Humble Pie and Cold Turkey: English Expressions and Their Origins by Caroline Taggart

Author:Caroline Taggart [Taggart, Caroline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, Linguistics, Etymology
ISBN: 9781789293487
Google: ZgAczgEACAAJ
Publisher: Michael O'Mara Books, Limited
Published: 2021-09-30T23:27:40.672109+00:00

Let it work,

For ’tis the sport to have the engineer

Hoist with his own petard.

It was obviously Shakespeare rather than military history that popularized the expression: both Walter Scott and Thomas de Quincey, writing some two hundred years later, use it and acknowledge Hamlet as the source.

While the petards are exploding gently around your castle, you might be driven further and further inside it – surrendering control of the outer courtyard, retreating across the moat, behind one wall and then another as the enemy advances and you finally find yourself in the last ditch, the last line of defence, a situation from which you are unlikely to recover. A last-ditch attempt, then, is a final, desperate one, made after all other options have failed: In a last-ditch attempt to break the deadlock, the delegates agreed to continue negotiations over the weekend.

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