Denis: Book uses its loaf to find origins of words

Oct 13 2008 by Our Correspondent, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

HOLD your horses and have a gander at this new book.

Bees’ Knees and Barmy Armies is by Harry Oliver (John Blake Publishing, £9.99) and provides the origins of words and phrases we use every day, without really knowing where they came from or originally meant.

Hold your horses comes from 19th century America when it was “hold your hosses”. Have a gander is 17th century when “to gander” meant to stretch your neck to see, much like a male goose.

Today a vandal may be someone who scratched your car or paint sprayed graffiti on a bus shelter but back in ancient times they were much more scary. The Vandals were a Germanic tribe who invaded Western Europe and sacked Rome in 455.

Someone who is bit grumpy might have got out of the wrong side of the bed. But what does that mean?

“In Roman times it became common always to consider the right side as the correct side to get out of bed from, since it represented the side of good, the left being traditionally associated with the Devil,” says Oliver.

Which is all well and good but do you mean the right side as you look at it? Or the right side when you are lying in it?

Good grief. To think I could have been getting out of bed with the Devil for years.

As well as being a delightful addition to the coffee table or the smallest room in the house for 10 minutes of solitary meditation, it contains a few surprises.

Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, for instance. This phrase has not survived from 1066 but comes, in fact, from 1976. A Poke In The Eye With A Sharp Stick was the title of the first show in the Secret Policeman’s Ball series of concerts that raised money for Amnesty International.

And how often have we been told to “use your loaf”?

Now here is an expression around which has been woven a wonderfully rich historical myth.

“During the American Civil War, soldiers trying to avoid enemy snipers in the forests would jab their bayonets into their daily bread ration and stick the loaf out to make it visible,” says Oliver.

“If the enemy fired at the loaf, the soldiers could rest assured that they had ‘used their loaf’ well. By using a false head, they had saved their own.” However, there is no truth at all in this legend. The phrase is cockney rhyming slang: loaf of bread - head.