohammed Khan’ quotes a proverb, ‘The little jackal barks, but the caravan passes.’ Truman Capote entitled a book, The Dogs Bark: Public People and Private Places (1973).
(looking/dressed up like a) dog’s breakfast (or dinner) When the first saying (known by 1937) suggests something scrappy and the second (known by 1934) something showy, what are we led to conclude about the differing nature of a dog’s breakfast and dinner? A dog’s breakfast might well have consisted (before the invention of tinned dog food) of the left-over scraps of the household from the night before. So that takes care of that, except that there is also the phrase cat’s breakfast, meaning a mess. Could both these derive from a belief that dogs and cats on occasions eat their own sick? A dog’s dinner might well not have differed very much (and, on occasions, can mean the same as a dog’s breakfast) except for the case described in 2 Kings 9 where it says of Jezebel that, after many years leading Ahab astray, she ‘painted her face and tired her head’ but failed to impress Jehu, whose messy disposal of her fulfilled Elijah’s prophecy that the ‘dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel’. Quite how one should distinguish between the two remains a problem, as is shown by this use of both phrases in a letter from Sir Huw Wheldon (23 July 1977), published in the book Sir Huge (1990) and concerning his TV series Royal Heritage: ‘It was very difficult, and I feared it would be a Dog’s Dinner. There was so much…to draw upon…I think it matriculated, in the event, into a Dog’s Breakfast, more or less, & I was content.’
(the) dogs of war Phrase from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, III.i.273 (1599): ‘Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war’. Used as the title of a Frederick Forsyth novel (1974; film UK 1980). Compare the title of the book Cry Havoc! (1933) by Beverley Nichols and the film Cry Havoc (US 1943).
doh (or d’oh)! Exclamation made famous by Homer Simpson in the TV series The Simpsons (1996– ) when admitting his own foolishness or expressing his frustration at the way things have turned out. Of course, he wasn’t the first person to use the word in this way or any other. And it may be the case that it was originally said by one person expressing irritation at someone else’s foolishness. It used to be spelt ‘Duh!’ and dates from the 1940s/50s. The OED in an update defined this version as, ‘Expressing inarticulacy or incomprehension. Also implying that the person has said something foolish or extremely obvious.’ Working backwards in time: in the 1960s, Peter Glaze used to say ‘Doh!’ in sketches with Leslie Crowther in the children’s TV show Crackerjack, as would the Walter Gabriel character in radio’s The Archers; in Anthony Buckeridge’s ‘Jennings at school’ stories (1950s), Jennings’s form master, Mr Wilkins, would say: ‘Doh! You stupid boy!’; in the 1940s’ radio series ITMA, Miss Hotchkiss (played by Diana Morrison) would express exasperation at her boss, Tommy Handley, with a simple ‘Doh!’ In the 1930s, the Scots actor James Finlayson, who appeared in many of the Laurel and Hardy films, would similarly sound off at the duo’s behaviour. In fact, Dan Castellaneta, who provides the voice for Homer Simpson, has apparently said that he based his ‘doh!’ on James Finlayson’s rendering – which is where we came in.
—do it—ly Joke slogan format. On 26 April 1979, the British Sun newspaper was offering a variety of T-shirts with nudging ‘do it’ slogans inscribed upon them. The craze was said to have started in the USA. Whatever the case, scores of slogans ‘promoting’ various groups with this allusion to performing the sexual act appeared over the next several years on T-shirts, lapel buttons, bumper stickers and car-window stickers. In the Graffiti books (1979–86), some seventy were recorded, among them: ‘Charles and Di do it by Royal Appointment’; ‘Donyatt Dog Club does it with discipline and kindness’; ‘Linguists do it orally’; ‘Footballers do it in the bath afterwards’; ‘Gordon does it in a flash’; ‘Chinese want to do it again after twenty minutes’; ‘City planners do it with their eyes shut’; ‘Builders do it with erections’; ‘Windsurfers do it standing up’; ‘Printers do it and don’t wrinkle the sheets’. All this from simple exploitation of the innuendo in the phrase ‘do it’, which had perhaps first been seized on by Cole Porter in the song ‘Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love’ (1928): ‘In shady shoals, English soles do it, / Goldfish in the privacy of bowls do it…’, and then in a more personal parody by Noël Coward (1940s): ‘Our leading writers in swarms do it / Somerset and all the Maughams do it…’ Much later came the advertising slogan ‘You can do it in an M.G.’ (quoted in 1983).
(la) dolce vita The title of Federico Fellini’s 1960 Italian film La Dolce Vita passed into English as a phrase suggesting a high-society life of luxury, pleasure and self-indulgence. Meaning simply ‘the sweet life’, it is not clear how much of a set phrase it was in Italian before it was taken up by everybody else. Compare dolce far niente [sweet idleness].
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