UNDYING PHRASES

Greymouth Evening Star, 3 December 1929, Page 4

UNDYING PHRASES

“BLUE RIBBON OF THE TURF.” We find phrase-makers among the unlikeliest people. No one could accuse the father of the Brontes of being an” unduly comfortable or comforting individual Yet he it was who, when told he was on the point of death, promptly stood up and observed: - “While there’s life, there’s hope!” True he died shortly afterwards, but that, after all, is a side issue. The phrase will probably endure to encourage the sick and sorry as long as the language itself. Its utterance was the one good deed in the life of father Bronte. Another helpful phrase, too, applied to the picture of a negro in chains, “Am I not a man and a brother?” did its share in knocking off the shackles of slavery and, incidentally, making the coloured man a much lonelier person than he was before. Contrariwise, how much that six-words sentence, “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” has to answer l for! The alliteration in the Biblical phrase has a good deal to do with its impressiveness, just as it was the alliteration in George I’s answer: •“! hate all boets and bainters!” when refusing to allow a poem to be dedicated to him, that pilloried him for ever in the minds of his subjects as a foreign boor. Even more telling than alliteration is a catchy rhyme. If it was Gladstone who divided the world into “the classes and the masses,” it was the itinerant preacher, John Ball, who asked: v When Adam delved and Eve span

Who was then the gentleman? and so put the case for Socialism into a nutshell. Again, when Disraeli alluded to the Rt. Hon. Edward Housman as a • “superior person” in the House of Commons, no one was particularly disturbed. But when a bright young undergraduate applied the word to a “purson” of the name of Curzon what a trail of enduring laughter it left behind! Among phrases which the world has “fallen for” by reason of their felicity are William of Wykeham’s “Manners makyth man,” Disraeli’s reference to the Derby as the “Blue Ribbon of the Turf, .or to himself in the character of a journalist as “A Gentleman of the Press.” Then there is Doctor Hall s somewhat heated description of a glass of brandy as “distilled damnation,” and John Burn’s delightful panegyric of the Thames mnic i,;„+

* -ex XV. yx. (Xuames. mis last was occasioned by hearing an American comparing it to the Mississippi to the English; river’s disadvantage Burns gave “01’ Man River” its size all right, but added that what the Thames lacked in quantity it. made up for in quality, being “liquid history.” The quite uptime perversion of* the phrase into “liquid ’istory” has made it more popular than ever. FRANKLIN’S WARNING. An example of unconscious humour that tickled his generatidn and became a catch-word was Sir H. M. Stanley’s polite “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

when he finally came across that missionary in the wilds of Ujiji, while definitely witty as well as gallant "were Lord Palmerston’s dying words, Die, my dear Doctor? That’s the last thing I shall do!” A good example of the double entendre, too, was Benjamin Franklin’s, “We must all hang together or else we shall all hang separately! — while the Declaration of Independence was being discussed. Charles 11. was not- an exemplary character, perhaps, but. his. dying words,. “Do not let poor Nelly starve, are more moving than the last words of many a better man. Inversely, certain of the “uncoo guid” are remembered by a bitter phrase. If Milton gave us “Paradise Lost” he also gave us the spiteful declaration “One tongue is sufficient for a woman,” on putting his veto on certain members of the weaker sex being taught foreign languages, while Carlyle’s cynical an-, swer .when asked the population of England, “Thirty millions—mostly fools,” has lingered rather persistently among the unfortunates thus designated. The field of politics has been a fertile one for the phrase-maker. When Bulwer Lytton said he could not vote for some Bill in Parliament, it being “against his principles,” Disraeli indignantly retorted, “Damn your principles! Stick to your party!” Of the same way of thinking was the American naval officer with his famous “Oui* country—right oi’ wrong!” Sometimes a phrase arrests attention because it has started a new train of thought, such as Gay’s daring “Why should the devil have all the good

things?” or Thomas Erskine’s surprising moment of illumination in which ‘ he gave utterance to the dictum, “That Which is' called firmness in a king is called obstinacy in a donkey!” Again, a phrase is sometimes adopted into the vernacular because it is recognised as potted horse sense. Such, for ' instance, was Lord Stowell’s shrewd, “A dinner lubricates business,” or Daniel Webster’s prescient, “There is always room at the top,” when advised not to become a lawyer as the profession was overcrowded, or James I’s intuitive, “I can make a lord, but only God Almighty can make a gentleman.” Cliche as it is, most of us have, at some time or other, used, the phrase “Brother Jonathan” - to designate the American .citizen. How ,surprised George Washington would have been 1 had be known that his frequent. relllHl’ll. ITlllStf* r’CVTI CI 11Dl’nfLn-n

we muse consult Brotner Jons than,” when referring to his secretary 1 and aide-de-camp Colonel Jonathan Irumball, should have been'the basis of the cognomen of a nation!—T.P’s Weekly;