Caroline Taggart - As Right as Rain: The Meaning and Origins of Popular Expressions

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

Michael OMara Books Limited

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Tremadoc Road

London SW4 7NQ

Copyright Michael OMara Books Limited 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78243-077-3 in hardback print format

ISBN: 978-1-78243-093-3 in ePub format

ISBN: 978-1-78243-094-0 in Mobipocket format

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Research by Elaine Koster

Illustrations by Andrew Pinder

Cover design by Anna Morrison

Designed and typeset by K DESIGN, Winscombe, Somerset

Many thanks to Anna, Silvia, Jess and the rest of the team at Michael OMara Books; and to Elaine for dealing so competently with the fuzzy end of the lollipop.

In case youre wondering, this is a book about idioms, so it seems only right to begin by clarifying what an idiom is. The OED describes it as a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from the meanings of the individual words (my italics); other dictionaries emphasize the same point. An idiom, by definition, doesnt make sense.

Isnt that fun? Or is it just baffling?

Take the books title, for instance. Why do we say as right as rain rather than as right as snow or as right as wind? And why should rain, or any other climatic feature, be more right than anything else?

Why, to take another example, do we cry over spilled milk rather than spilled tea or spilled wine? Why is a wild idea pie in the sky or a piece of surprising news a turn up for the books?

A foreigner learning English might well ask these questions and be told, Because it just is, OK? Thats because a newcomer to the language has to learn the exact form of an idiom nine times out of ten, if you translate it from one language to another, it means nothing, and if you alter a single word it means even less. (To give someone the cold elbow? To bring home the pork? I dont think so.) But if you want to delve deeper, to find out where these apparently absurd expressions came from in the first place, you might choose to pick up this book. Its an attempt to reduce the bafflement and increase the fun.

When I wrote a book of proverbs, An Apple a Day, a few years ago, I found that, like a lot of the English language, many of them derived from the Bible or the works of Shakespeare. The idioms in As Right As Rain tend to have humbler beginnings. They often come from worlds that have their own specialist vocabulary, such as seafaring (see ). Expressions coined in these settings, often with a practical purpose, are then taken up by journalists and other writers and used out of context. At first they may be enclosed in semi-apologetic inverted commas or, in Britain, accompanied by the proviso as the Americans say. But these asides soon disappear as the phrase becomes accepted. Thus it moves from the specific to the general, from the literal to the metaphorical, from the inventive and original to the everyday but with one thing in common. It sticks resolutely to the same form of words, even though that form of words no longer makes sense. It becomes an idiom.

That isnt to say that the Bible and Shakespeare have no place here. We owe the former is an example of two words that have become obsolete (span in this context means a chip of wood, nothing to do with the current senses of the length of a bridge or the duration of a life). Yet they persist in this one idiom.

Digging down into the history of language is not an exact science. The first recorded use of an expression often shows that it is well established the writer clearly expects his readers to know what he means so its impossible to be precise about when it was invented. On rare occasions (see, for example, ).

So what can we do? Only our humble best. Aim at the truth, admit it when we dont know and tell a few good stories along the way. There is no shortage of those. As Dr Johnson didnt say but should have, if you are tired of the English language you are tired of life.

Caroline Taggart

Above board

Board in this context is another word for table and if you keep your hands above it people can see what you are doing. Specifically, if you have cards in your hand when playing poker or the like, they can tell that you are not accidentally, of course, because you happen to be wearing that sort of jacket, not because of any intent to defraud, how could you think of such a thing pulling an ace from your sleeve (see dates back to the sixteenth century in its literal sense and has been used in a figurative sense almost from the word go.

Oddly, if we want to convey skulduggery, we say underhand rather than under board. And, to complicate the issue, I discovered in the course of my research that there exists a company called Interface that produces a range of tufted cut and loop wood-effect carpet tiles called Above Board. So you could, should the mood take you, have something above board underfoot.

To have an ace up ones sleeve

This means to have a good thing hidden away, to be kept secret until you need to use it. Like , it derives from card playing, where in many games an ace is a high card, a potential winner. Early (nineteenth-century) uses in both the UK and the USA refer to games of chance; then in 1916 the OED records this extended metaphor: You tell a man your cards are all on the table and try to take him into your confidence, but unless he has confidence in you he suspects that there are some aces up your sleeve. This could, of course, be interpreted literally, except that it comes from the Electric Railway Journal. The May 1916 edition of that worthy publication includes articles on Detroit Tunnel River Operation, Latest Connecticut City Cars and Franchise Extension Rejected in Valparaiso, Chile so its unlikely to have slipped in anything about cheating at cards; the author is talking about one railway company doing business with another and we can safely say that this is the earliest truly idiomatic use.

The Americans also use an equivalent expression, to have an ace in the hole. This is said to originate specifically from poker, where a hole card is one that is dealt face down and is therefore hidden from ones opponents. The implication is that an ace would be the best possible card to have hidden away, though anyone who has played poker will know that it is not as simple as that.

Against the grain

The grain here is the general direction or arrangement of the fibrous elements in wood, which makes cutting against the grain i.e. crosswise more difficult than cutting in line with it; it will also result in a torn, jagged edge rather than a smooth one. Thus something that goes metaphorically against the grain is difficult, unnatural and unpleasing. The expression is, however, often followed by