quotes William Allen White’s comment on the defeat of Alfred Landon in the 1936 US presidential election: ‘It was not an election the country has just undergone, but a political Johnstown flood.’
don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs Meaning, ‘don’t try to tell people things which, given their age and experience, they might be expected to know anyway’. According to Partridge/Slang, variations of this very old expression include advice against instructing grandmothers to ‘grope ducks’, ‘grope a goose’, ‘sup sour milk’, ‘spin’ and ‘roast eggs’. In 1738, Jonathan Swift’s Polite Conversation had ‘Go teach your grannam to suck eggs’. It has been suggested that, in olden days, sucking eggs would be a particularly important thing for a grandmother to be able to do because, without teeth, it would be all she was capable of. Known since the late 17th century.
don’t throw the baby out with the bath water Meaning, ‘don’t get rid of the essential when disposing of the inessential’. There are several similar English expressions, including ‘to throw away the wheat with the chaff’, ‘to throw away the good with the bad’, but this one seems to have caught on following its translation from the German by Thomas Carlyle in 1849. According to Wolfgang Mieder in Western Folklore (October 1991), the first written occurrence appears in the satirical book Narrenbeschwörung (1512). Chap. 81 is entitled ‘Das kindt mit dem bad vß schitten [to throw the baby out with the bath water].’
don’t try this at home Injunction, usually to young television viewers, not to try to replicate stunts and dangerous activities they have just been shown. Accordingly, Don’t Try This At Home became the title of a British TV programme of which The Guardian (25 January 1999) said: ‘[It] takes itself seriously. Large lumps of the programme are devoted to repeating the title in case viewers try to kill themselves.’ At about this time, the catchphrase warning was noticed in a Dutch text (but in English) describing a somewhat dangerous sexual position. Earlier: ‘As one baffled scientist told his peers over the electronic mail, “Remember, kids, don’t try this at home, unless you want your baby brother to have three arms”’ – The Guardian (12 April 1989).
don’t want it good – want it Tuesday Journalistic motto of editors – and quoted by journalists – suggesting that actual delivery of copy is more important than striving after quality. British, mid-20th century. Compare: ‘Don’t get it right, just get it written’ – James Thurber, Fables of Our Time, ‘The Sheep In Wolf’s Clothing’ (1940).
don’t worry, be happy Injunction. Bobby McFerrin’s song with this title became George Bush’s unofficial campaign theme in the presidential election of 1988 and won the Grammy award for the year’s best song. ‘The landlord says the rent is late, he might have to litigate, but don’t worry, be happy,’ sang McFerrin, in a song which became a minor national anthem, reflecting a feeling in the USA at the time. The Times (8 March 1989) noted: ‘The song has spawned a whole “happy” industry and relaunched the Smiley face emblem that emerged in America in the late 1960s and was taken up in Britain by the acid-house scene last year. Bloomingdales, the Manhattan department store, now features a “Don’t worry, be happy shop”.’ In the form, ‘Be happy, don’t worry’, it was earlier a saying of Meher Baba (1894–1969), the so-called Indian God-Man.
don’t you just love being in control? Slogan from TV advertising for British Gas from 1991. Originally, the ‘control’ was seen to come from the fact that a gas appliance responds more quickly to its operator’s demands than does an electrical one, but the saying soon achieved brief catchphrase status in the UK, not least because of its scope for sexual innuendo. From The Independent (19 October 1992): ‘England signally failed to achieve their stated [rugby union] goals. Perhaps disarranged by their new surroundings, England, who just love being in control, were frustrated by the resilience and organisation of the Canadians.’ From The Daily Telegraph (5 April 1993): ‘Most annoying of all is the circle of fire [in a National Theatre production of Macbeth], like a giant gas ring, which whooshes into jets of flame at certain key moments. It is ludicrously obtrusive and sometimes it doesn’t seem to be working properly, adding to the viewer’s sense of fretful alienation. As Alan Howard stands in the middle of it, looking haggard, you suddenly wonder if the whole dire production is actually an advertisement for British Gas. Will he suddenly flick his thumb and say “Don’t you just love being in control?”’
don’t you know there’s a war on? Reproof delivered in response to complaints and used by (Will) Hatton and (Ethel) Manners portraying a Cockney chappie and a Lancashire lass in their British variety act of the 1940s. Fairly widely taken up, ironically after the Second World War. Somehow or other it found its way into the script of the US film It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), where it is exclaimed by James Stewart. Partridge/Catch Phrases has the similar ‘Remember there’s a war on’ dating from the First World War. In a letter to Cyril Connolly on 19 October 1939, John Betjeman wrote: ‘We must all do our bit. There’s a war on, you know.’
don’t you pour that tea, there will be ginger twins! Injunction expounding the curious superstition that the person who has made a pot of tea should be the one to pour it out. If it was poured by another it would bring ginger twins into the family. There are, in fact, several superstitions concerning the pouring out of tea, especially if it involves two people. Another is that it is bad luck for two people to pour out of the same pot. The journal Folklore (in 1940) reported this as follows: ‘I have often heard…that two women should not catch hold of a teapot at once or one of them will have ginger-headed twins within the year.’
doodah See ALL OF.
doolally tap Mad, of unbalanced mind. ‘Tap’ here is in the sense of ‘heat, fever’ and ‘doolally’ is the spoken form of the Marashtra (India) word ‘deolali’. Fraser & Gibbons, Soldier & Sailor Words (1925), state: ‘Deolali tap (otherwise doolally tap), mad, off one’s head. Old Army.’ Street (1986) describes Deolali as ‘a turn-of-the-century Bombay sanatorium where many British soldiers were detained before being shipped home.’
doom and gloom (or gloom and doom) (merchants) The basic rhyming phrase became especially popular in the 1970s/80s and a cliché almost simultaneously. ‘Doom and gloom merchants’ was part of the ‘travel scribes’ armoury’ compiled from a competition in The Guardian (10 April 1993). An early appearance was in the musical Finian’s Rainbow (1947; film US 1968) in which Og, a pessimistic leprechaun, uses it repeatedly, as in: ‘I told you that gold could only bring you doom and gloom, gloom and doom.’ ‘It was only last month that Mr Alex Park, chief executive of British Leyland, was attacking the news media for “pouring out gloom and doom about the car industry”’ – BBC Radio 4, Between the Lines (9 October 1976); ‘Amongst all the recent talk of doom and gloom one thing has been largely overlooked…’ – Daily Telegraph (7 November 1987); ‘The doom-and-gloom merchants would have us convinced that only an idiot would ever invest another hardearned penny in property’ – Daily Record (7 March 1995); ‘Yet athletics usually gets its own back on the doom-and-gloom merchants, and can do so here when people such as Privalova and Johnson take the stage’ – The Guardian (10 March 1995).
doomed See MANY MANY TIMES.
(to) do one’s own thing A 1960s’ expression, meaning ‘establish your own identity/follow your own star’, which is said to have been anticipated by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), the American poet and essayist. The passage from his ‘Essay on Self Reliance’ actually states: ‘If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it…under all these screens, I have difficulty
