“QUOTE ... UNQUOTE”
NEW BOOKS
My latest book is All Gong and No Dinner: 1,001 Homely Phrases
and Curious Domestic Sayings (Collins, 2007).
Over the past thirty years, thousands of listeners have shared their
informal family sayings with BBC Radio’s Quote ...Unquote and asked whether anybody
else knew of them.
With All Gong and No Dinner,
Nigel Rees has produced both a fresh and an updated celebration of these
domestic catchphrases, household words, rhymes, old wives’ sayings, and
proverbial pearls of wisdom. He has searched for the origins of hundreds of the
conversation clippings which together illustrate all aspects of domestic life.
Whether unique to their owners, or instantly recognizable, they reveal
everything from how we talk about our relatives and neighbours to the ‘nannyisms’ embedded since childhood.
Organized thematically, these euphemisms, exclamations, put downs and
vivid vignettes, take us all the way from the kitchen to the bedroom, via the
bathroom and back again. They underscore both the warm truths and the perfect
nonsense of everyday family life.
Ever wondered why people say, ‘Well,
I’ll go to the foot of our stairs’?
Have you ever been fobbed off with ‘That’s
for me to know and you to wonder’?
Do you know someone who is ‘all fur
coat and no knickers’?
If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then you are already part
of the wonderful world of family phrases.
Containing many of the origins and meanings of our everyday expressions,
here is a treasury of delights for language lovers everywhere.
all gong and no dinner – meaning, of a person, that he is ‘all talk and no
action’. What you might say of a loud-mouthed person who is somewhat short on
achievement. Current since the mid-20th century at least.
‘So far, all we have had from the Government is “all gong and no dinner” – to
use a phase that a constituent of mine used in a public meeting. In other
words, the sound and the fury have been there but the delivery has been
missing’ – speaker at Welsh Grand Committee (
*
My other recent
publications include:
A Man About a Dog: Euphemisms & Other Examples of Verbal
Squeamishness (Collins, 2006).
‘Euphemisms are
unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne’ – Quentin Crisp
Here are 2,467 examples
of verbal perfume. Nigel Rees, one of
Britain’s best-known commentators on popular language, has ranged far and wide
to collect and comment on this huge selection of euphemisms – those expressions
which so inventively display the art of mincing words and which resolutely
avoid calling a spade a spade.
From the politically
correct to the highly incorrect, A Man About a Dog goes in ruthless pursuit of the coy, the
prudish, the obfuscatory and the blatant reshaping of
the truth. So, whether you wish to
‘discuss Ugandan affairs’ with someone, or have issues with your ‘ambient
replenishment assistant’ when you go shopping or need to work on your
‘terminological inexactitude’ when you ring in sick to work, this wonderful
book will guide, illuminate and entertain along the way.
The New Statesman called A Man About a Dog ‘an amusing, meticulously researched
catalogue of the social forces that shape the way we speak.’
*
Published to coincide
with the 30th anniversary of Quote ...
Unquote is Brewer’s Famous Quotations:
5,000 Quotations and the Stories Behind Them (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006).
This extract from the
introduction explains the purpose of it:
Traditionally, there
have been two ways to go about compiling a dictionary of quotations. One has been to anticipate the kind of
quotations that readers will be interested in and then to provide accurate
wording and source material for them.
The second has been to put forward quotations that the compiler has
gathered together – possibly on a theme or themes – and that the reader may in
time find useful or simply enjoyable.
Brewer’s
Famous Quotations and the Stories Behind Them is
not quite either of these things. What
it seeks to provide is the context for and ancillary information about
quotations which do already exist – that is to say, which are written or spoken
words that have already been quoted, but about which there is something to be
said for their meaning to be properly appreciated. A complaint that can often
be made about dictionaries of quotations – however substantial and
‘comprehensive’ they may be – is that they lack contextual commentary or,
indeed, any commentary at all.
There is a tendency for such books simply to deposit the minimum of
information upon the page and then hurry on, however misleading (or inaccurate)
this may be.
‘The glory of [Nigel Rees’s] choice of
quotations is twofold. First they are
proper quotations, not merely flowers gathered for a thoughtful posy, a habit
particularly of American quotation books.
Secondly they are put in context, at least regarding their provenance
and later use, so that the book is “composed largely of footnotes”’ – The Spectator
*
I Told You I Was Sick – A Grave Book of Curious
Epitaphs is
published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
and sells at about £7.99 in the
This is the blurb on the jacket:
A guided tour of some 150 remarkable epitaphs that reveals that the graveyard and family vault are not so much places of the spooky terrors of the night…but of curiosity, fascination – and more than a little humour.
Author Nigel Rees brings to bear upon the strange and sometimes surprising world of the epitaph his formidable skills as an ‘archaeologist’ of the sources of quotation and phrases: each epitaph is explained and located, and its source and context described as fully as possible. I Told You I Was Sick continues the centuries-old custom of epitaph collecting and brings it right up to date.
From 1960’s rock star Jim Morrison’s much-visited grave in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, Paris, to a little-known memorial stone in the Church of the Holy Cross in Haltwhistle, Northumberland (which translates from the Latin as ‘After a short, difficult and useless life, Here rests in the Lord, Robert Tweddle’). And from the gravestone of a ‘tiny marmoset’ near Henley-on-Thames to the resting place of Maggie, an army mule somewhere in France (‘who in her time kicked two colonels, four majors, ten captains…and one Mills bomb’). Notably, the book discovers what happens when people like the comedian Spike Milligan expressed a wish that the joking words ‘I told you I was ill’ (or ‘sick’) should be put on their gravestones.
*
A Word In Your Shell-Like: 6,000 Curious &
Everyday Phrases is published by Collins and is a modern, entertaining guide to the
wonderful world of phrases, familiar and unfamiliar. It unravels the meaning, origin and usage of
over 6,000 phrases from catchphrases, book and film titles, idioms and clichés,
to nicknames, slogans and short quotations.
In the
In case you are puzzled
by the title, here is my entry on the phrase, as it appears in the book:
in your shell‑like
(ear). Phrase used when asking to have a ‘quiet word’
with someone: ‘(Let me have a word) in your ear’ is all it means, but it makes
gentle fun of a poetic simile. Keats in
‘To – ’ (1817) has: ‘Had I a man’s fair form, then
might my sighs / Be echoed swiftly through that ivory shell, / Thine ear and find thy gentle heart’ and Thomas Hood’s Bianca’s Dream (1827) has: ‘Her small
and shell-like ear’. ‘So, Effie, turn
that shell-like ear, / Nor to my sighing close it’ –
P.G. Wodehouse, ‘The Gourmet’s Love-Song’ in Punch (24 December 1902).
From an episode of the BBC radio show Round the Horne (31 March 1968): ‘I started to whisper endearments
into her shell-like.’ The Complete Naff Guide (1983) has ‘a
word in your shell-like ear’ among ‘naff things schoolmasters say’. Sometimes
the word ‘ear’ is not spoken but understood.
‘Don’t you think you ought to whisper in my shell-like what this is all
about?’ – Kerry Greenwood, Murder in
A Word in Your Shell-Like was described by The Guardian as ‘a treasury of stimulating excursions
and digressions.’
*
The second edition of my
CASSELL’S DICTIONARY OF CATCHPHRASES is now available (published April
2005). The first edition was published
in 1996 and has now been revised and expanded to include several dozen new and
additional catchphrases. Recent years
have seen a resurgence in the popularity of the catchphrases with TV shows like
The Simpsons
and The Fast Show sending their
phrases echoing round the streets and clubs in a way reminiscent of the ‘golden
age’ of the show business catchphrase which may be said to have lasted from the
1930s to the 1960s.
*
The paperback edition of
CASSELL’S HUMOROUS QUOTATIONS was first published in 2003. This is the biggest and best collection you
will find. 912 pages
(including a detailed index) with revised notes and additional quotations.
The paperback of
CASSELL’S MOVIE QUOTATIONS was first published in 2002. This has been substantially revised and
corrected and now appears without illustrations. 512 pages including a
detailed index.
The third edition of
CASSELL’S DICTIONARY OF WORD AND PHRASE ORIGINS appeared as a paperback
original in 2002. This book was first
published by Blandford Press in 1987. The second edition, under the Cassell title, came out in 1996.
*
Just in
case you’re wondering, it is a ‘white elephant’ – one of the 1,200 + words and
colloquial phrases discussed in the new edition. The total number of copies sold of previous
editions is over 80,000 – so, if you haven't got one, how have you managed without
it?