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and with that, I return you to the studio! Catchphrase from the BBC radio show Beyond Our Ken (195864). Hugh Paddick played Cecil Snaith, a hush-voiced BBC outside broadcasts commentator. After some disaster in which he had figured, he would give this as the punchline, in a deadpan manner. The shows host, Kenneth Horne, apparently suggested the line. In its straight form, many TV and radio news reporters use the phrase in live spots even today.
(the) Angel of Death A nickname bestowed in the Second World War upon Dr Joseph Mengele, the German concentration camp doctor who experimented on inmates for his power to pick who would live and die in Auschwitz by the wave of his hand (Time Magazine, 17 June 1985). Angel of death as an expression for a bringer of ills is not a biblical phrase and does not appear to have arisen until the 18th century. Samuel Johnson used it in The Rambler in 1752.
angels dancing on the head of a pin Benham (1948) went into this thoroughly but did not provide an actual example of what it gives as a head phrase, namely, A company of angels can dance on the point of a needle. Nevertheless, it glosses the phrase thus: Saying attrib. with variations to St Thomas Aquinas (circa 122774) [who] in Summae Theologiae devotes superabundant space to fanciful conjectures about the nature of angelsWhether an angel can be in several places at onceWhether several angels can be in one place at the same timeHe expends much laboured argument on this and similar problems. Correspondents in The Times (20/21 November 1975) seemed to suggest that the attribution to Thomas Aquinas had been mistakenly made by Isaac Disraeli. Mention was made of the 14th-century tractate Swester Katrei wrongly ascribed to Meister Eckhart which contains this passage: Doctors declare that in heaven a thousand angels can stand on the point of a needle. Mencken (1942) has How many angels can dance upon the point of a needle? ascribed to various medieval theologians, c. 1400.
angels one five
In Royal Air Force jargon, angels means height measured in units of a thousand feet; one five stands for fifteen; so 20 MEs at Angels One Five means Twenty Messerschmitts at 15,000 feet. Angels One Five was the title of a film (UK 1952) about RAF fighter pilots during the Second World War.
Anglo-Saxon attitudes Typically English behaviour. The title of Angus Wilsons novel (1956) about a historian investigating a possible archaeological forgery comes from Lewis Carrolls Through the Looking Glass, Chap. 7 (1872). Alice observes the Messenger skipping up and down, and wriggling like an eel, as he came along. When she expresses surprise, the King explains: Hes an Anglo-Saxon Messenger and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes. Harry Morgan Ayres in Carrolls Alice (1936) suggests that the author may have been spoofing the Anglo-Saxon scholarship of his day. He also reproduces drawings of Anglo-Saxons in various costumes and attitudes from the Caedmon manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
(the) Angry Decade A decade label for the 1950s though it is not certain that this had any wide circulation beyond being the title of Kenneth Allsopps book a cultural survey (1958). Obviously it derived from:
(an) angry young man Label for any writer in the mid-1950s who showed a social awareness and expressed dissatisfaction with conventional values and with the Establishment John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and Colin Wilson among them. Leslie Paul, a social philosopher, had called his autobiography Angry Young Man in 1951, but the popular use of the phrase stems from Look Back in Anger, the 1956 play by John Osborne that featured an anti-hero called Jimmy Porter. The phrase did not occur in the play but was applied to the playwright by George Fearon in publicity material sent out by the Royal Court Theatre, London. Fearon later told The Daily Telegraph (2 October 1957): I ventured to prophesy that [Osbornes] generation would praise his play while mine would, in general, dislike itIf this happens, I told him, you would become known as the Angry Young Man. In fact, we decided then and there that henceforth he was to be known as that.
anguish turned to joy (and vice versa) A journalistic cliché noticed as such by the 1970s: A young mothers anguish turns to joy and so on. Joy has turned to anguish for the parents of British student Colin Shingler aged 20, who was trapped in the Romano during the earthquake. Only hours after hearing that he had been rescued they were told that surgeons had to amputate his left hand The Times (23 September 1985); Meanwhile, that anguish had turned to joy among the 250 Brechin fans at Hamilton. The players took a salute and then it was Clydes turn to be acclaimed, with the championship trophy being paraded round the ground The Herald (Glasgow) (17 May 1993).
animal, vegetable and mineral Not a quotation from anyone in particular, merely a way of describing three types of matter. And yet, why does the phrase trip off the tongue so? Edward Phillips, The New World of English Words (ed. Kersey) (1706) has: Chymistscall the three Orders of Natural Bodies, viz. Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral, by the name of Kingdoms. But why not animal, mineral, vegetable? Or vegetable, animal, mineral? Perhaps because these variants are harder to say, although in W. S. Gilberts lyrics for The Pirates of Penzance (1879), Major-General Stanley does manage to sing: But still in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral, / I am the very model of a modern Major-General. For BBC television viewers, the order was clearly stated in the title of the long-running archaeological quiz Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? (established by 1956) in which eminent university dons had to identify ancient artefacts just by looking at them. The trio of words was also evoked in the long-running radio series Twenty Questions. This originated on the Mutual Radio Network in the US in 1946, having been created by Fred Van De Venter and family who transferred with the show to NBC TV, from 1949 to 1955. Twenty Questions ran on BBC radio from 1947 to 1976. Panellists simply had to guess the identity of a mystery object by asking up to twenty questions. A fourth category abstract was added later. In 19734, a version of this game made for BBC World Service was actually called Animal, Vegetable or Mineral. The key to the matter is that the original American show was admittedly based on the old parlour game of Animal, Vegetable [and/or] Mineral. This seems to have been known on both