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(the) affluent society Label applied to Western society in the mid-20th century. John Kenneth Galbraiths book The Affluent Society (1958) is about the effect of high living standards on economic theories that had been created to deal with scarcity and poverty. The resulting private affluence and public squalor stemmed from an imbalance between private and public sector output. For example, there might be more cars and TV sets but not enough police to prevent them from being stolen. The Revd Dr Martin Luther King Jnr, in a 1963 letter from gaol, used the phrase thus: When you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smouldering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent societythen you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. The notion was not new to the mid-20th century. Tacitus, in his Annals (circa AD 115) noted that many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable and Cato the Younger (9546 BC), when denouncing the contemporary
state of Rome said: Habemus publice egestatem, privatim opulentiam [public want, private wealth]. The punning tag of the effluent society, a commonplace by the 1980s, had appeared in Stan Goochs poem Never So Good in 1964, and indeed before that.
after Ive shampooed my hair, I cant do a thing with it (or I washed my hair last night and now)! Commonplace excuse for ones less than good appearance and a domestic conversational cliché. In Are You a Bromide? (1907), the American writer Gelett Burgess castigated people who spoke in what he called Bromidioms, like this one. The second part is sometimes given as a chorused response as though anticipating the cliché involved.
after the Lord Mayors show comes the shit-cart A reference to the anti-climactic appearance of a dust-cart and operative to clean up the horse manure that is left behind after the Lord Mayors annual show (really a procession) in the City of London. Partridge/Catch Phrases suggests that it is a late 19th century Cockney observation and one that could be applied to other from-the-sublime-to-the-ridiculous situations.
after you, Claude! / no, after you, Cecil! Catchphrase exchange spoken by Horace Percival and Jack Train playing two over-polite handymen, Cecil and Claude, in the BBC radio show ITMA (193949). It still survives in pockets as an admirable way of overcoming social awkwardness in such matters as deciding who should go first through a door. In the early 1900s, the American cartoonist Fred Opper created a pair of excessively polite Frenchmen called Alphonse and Gaston who had the similar exchange: You first, my dear Alphonse No, no, you first, my dear Gaston.
afternoon men Drunkards (afternoon, presumably because they have imbibed a liquid lunch). As if they had heard that enchanted horn of Astolpho, that English duke in Ariosto, which never sounded but all his auditors were mad, and for fear ready to make away [with] themselvesThey are a company of giddy-heads, afternoon men. This is the final part of the quotation given by Anthony Powell as the epigraph to his novel Afternoon Men (1931). He gives the source as Burtons Anatomy of Melancholy. The only other use found of the term afternoon men is from the same work. In the introductory Democritus to the Reader, Burton has: Beroaldus will have drunkards, afternoon men, and such as more than ordinarily delight in drink, to be mad.
age See ACT YOUR.
age before beauty! A phrase used (like AFTER YOU) when inviting another person to go through a door before you. In the famous story, Clare Boothe Luce said it to Dorothy Parker, ushering her ahead. Parker assented, saying, Pearls before swine. Mrs Luce described this account as completely apocryphal in answer to a question from John Keats, Parkers biographer, for his book You Might as Well Live (1970). The saying presumably originated when people first started worrying about the etiquette of going through doors. It does not occur in Jonathan Swifts Polite Conversation (1738), as one might have expected. A variant reported from New Zealand (1987) is dirt before the broom, though Partridge/Catch Phrases has this as the response to Age before beauty (which it describes as a mock courtesy). Other versions are dust before the broom (recorded in Dublin, 1948) and the dog follows its master. Whichever phrase is used, it usually precipitates a response. An exchange between two boozy buffoons at a pub door in Posy Simmondss cartoon strip in The Guardian (19 May 1985) included these phrases: Certainly! Dogs follow their master! Dirt before the broom! Shepherd before sheep! Shit before shovel! Another phrase to offer in reply is: grace before meat!
(the) age of anxiety Label for the mid-20th century. It was the title of a long poem by W. H. Auden, written 19446 an expression of loneliness in the midcentury. It was the inspiration of Leonard Bernsteins second symphony (19479), which became known as The Age of Anxiety, and was used as the score for a ballet (US 1950), also with the title.
(the) age of Aquarius The astrological