In a Manner of Speaking

Phrases, Expressions, and Proverbs and How We Use and Misuse Them

Colin McNairn

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781632205209
• eBook ISBN: 9781632208989
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Authorship

What do "the whole kit and caboodle, " "the whole shebang, " "the whole megillah, " "the whole enchilada, " "the whole nine yards, " "the whole box and dice, " and "the full Monty" have in common? They're all expressions that mean "the entire quantity, " and they're all examples of the breadth and depth of the English-speaking world's vocabulary.From the multitude of words and phrases in daily use, the author of this delightful exploration into what we say and why we say it zeroes in on those expressions and sayings and their variations that are funny, quirky, just plain folksy, or playfully dressed up in rhyme or alliteration. Some may have become clichés that, as it's said with "tongue in cheek, " should be "avoided like the plague." Others have been distorted, deemed politically incorrect, or shrouded in mystery and must bear some explanation.Among the topics the author delves into are expressions that shouldn't be taken literally ("dressed to kill" and "kick the bucket"), foreign expressions that crept into English ("carte blanche, " "carpe diem, " and "que sera, sera"), phrases borrowed from print ads and TV commercials ("where there's life, there's Bud" and "where the rubber meets the road"), animal images ("a barrel of monkeys" and "chasing your tail"), and food and drink ("cast your bread upon the water, " "chew the fat, " "bottom's up!", and "drink as a lord").Here's a book for everyone who delights in the mysteries of language and the perfect gift for all the "wordies" in your life.

1

EXPRESSIONS MADE MEMORABLE

Substance without style is like a face without a smile.

Anon.

Why is it that we remember certain expressions while others “go in one ear and out the other?” Are we seduced by style, particularly the use of alliteration or rhyme? In this chapter, we’ll see that these two devices often help in “getting a foot in the door” and leaving a mental imprint of an expression. In fact, they may provide the only reason for the continuing popularity of a number of expressions that lack any real logic. In that case, it’s clearly a matter of style over substance.

Rhyming expressions are particularly effective with children. A young child quickly learns what “yummy in the tummy” means and is “egged on,” when he does something amusing, by the comment that he’s being “a silly billy” or “a funny bunny.” When he gets older and more restless, he comes to understand the much stranger diagnosis that he has “ants in his pants.” He eventually learns to rebuke his playmates with juvenile jingles such as “liar, liar, pants on fire” and “I’m the king of the castle and you’re the dirty rascal.” Then, when old enough to be responsible for his own behavior, he becomes familiar with the threat “you’re cruisin’ for a bruisin’,” when he acts up. Alternatively, he may be intimidated by the less common “you’re achin’ for a breakin’” or “you’re aimin’ for a maimin’.” All three expressions are fast becoming obsolete, however, now that the corporal punishment of children is generally frowned upon.

There are many slang terms or expressions that are in the form of rhyming reduplications, for example, “higgledy piggledy,” “fuzzy wuzzy,” “mumbo jumbo” and “nitty gritty.” Some rhyming reduplications, such as “the heebie jeebies,” “the bees knees,” “hocus pocus,” “okay dokey,” “helter skelter,” “hanky panky” and “artsy fartsy,” are light-hearted terms that came out of the roaring twenties before the dirty thirties turned everyone more serious. This kind of whimsical expression, from whatever era, is frequently written with a hyphen between the two words on the theory that it’s a compound noun or a compound adjective.

Many of the words in these rhyming reduplications are simply made up and each of the words is matched up with another word in a nonsensical way, hence the alternative description of these combinations as nonsense pairings. Most of these pairings have, nonetheless, acquired a certain accepted meaning, which may be completely unrelated to the meaning, if any, of either of the component words. “Higgledy piggledy,” for example, is generally used, in a no-nonsense way, to mean mixed together in a jumbled, confused or disorderly manner. The expression itself meets this definition, for the order of the “l” and the “e” in each word has to be reversed to come up with the proper pronunciation.

“Higgledy piggledy” seems to be used more for effect than to convey any particular meaning in the nursery rhyme that begins: “Higgledy piggledy, my black hen, she lays eggs for gentlemen,” although some might argue that “higgledy piggledy” must be the name of the hen. “Fuzzy wuzzy” is clearly the inappropriate name of an animal in the old children’s poem that goes like this:

Fuzzy wuzzy was a bear.

Fuzzy wuzzy had no hair.

Fuzzy wuzzy wasn’t fuzzy, was he?

But the expression has also been used, most famously by the British poet Rudyard Kipling, to describe black people by allusion to their tight curly hair. In Kipling’s poem “Fuzzy Wuzzy,” they are members of a Sudanese fighting force for which he has much praise. Nonetheless, the term is now widely regarded as derogatory for its racial stereotyping.

The question, “do yo’ hair be kinky?” was raised in the opening line of an ad on the popular country music show broadcast every Saturday night from the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee. Mimicking jive talk, this was the attention grabber for a short exposé on the straightening merits of a hairdressing pomade manufactured by one of the early sponsors of this long running radio program. Although something of a catchphrase in its day, it ultimately fell into disrepute, just as “fuzzy wuzzy” has done, hastened no doubt by the fact that “kinky” has an alternative meaning of sexually weird.

“Mumbo jumbo,” like “fuzzy wuzzy,” emerged from an African setting. It was the name given by the Mandingo people of West Africa to a protective ancestral figure who punished wives accused by their husbands of being troublesome in some way, particularly by getting into conflicts with their fellow wives. Behind every appearance of Mumbo Jumbo was a respected male tribesman, selected for the occasion, masquerading in a familiar bark cloth and long coat get-up. The punishment that Mumbo Jumbo would usually mete out, after a hasty finding of guilt, was a public beating of the offending spouse while she was tied naked to a post. This background would seem to bear little relationship to the current use of “mumbo jumbo” as referring to unintelligible language or gibberish. But the term also has a secondary meaning as a belief or behavior based on superstition, which provides a closer tie-in to the Mumbo Jumbo of West African tradition. Some have argued that “mumbo jumbo” is racist, given its likely origin in a cruel practice of a black ethnic group and the gullibility of the members of that group. This reaction may have been fueled by the fact that the parents in The Story of Little Black Sambo, published in 1899 and widely condemned as racist by today’s standards, were named Black Mumbo and Black Jumbo.

“Mumbo jumbo” is likely to remain popular, however, as a good way to describe a jumble of verbal nonsense, particularly typical of “bureaucratese.” That language of officialdom has no other recognized name that’s nearly as appropriate as “mumbo jumbo” with its dose of resigned humor.

“Nitty gritty,” which occurs in the larger expression “getting down to the nitty gritty,” is closer to “the fuzzy line” (a term that’s still acceptable) separating the politically correct from the politically incorrect. The expression simply means getting down to the basic essentials. However, it’s thought by some to refer to the debris at the bottom of slave ships after they were unloaded and, therefore, as conjuring up nasty images of slavery. Yet there’s no evidence that “nitty gritty” was understood to be associated in any way with the slave trade until those who are critical of it speculated upon a connection in recent times. To be on the safe side, it might be better to “get down to brass tacks,” rather than the “nitty gritty,” which would just as well convey the essential idea of getting down to the basics. Undeterred by the controversy, the folk-rock group, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, has “thrown caution to the wind,” choosing to emphasize its country music roots through its name.

In a famous incident in February, 1971, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, then Prime Minister of Canada, coined a new rhyming reduplication “fuddle duddle” to describe something off-color that he may have said. At the time, he was accused by certain lip-reading Opposition members in Parliament of having mouthed a two-word obscenity directed at them across the floor of the House of Commons. When he was confronted by the press with that accusation, he engaged in a technical diversion by asking what “mouthed” meant. He never did admit that anything improper passed his lips, although the general public considered him guilty as charged by the Opposition. “Fuddle duddle” found its way, in due course, into the Canadian Oxford Dictionary as an oath meaning “go to hell” or “drop dead.” Both of these meanings are very mild substitutes for what the PM likely “mouthed.” A more accurate definition of “fuddle duddle” would be “a euphemistic rhyming cover-up for the ‘f’ word.” As such, it’s a minced oath or, in the popular jargon, an expletive-deletive.

A few rhyming duplications have a good deal of logic to them because the two words that make them up are suggestive of the meaning of the reduplication. This is true of “itsy bitsy” and “teenie weenie.” These two reduplications are, perhaps, best known, in the adult world, for their combination in this line from a popular song of the 1960s: “She Wore an Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.” With this doubling up of reduplications to similar effect, who could possibly miss the bare fact that her bathing suit was very skimpy? According to the song, this swimming attire explained why, in those more modest times, she didn’t want to come out of the change room and, after overcoming that hurdle, why she didn’t want to get out of the water.

There are many rhyming expressions, besides the typical rhyming reduplications, that have little or no inherent logic and are remembered, in large part, because of their rhythmic quality. “Loose as a goose,” for example, hardly seems a suitable description of someone who is relaxed, cool and indifferent given the aggressive behavior of geese, particularly those with goslings in tow. Yet, that’s the way the expression is used. “Loosey goosey,” a spin-off reduplication, is also a poor candidate for what it signifies, namely laid-back or imprecise. The only thing loose about a goose is its overactive bowels.

If someone is described as “drunk as a skunk,” the analogy really doesn’t help to call up an image of one who is seriously inebriated. As far as we know, skunks are teetotalers. While they may, at times, be high, it’s because of their scent and not because they’ve been “into the sauce.” The recognizable characteristics of many other animals provide a rich source for revealing similes: “sly as a fox,” “happy as a lark,” “strong as an ox,” “proud as a peacock,” “slow as a snail” and “quiet as a mouse.” But “loose as a goose” and “drunk as a skunk” hardly have the same illustrative quality; they don’t play upon a common stereotype of a particular creature. Rather, their attraction lies in their rhyming cadence.

In Australia, where there are no skunks, it may be more appropriate to go for alliteration, rather than rhyme, and say that someone is “wasted as a wallaby.” While this is not an established expression, it could catch on as a result of a story that appeared, under the headline “Hopping Mad: Stoned Wallabies Make Crop Circles,” in The Sydney Morning Herald. The newspaper reported that wallabies are getting high on Tasmanian opium crops causing disorientation and a propensity to hop around in circles, leaving a telltale imprint in the poppy fields. If this report is to be believed, there is now more empirical evidence to support “wasted as a wallaby” than there is to support “drunk as a skunk.”

Another possible alliterative simile, “fried as a frustrated fruit fly,” would also be a good candidate to replace “drunk as a skunk.” A recent study reported by the magazine Science compared the drinking behavior of male fruit flies who had just had sex with virgin females to that of other male fruit flies who had been exposed to recently mated females and were spurned because the females were sexually sated. For their efforts, successful or otherwise, the members of both male groups were offered two kinds of liquid refreshment, one laced with alcohol and the other not. In their misery, the unsatisfied fruit flies drank heavily of the mixture spiked with alcohol; their experience with the females was, apparently, “enough to drive them to drink.” In their euphoria, the satisfied fruit flies were more inclined to choose the non-alcoholic option. Therefore, “fried as a frustrated fruit fly” would make a lot of sense on scientific grounds although, like “wasted as a wallaby,” it has yet to gain general acceptance.

“That’s tough titty” is a sarcastic way of saying that’s just too bad. This alliterative expression comes from a line of uncertain origin: “Tough titty said the kitty when the milk went dry.” While this has the beauty of combining alliteration with a rhyme, the rhyme seems forced. It’s much more likely that the nursing cat, rather than her deprived kitten, would utter the words “tough titty,” to express callous indifference, should the mother’s milk dry up.

Sometimes alliterative expressions, like some rhyming expressions, provide no useful frame of reference for the meaning they’re meant to convey. While something or somebody may be “dead as a doornail” or “deader than a doornail,” a door nail is no more lacking in life than any other inanimate object so as to justify its use as signifying “dead as dead can be.” “Dead as a dodo” is a much more revealing alliterative expression, drawing as it does on the notion of the extinct as an emphatic representation of “dead and departed.” Other alliterative expressions, such as “a war of words,” “good as gold” and “come hell or high water,” also do a good job of leading us to their meaning. So does “too pooped to pop,” although some might jump to the wrong conclusion that it has something to do with being “loosey goosey.”

Still other alliterative expressions that embody pairs of words or word couplings have been called Siamese twins because they’re composed of two words, usually linked by “and” or “or,” one of which has more or less the same meaning as the other or encompasses the other. This aptly describes “alas and alack,” “hale and hearty,” “slip and slide” and “vim and vigor.” All of these pairs are taken to exhibit an acceptable redundancy in the interests of effect, clarity or emphasis.

The Italian-American expression “badaboom badabing,” which can just as well be reversed or else shortened to “badabing,” consists of a nonsense pairing in alliterative form. Neither of its two made-up words seems to make any sense but “badaboom badabing” nonetheless became popular, as an exclamation, after it was used by actor James Caan, playing the role of Sonny Corleone, in the original Godfather movie. Later, it featured in the TV series The Sopranos, as the name of a mob-owned strip club. It’s been suggested that the word “badabing” is intended to reflect the sound of a drum roll used to punctuate a vaudeville show. In this situation, the sound of the drum plugged a gap and provided a diversion after a comedian had “laid an egg” with a punch line that had “fallen flat.” This may explain why “badaboom badabing” came to be used, in the midst of a spoken narrative, as a filler between two happenings, indicating that “one thing led to another,” without being specific, or simply et voilà, as the French would say. Sonny Corleone used the expression in The Godfather to describe the effortless nature and predictable outcome of an up-close mob shooting.

Rhyming expressions and alliterative expressions aren’t always doublets; they may also be triplets. The best known example of a rhyming triplet is “snug as a bug in a rug,” which is apparently another of the inventions from the lightning mind of Benjamin Franklin. The phrase “nattering nabobs of negativism” was coined by William Safire when acting as a speechwriter for U.S. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. It soon became a popular expression, particularly among politicians who used it as a dismissive denunciation of a critical press.

“The fickle finger of fate” is used to describe the vagaries of chance or the caprices of destiny, which may foreshadow something quite ominous. The creators of Laugh-In, the popular television series of the late 1960s and early 1970s, added to the alliteration in this expression, turning it into a quad, when they instituted the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate Award. The award was presented, in each show, to recognize a dubious achievement by a famous person. The statuette emblematic of the award was known as the “Rigid Digit.” One of the recipients was the conservative commentator, William F. Buckley. He was singled out for bastardizing a familiar saying when he advised: “Never clarify tomorrow what you can obscure today.” Had he been alliteratively and lyrically inclined, he might have said: If your “bullshit baffles brains” today, don’t later “stoop and scoop” the crap away.

2

DON’T TAKE THE EXPRESSION LITERALLY

When a middle-aged man says in a moment of weariness that he is half dead, he is telling the literal truth.

Elmer Davis, American News Reporter and Author

How much simpler life would be if all expressions were to be taken literally. Simpler yes, but much less interesting as we would miss out on the color and intrigue of idiomatic expressions and of expressions that use hyperbole, understatement or irony to make a point. These expressions all ignore the admonition that the March Hare gave Alice in Wonderland because they really don’t say what they mean. As we shall see in this chapter, humorists have had a lot of fun with idiomatic expressions by using them in a way that suggests a literal meaning that they don’t normally bear.

An idiomatic expression can challenge us because its individual words, taken at face value, don’t lead us inevitably to the sense in which the expression is commonly used. A prime example is “kick the bucket,” an idiomatic way of saying “die.” Yet there’s nothing in our usual understanding of “giving the boot to” a bucket, in a physical sense, that would be likely to equate it with someone’s demise. The actual, figurative meaning of an idiomatic expression, such as this, is associative. It comes from the customary identification of a particular image with the words in the expression taken as a whole.

It’s much easier to guess at the meaning of “hold your tongue” from the bare words of that idiomatic expression. The physical act of holding your tongue would result in a loss of the capacity to speak. Therefore, it’s not a large leap in logic from holding your tongue to the notion of remaining silent, which is the figurative meaning of the expression. It helps, as a springboard in making the leap, that “tongue” serves as a metaphor for speaking when it pops up in several other words and phrases, such as “tongue-tied” and “having a silver tongue.”

A phrase that makes up an idiomatic expression can often be used as well for its literal meaning. It’s fairly clear, for example, that “kick the bucket” is intended to be taken literally in the following sentence: The cow managed to “kick the bucket” before the milkmaid had even begun to milk her and then returned, still engorged, to the pasture.

The literal meaning of a phrase that makes up an idiomatic expression may, however, be quite implausible in almost any context. If an individual is said to “have butterflies in his stomach,” it’s very unlikely that he has actually swallowed some of these flying insects. The more likely scenario is that the individual is being portrayed as having the same sort of sensatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Expressions Made Memorable
• 2. Don’t Take The Expression Literally
• 3. What Do You Mean By that Expression?
• 4. Coded Expressions
• 5. All Over the Map: The Geography of Expressions
• 6. The Players in Expressions: Getting to Know Them Without a Program
• 7. The Evolution of Expressions
• 8. Metaphorically Speaking Through Sayings
• 9. The Style and Form of Sayings
• 10. Making Sense of Sayings
• 11. The Origins and The Commercial Applications of Sayings
• 12. Things Go Better with Latin
• 13. Animal Images
• 14. Body Language
• 15. Food for Thought
• 16. Drink as an Afterthought
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index