Nigel Rees - A Word In Your Shell-Like стр 2.

Slogan: a phrase designed to promote a product, idea or cause or which has this effect. However, at times I have employed it rather loosely to cover any phrase that is used in advertising in headlines, footnotes, but not necessarily in a selling line that names the product. BODY ODOUR (or BO) could hardly be described as a slogan in itself, but as an advertising line it did help to promote a product.

Stock phrase: a regularly used phrase that cant be said to have caught on like a full-blooded catchphrase for example, a celebritys verbal mannerism (CAN WE TALK?), by which he or she is known but which cant be said to have caught on with the public as a proper catchphrase should. It also refers to phrases which get regularly

trotted out but which, again, cannot be said to have passed into the language generally.

A word about dating: Eric Partridge was always game (as someone once felicitously put it) to try to pinpoint when a phrase came into use, though many of his stabs at it were no more than guesses. Using the citations that I have accumulated, I have tried to be a little more precise in this area. When I say that a phrase was Current in 1975, I mean that I simply have a record of its use then not that I think it was first used in that year. It may also have been current long after that date. When I say that a phrase was Quoted in 1981, I mean precisely that not that it was originated in that year. It might have been coined long before. On the whole I have not indulged in speculation about when a phrase might have entered the language but have simply recorded hard and fast examples of its use.

In case you find my interpretation of alphabetical order puzzling, the phrases are listed in what is known as letter by letter order that is to say, in alphabetical order of letters within the whole phrase exactly as it is written. Thus, for example, nicest things come in smallest parcels appears before nice work if you can get it! and move the goalposts before Mr.

Cross-references to other entries are made in SMALL CAPITALS.

Abbreviations

Bartlett: Bartletts Familiar Quotations (15th edn), 1980, (16th edn), 1992, (17th edn), 2002

Benham: Benhams Book of Quotations, 1907, 1948, 1960

Bible: The Authorized Version, 1611 (except where stated otherwise)

Brewer: Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, (2nd edn), 1894, (3rd edn), 1923, (13th edn), 1975, (14th edn), 1989

Burnam: Tom Burnam, The Dictionary of Misinformation, 1975; More Misinformation, 1980

Casson/Grenfell: Sir Hugh Casson & Joyce Grenfell, Nanny Says (ed. Diana, Lady Avebury), 1982

CODP: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, 1982

DOAS: Wentworth & Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang, 1960 (1975 revision and 1987 edition, ed. Robert L. Chapman)

DNB: The Dictionary of National Biography

Flexner: Stuart Berg Flexner, I Hear America Talking, 1976; Listening to America, 1982

Grose: Francis Grose, Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 17851823

Mencken: H. L. Menckens Dictionary of Quotations, 1942

Morris: William and Mary Morris, Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, 1977

ODP: The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (3rd edn), 1970

ODQ: The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (2nd edn), 1953, (3rd edn), 1979, (4th edn), 1992, (5th edn), 1999

OED2: The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed,) 1989, (CD-ROM version 3.0), 2002

Partridge/Catch Phrases: Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Catch Phrases (2nd edn, edited by Paul Beale), 1985

Partridge/Slang: Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (8th edn, edited by Paul Beale), 1984

Safire: William Safire, Safires Political Dictionary, 1978

Shakespeare: The Arden Shakespeare (2nd series)

Slanguage: Brigid McConville & John Shearlaw, The Slanguage of Sex, 1984

Street Talk: Street Talk: The Language of Coronation Street, eds Jeffrey Miller & Graham Nown, 1986

A

abhors a vacuum PHRASES A format based on the maxim Nature abhors a vacuum that François Rabelais quotes in its original Latin form, natura abhorret vacuum, in his Gargantua (1535). Galileo (15641642) asserted that it was the reason mercury rises in a barometer. An early appearance in English is, The Effatum, That Nature abhors a Vacuum, from Robert Boyle, A Free Enquiry

Into the Vulgarly Receivd Notion of Nature (1685). Nature abhors a straight line was a saying of the English garden landscaper Capability Brown (171583). Clare Boothe Luce, the American writer and socialite (1903 87), is supposed to have said, Nature abhors a virgin, but this may just be a version of the line in her play The Women (1936): Im what nature abhors an old maid. A frozen asset. Nature abhors a vacuum and what appears ultimately to concern the Reagan Administration most of all is the possibility that President Mitterrands France will gradually abandon its traditional military protection of central Africa and the Sahara Financial Times (12 August 1983); I quickly developed a pear-shaped figure that testified to my indolent lifestyle. I became the archetypal also-ran that PE masters could barely bring themselves to talk to without risk of life-threatening apoplexy: they abhorred my idleness as Nature abhors a vacuum The Guardian (24 June 1986).