Nigel Rees - A Word In Your Shell-Like стр 19.

and no heavy lifting Phrase used in a jokey description of the demands made or not made by a job, usually in politics. In an interview with Hunter Davies in The Independent (18 January 1994), Diane Abbott, the British Labour politician, said: Being an MP is a good job, the sort of job all working-class parents want for their children clean, indoors and no heavy lifting. What could be nicer? Much the same claim had earlier been made by Senator Robert Dole about the US vice-presidency (ABC TV broadcast, 24 July 1988): It is inside work with no heavy lifting. And then J. K. Galbraith, Name-Dropping, Chap. 8 (1999), had: [John F.] Kennedy also knew how to identify himself withthe larger electorate. At

the end of his 1960 campaign, he addressed a vast crowd in the old Boston Garden He asked himself, as though from the floor, why he was running for president. In reply, he listed some issues, all relevant to his audience, that needed attention; then he ended by saying that the presidency was a wellpaid job with no heavy lifting. The largely working-class gathering responded with appreciation, affection and joy. He was one of them.

---, and no mistake! An intensifying phrase of affirmation, dating from the 1810s.

and now a word from our sponsor One of the various ways of getting into a commercial break, taken from American radio and television and much employed in British parodies of same in the 1950s and 60s though never used in earnest in the UK (for the simple reason that sponsored TV of any type was not permitted until much later).

and now for something completely differentCatchphrase from BBC TV, Monty Pythons Flying Circus (196974) and used as the title of the comedy teams first cinema feature in 1971. Like most graduate comedy shows of the 1960s and 70s, Monty Python rather frowned upon the use of catchphrases as something belonging to another type of show business. Usually delivered by John Cleese as a dinner-jacketed BBC announcer, seated before a microphone on a desk in some unlikely setting, the phrase had hitherto been a slightly arch link much loved by magazine programme presenters. These people were thus deprived of a very useful phrase. After all, there is not much else you can say to get from an interview with the Prime Minister to an item about beerdrinking budgerigars. The childrens BBC TV series Blue Peter is sometimes said to have provoked the Python use of the phrase. It was first delivered by Eric Idle in the second edition of Python (12 October 1969), though it had also featured in some of the same teams earlier series, At Last the 1948 Show, on ITV (1967), where it was uttered by the lovely Aimi Macdonald in her introductions.

and now, her nibs, Miss Georgia Gibbs! The standard introduction to the singer of that name on the US radio show The Camel Caravan (19437).

and pigs might fly (or a pig may fly). An expression of the unlikelihood or impossibility of something actually taking place. Thomas Fuller, the proverb collector, had That is as likely as to see an hog fly in 1732 though, earlier, The Spectator (2 April 1711) was bemoaning absurd inn signs including flying Pigs, which would seem to refer to this saying. From Lewis Carroll, Alices Adventures in Wonderland, Chap. 9 (1865): Ive a right to think, said AliceJust about as much right, said the Duchess, as pigs have to fly.

and so forth And similarly, and then onwards now mostly used after breaking off a list or quotation. This is a very old phrase indeed. Aelfric was writing And swa forþ circa AD 1000 (see YE OLDE TEA SHOPPE). A would-be humorous elaboration of it, dating from the mid-20th century, is and so forth and so fifth!

and so it goes Mildly irritated or amused and philosophical phrase used when presented with yet another example of the way things are in the world. A catchphrase in Kurt Vonneguts novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). So It Goes was the title of a British TV pop show devoted mainly to punk (by 1976). And so it goes: hassle, hassle, hassle, one horrible death after another, and yet the put-upon lads soul is a butterfly that transmutes (on the spiritual sphere, you understand) into an Airfix Spitfire. By MTV standards, Hirst could be the next Francis Ford Coppola The Observer (25 February 1996); Sausages are brilliant all-rounders, everyone knows that. Fried up for breakfast, sandwiched between two slices of bread at lunch, grilled with mustard and mash for supper, cold on sticks at childrens parties, hot on sticks with a spicy dip at grown-up dos, and so it goes The Sunday Times (25 February 1996).

and so to bed Samuel Pepyss famous signing-off line in his diary entries appears first on 15 January 1660. However, on that particular occasion, they are not quite his last words. He writes: I went to supper, and after that to make an end of this weeks notes in this book, and so to bed. Then he adds: It being a cold day and a great snow, my physic did not work so well as it should have done. And So To Bed was the title of a play

(1926) by J. B. Fagan, which was then turned into a musical by Vivian Ellis (1951).