ADN

I was reading something and I came across a phrase and I looked it up and I thought to myself that this could be a cool thread. You can post a phrase with its meaning and possibly its origin as well. Since I started this thread let me start with this:

O ye, of little faith

Meaning

This is the rebuke levelled at the disciples of Christ, when seeming to doubt his divinity. The phrase is also more widely used to describe any Christian doubter. In a secular setting it may be intended as a humorous jibe when doubting someone's abilities.

Origin

There are several places in the Bible in which this phrase is used with reference to those who demonstrate their lack of faith in Jesus' power to perform miracles. Here are a few examples, all from the King James Version:

Luke 12:27 Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
Luke 12:28 If then God so clothe the grass, which is to day in the field, and to morrow is cast into the oven; how much more will he clothe you, O ye of little faith?

Matthew 8:25 And his disciples came to him, and awoke him, saying, Lord, save us: we perish.
Matthew 8:26 And he saith unto them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith? Then he arose, and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm.

Matthew 14:30 But when he [Peter] saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me.
Matthew 14:31 And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?

In the 17th century the state of insufficient faith was of common enough interest to be given a name - petty fidianism. John Trapp, in his Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (1647), recorded the term:

"O ye of little faith. Ye petty fidians; He calleth them not nullifidians."

Lickety-split

Meaning

Headlong; at full speed.

Origin

This is an American phrase in origin, possibly with Scottish influences, and isn't commonly used in other countries. Lickety may be taken from lick, meaning speed - as in 'going at quite a lick'. That usage is known by the early 19th century. For example, this piece from Thomas Donaldson's Poems, chiefly in the Scottish dialect, 1809:

"Ere I get a pick, In comes young Nannie wi' a lick."

It is variously spelled in early citations but, whatever the spelling, it is just as likely to be a nonsense word, not pertaining to anything in particular. The first record of it in print is in D. McKillop's Poems, 1817:

"I rattl'd owre the A, B, C, as fast as lickitie An' read like hickitie."

The hiciktie in that line may be a version of heck - itself a euphemism for hell. I can't find out anything about Mr. McKillop but I would guess he was a Scottish gentleman - Donaldson certainly was. Lickitie in that spelling certainly wouldn't look out of place in Scotland.

The second word of the term is just an intensifier, and 'split' was settled on eventually. That is first cited in American Speech (1848), as 'lickoty split'. Lickety may have been imported into the USA via immigration from Scotland. Split seems to have been added in the USA.

The many variations on 'lickety split', for example 'licketty cut', 'lickety click', 'lickoty split' suggest an invented onomatopoeic phrase. It is suggestive of phrases like clickety-click which mimic trains running across points.

Also of American origin is the more recent vulgar usage of the term to mean cunnilingus. This isn't common even in the USA and dates from the 1960s. It first appeared in print in the jokes section of Playboy Magazine, January 1970, in a joke about Mae West which I'll leave to your imagination.

A fool's paradise

Meaning

A state of happiness based on false hope.

Origin

An early phrase, first recorded in the Paston Letters, 1462:

"I wold not be in a folis paradyce."

Shakespeare later used it in Romeo and Juliet.

Nurse:
Now, afore God, I am so vexed, that every part about
me quivers. Scurvy knave! Pray you, sir, a word:
and as I told you, my young lady bade me inquire you
out; what she bade me say, I will keep to myself:
but first let me tell ye, if ye should lead her into
a fool's paradise, as they say, it were a very gross
kind of behavior, as they say: for the gentlewoman
is young; and, therefore, if you should deal double
with her, truly it were an ill thing to be offered
to any gentlewoman, and very weak dealing.

The devil to pay

Meaning

Impending trouble or other bad consequences following from one's actions.

Origin

People seem to love ascribing nautical origins to phrases. Here's a good case in point. The 'devil' is a seam between the planking of a wooden ship. Admiral William Henry Smyth defined the term in The Sailor's Word-book: An Alphabetical Digest of Nautical Terms, 1865:

Devil - The seam which margins the waterways on a ship's hull.

'Paying' is the sailor's name for caulking or plugging the seam between planking with rope and tar etc. 'Paying the devil' must have been a commonplace activity for shipbuilders and sailors at sea. This meaning of 'paying' is recorded as early as 1610, in S. Jourdain's Discovery of Barmudas:

Some wax we found cast up by the Sea... served the turne to pay the seames of the pinnis Sir George Sommers built, for which hee had neither pitch nor tarre.

Many sources give the full expression used by seafarers as "there’s the devil to pay and only half a bucket of pitch", or "there’s the devil to pay and no pitch hot". Nautical origin; case closed? Well, no.

The phrase doesn't originate from the name of the ship's seam, as is sometimes supposed. It is the name 'devil' in this context which comes from the phrase 'the Devil to pay', rather than the other way about.

The other meaning of paying the Devil alludes to Faustian pacts in which hapless individuals pay for their wishes or misdeeds by forfeiting their soul. This allusion, and the everyday usage meaning 'I am in trouble now, I will have to pay for this later', date from the 18th century. For example, Thomas Brown's Letters From the Dead to the Living, 1707:

Don't you know damnation pays every man's scores... we knew we should have the Devil to pay one time or other, and now you see like honest men we have pawn'd our Souls for the whole Reckoning.

This quotation predates the earliest recorded usage of 'devil' to mean the seam of a ship (Smyth's Sailor's Workbook, 1865) by more than a century. Given the known nautical meaning of 'paying' a seam and the well-established phrase 'the Devil to pay', sailors probably adopted the phrase in reference to the unpleasant task of seam caulking.

George Lemon put forward his understanding of how the phrase was coined in English Etymology, 1783. Lemon explains that, when sailors were ready to start caulking seams before the tar was melted, they used the phrase 'here's the Devil to pay and no pitch hot'. As Lemon put it:

"Here's the black gentleman come to pitch the vessel's sides and you have not so much as made the pitch kettle hot enough to employ him."

Whether we accept Lemon's version or prefer the 'pact with the Devil' derivation, it is clear that the devil in the phrase was originally a reference to Satan, not the seam of a ship.

The seven-year itch

Meaning

The inclination to become unfaithful after seven years of marriage.

Origin

The Seven Year Itch is best-known to us as the title of the 1955 film, starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell and directed by Billy Wilder. The plot of has Ewell's character working for a company that is about to publish a book suggesting that a many men have extra-marital affairs after seven years of marriage - called the "7-Year Itch". The film contains one of the most famous images in cinema history - Monroe's dress blowing up over a subway grating. That supposed urge for infidelity after seven years of marriage is the meaning we now have for this phrase. It is now often extended to refer to an urge to move on from any situation, and not even limited to those of seven years' duration.

George Axelrod, who wrote the play on which the film was based, didn't coin the phrase though. It came from an earlier US source. The original seven-year itch wasn't a condition that supposedly began after seven years, but one that supposedly lasted for seven years. Seven-year itch had been known in the USA since the early 19th century as the name of a particularly irritating and contagious skin complaint. The name was well enough known by 1845 for the condition to be used as a metaphor for all that is annoying. For example, this item from that year, from the Wisconsin Herald and Grant County Advertiser:

"When Illinois caught Mormonism off Missouri, she caught something worse than the seven year itch. Job sitting in the ashes and scratching himself amongst the potsherds, was infinitely more comfortable than poor Illinois now is, burning and festering under the scab of Mormonism."

The condition, which was bacterial in nature - causing highly irritating red pimples on the face and body, is now so easily treated as to have been virtually forgotten. In the 19th and early 20th centuries though it was viewed as being so bad that it was used as an appropriate imagined punishment for antisocial behaviour - "he should be given the seven-year itch and not be allowed to scratch". The difficulty of getting any relief from the condition was also expressed in the simile - "as close as the seven-year itch".

In a sad parallel of more recent criminal cases involving people who have been maliciously infected with the HIV virus (called 'revenge sex'), the Iowa State Press reported this in November 1903:

"Brahm vs. Corey - an action brought by the plaintiff to recover damages because of an attack of the 'seven year itch'. A contagious disease which, it is claimed, was communicated purposely by the plaintiff to he defendant."

The complaint was also known as camp itch or army itch and was associated with the US army where, around the turn of the 20th century, it was considered to be so rife that civilians would cross the street to avoid being near soldiers. Following discharge from the army in Europe after WWI many soldiers made their way to Paris, where the condition spread, under the pseudonym of French itch.

Relief was at hand though. By 1920 adverts like this were appearing in US newspapers and subsequently printed records that refer to seven-year itch diminished, until the 1955 film was released and the term began a new life.

A fate worse than death

Meaning

Any misfortune that would make life unlivable, especially rape or loss of virginity. The phrase was formally a euphemism for rape.

Origin

This attested to the belief that a dishonoured woman was better off dead. It is still used, but ironically of late. That earlier view was expressed in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1781:

"The matrons and virgins of Rome were exposed to injuries more dreadful, in the apprehension of chastity, than death itself."

tarzanThe current version of the phrase was used in several works from 1810 onward but was probably brought into public use via Edgar Rice Burroughs' widely read Tarzan of the Apes, 1914:

"[The ape] threw her roughly across his broad, hairy shoulders, and leaped back into the trees, bearing Jane Porter away toward a fate a thousand times worse than death."