from The Dictionary of Clichés -- and I'm only through D!

I went to Main Street Books and it wasn't a Sunday (the day when you can but one used book and get one used book free). But I go there a few times a week anyway just to look around and sometimes there's a book that catches my eye and I buy it. Friday I bought FOUR, and one of them was

The Dictionary of Clichés compiled by James Rogers (copyright 1985, ISBN 0517060205). You know, those expressions your English teachers and allegedly professional writers tell you not to use because they're overused. Well, it's often difficult to figure out the dividing line between the two; I had some free time and I thought I'd share what I'm learning already!

Enjoy the day, David

 

The cliché is written in bold. Then what the cliché means. Then its first known use in print, which usually indicates that it appeared in spoken English shortly before.

 

(Oh, throughout the book -- or for that matter any list of such quotations -- one-fifth of them come out to be either from Shakespeare or the Bible; good to know.)

 

Actions Speak Louder Than Words. What you do is more significant than what you say. The thought was put almost that way in 1692 by Gersham Bulkeley, in Will and Doom: "Actions are more significant than words."

As Fate (Luck) Would Have It. That's the way it happened, and it was a fortunate turn of events. American Speech recorded the expression in 1928: "As luck would have it, we took another road."

 

Bag of Bones. Thin or emaciated. Sometimes "skin and bones." Examples include "There, get down stairs, little bag o'bones" in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (1838) and "I am almost ashamed to punish a bag of skin and bones" in Charles Kingsley's play The Saint's Tragedy (1848).

 

Baker's Dozen. A little extra; specifically, thirteen. The term is usually traced to an act of the English Parliament in 1266, laying down standards of weight for bread. In order to make certain they were meeting were standard, bakers adopted the practice of giving 13 loaves to vendors for each dozen they bought to sell to customers.

 

Child's Play. An extremely easy or simple task. The phrase was familiar enough by about 1385 for Chaucer to put it in the negative, in The Merchant's Tale: "It is no childes play to take a wyf without avysement [advisement]."

 

Cut and Dried. Routine; prepared beforehand. Sometimes it is said as "cut and dry," which is what one does with lumber, herbs, tobacco and flowers. The practice with herbs seems to have been the origin of the saying, which appears as early as 1710 in a letter to the Rev. Henry Sacheverell: "Your Sermon was ready Cut and Dry'd." The transferred meaning arises because cut and dried items, however useful they may be, have lost their freshness.

 

Dirt Cheap. Extremely low priced. Dirt doesn't usually carry a well-known price, and nowadays it isn't always cheap, but the expression is old enough to suggest a time when it may have been free for the taking. "Dirt-cheap, indeed, it was, as well it might." That line appeared in Blackwell's Magazine in 1821.

 

Draw a Blank. Fail to remember or find something; fail to recognize what someone is driving at. One of the meanings of "blank," now almost forgotten, is a lottery ticket that does not bring a prize. This is the "blank" that one "draws." Washington Irving wrote of "drawing a blank" in 1824 (in Tales of a Traveller), so the saying is at least that old.