Author: Emma

American desi near DC blogging re: movies, TV, & more.

Origins of Some Commonly Used Phrases

EmmaLeave a comment

1) a foregone conclusion

Shakespeare’s Othello (1604) is the source:

But this denoted a foregone conclusion:
‘Tis a shrewd doubt, though it be but a dream.

2) all of a sudden

In The Taming of the Shrew (1596):

Is it possible That love should of a sodaine take such hold? [sodaine was one of many spellings of sudden]

3) apple of my eye

The phrase refers to something or someone that one cherishes above all others.  This goes ALL the way back to The Bible- WOW!  The Bard used it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Flower of this purple dye,

Hit with Cupid’s archery,

Sink in apple of his eye.

4) the be all and end all

This is another of Shakespeare’s inventions (dating back to 1605).  Here’s the reference from Macbeth:

If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly. If th’ assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease, success: that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all

5) cute as a button

“Cute, charming, attractive, almost always with the connotation of being small, 1868 (from the original 1731 English meaning of acute or clever).” Cute as a button dates back to 1946. Cute and keen were two of the most overused slang words of the late 1920s and 1930s.” From Listening to America by Stuart Berg Flexner

6) fair play

Shakespeare coined this phrase and used it in several of his plays; for example, The Tempest (1610):

Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle,
And I would call it, fair play.

7) fancy free

From Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Nights Dream (1598):

That very time I saw, but thou couldst not,
Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
Cupid all arm’d: a certain aim he took
At a fair vestal throned by the west,
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts;
But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft
Quench’d in the chaste beams of the watery moon,
And the imperial votaress passed on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.

8) heart’s content

This phrase is first put into print in Shakespeare’s plays and there’s every reason to believe that he coined it. He used it in at least 2 plays, such as in The Merchant of Venice (1596):

I wish your Ladiship all hearts content.

9) hot-blooded

“Hot-blooded,” or as Shakespeare wrote it ‘hot-bloodied’, first appears in The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1600:

The Windsor bell hath struck twelve; the minute draws on. Now, the hot-bloodied Gods assist me!

10) in a pickle

There are a few references to ill pickles and this pickle in print in the late 16th century.  Shakespeare was one of the first to use in a pickle, in The Tempest (1610):

ALONSO:
And Trinculo is reeling ripe: where should they
Find this grand liquor that hath gilded ’em?
How camest thou in this pickle?

TRINCULO:
I have been in such a pickle since I
saw you last that, I fear me, will never out of
my bones: I shall not fear fly-blowing.

11) I will wear my heart upon my sleeve

From Shakespeare’s Othello (1604), as spoken by Iago:

It is as sure as you are Roderigo,
Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago:
In following him, I follow but myself;
Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,
But seeming so, for my peculiar end:
For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In compliment extern, ’tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at: I am not what I am

 12) in stitches

The phrase was first used by Shakespeare in Twelfth Night (1602):
If you desire the spleen, and will laugh yourself into stitches, follow me. Yond gull Malvolio is turned heathen, a very renegado; for there is no Christian, that means to be saved by believing rightly, can ever believe such impossible passages of grossness. He’s in yellow stockings.

13) lie low

There are many citations of variants of this little phrase dating back to the 13th century. Shakespeare used it in Much Ado About Nothing (1599):
If he could right himself with quarreling,
Some of us would lie low.

14) love is blind

This expression is first found in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale, circa 1405:

For loue is blynd alday and may nat see.

It didn’t at that stage become a commonly used phrase and isn’t seen again in print until Shakespeare took it up. It appears in several of his plays, including Two Gentlemen of Verona, Henry V, and in The Merchant Of Venice (1596):

Here, catch this casket; it is worth the pains.
I am glad ’tis night, you do not look on me,
For I am much ashamed of my exchange:
But love is blind and lovers cannot see
The pretty follies that themselves commit;
For if they could, Cupid himself would blush
To see me thus transformed to a boy.

15) makes your hair stand on end

This is first found in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1602):

I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, thy knotted and combined locks to part and each particular hair to stand an end, like quills upon the fretful porpentine [porcupine].

“A Sonnet of the Moon” by Charles Best

EmmaLeave a comment

Look how the pale queen of the silent night
Doth cause the ocean to attend upon her,
And he, as long as she is in his sight,
With her full tide is ready her to honor.
But when the silver waggon of the moon
Is mounted up so high he cannot follow,
The sea calls home his crystal waves to moan,
And with low ebb doth manifest his sorrow.
So you that are the sovereign of my heart
Have all my joys attending on your will;
My joys low-ebbing when you do depart,
When you return their tide my heart doth fill.
So as you come and as you do depart,
Joys ebb and flow within my tender heart.

“The Buried Life” by Matthew Arnold

EmmaLeave a comment

Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
I feel a nameless sadness o’er me roll.
Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,
We know, we know that we can smile;
But there ‘s a something in this breast,
To which thy light words bring no rest,
And thy gay smiles no anodyne;
Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.

Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men conceal’d
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal’d
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reprov’d;
I knew they liv’d and mov’d
Trick’d in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselves—and yet
The same heart beats in every human breast.

But we, my love—does a like spell benumb
Our hearts—our voices?—must we too be dumb?

Ah, well for us, if even we,
Even for a moment, can get free
Our heart, and have our lips unchain’d;
For that which seals them hath been deep-ordain’d!

Fate, which foresaw
How frivolous a baby man would be,
By what distractions he would be possess’d,
How he would pour himself in every strife,
And well-nigh change his own identity;
That it might keep from his capricious play
His genuine self, and force him to obey,
Even in his own despite his being’s law,
Bade through the deep recesses of our breast
The unregarded River of our Life
Pursue with indiscernible flow its way;
And that we should not see
The buried stream, and seem to be
Eddying at large in blind uncertainty,
Though driving on with it eternally.

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life,
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us, to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas, none ever mines!
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power,
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves;
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress’d.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well—but ‘tis not true!
And then we will no more be rack’d
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;
Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.

Only—but this is rare—
When a belovèd hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen’d ear
Is by the tones of a lov’d voice caress’d—
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again!
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know,
A man becomes aware of his life’s flow,
And hears its winding murmur, and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.

And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
The flying and elusive shadow, Rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the Sea where it goes.

 

 

“The Dream” by Theodore Roethke

Emma7 Comments

I met her as a blossom on a stem
Before she ever breathed, and in that dream
The mind remembers from a deeper sleep:
Eye learned from eye, cold lip from sensual lip.
My dream divided on a point of fire;
Light hardened on the water where we were;
A bird sang low; the moonlight sifted in;
The water rippled, and she rippled on.

She came toward me in the flowing air,
A shape of change, encircled by its fire.
I watched her there, between me and the moon;
The bushes and the stones danced on and on;
I touched her shadow when the light delayed;
I turned my face away, and yet she stayed.
A bird sang from the center of a tree;
She loved the wind because the wind loved me.

Love is not love until love’s vulnerable.
She slowed to sigh, in that long interval.
A small bird flew in circles where we stood;
The deer came down, out of the dappled wood.
All who remember, doubt. Who calls that strange?
I tossed a stone, and listened to its plunge.
She knew the grammar of least motion, she
Lent me one virtue, and I live thereby.

She held her body steady in the wind;
Our shadows met, and slowly swung around;
She turned the field into a glittering sea;
I played in flame and water like a boy
And I swayed out beyond the white seafoam;
Like a wet log, I sang within a flame.
In that last while, eternity’s confine,
I came to love, I came into my own.

choc bar
The above poem was written on the wrapper of my favorite candy bar (Whole Foods).

Game of Thrones: Season 5 – New Cast Members

EmmaLeave a comment

I’m VERY excited to see Alexander Siddig (ST: DS9; Syriana) on a regular series again!  I was surprised at first, BUT now it makes great sense (his looks fit for a Martell).  Also, it’ll be interesting to see Jonathan Pryce (a veteran actor of great stature) and the Oscar-nominated Keisha Castle-Hughes (Whale Rider; The Nativity Story), who’s now ALL grown-up.