The Dictionary of Clichés by Christine Ammer

Author:Christine Ammer
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing (Perseus)
Published: 2012-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

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nail in one’s coffin, drive/put a Perform some destructive (or self-destructive) act. The term first appeared in print in Peter Pindar’s (John Wolcot’s) Ode no. 15 (1789): “Care to our coffin adds a nail.” It was repeated over the years, and in the early twentieth century was taken up by the Anti-Cigarette League, which announced that every cigarette smoked was a nail in one’s coffin, giving rise to the colloquial name coffin nail for a cigarette. “Have you a coffin nail?” wrote O. Henry (The Higher Abdication, 1907).

nail one’s colors to the mast Adopt an unyielding attitude. This nineteenth-century expression alludes to flying a flag from a ship’s mast. If the flag is nailed to the mast, it cannot be hauled down. Sir Walter Scott may have been the first to put it in writing: “Stood for his country’s glory fast, And nailed her colours to the mast” (Marmion, 1808). Although the days of flag-flying sailing ships are in the past, the expression lives on. It appeared in Great Outdoors (Sept. 27, 1989): “The prince neatly side-stepped nailing his colours to the mast in the national parks debate.”

naked as a jaybird Nude. This expression is definitely American in origin, but the simile is as puzzling as the older British naked as a robin. Neither bird is very plain in appearance (“bare”). It appears in print with some frequency from the mid-twentieth century on. For example, D. Delman used it in Sudden Death (1972): “The corpus was as naked as a jaybird.”

naked truth The plain unvarnished facts. Allegedly this term came from a fable in which Truth and Falsehood went bathing. Falsehood finished first and dressed in Truth’s garments, whereupon Truth, unwilling to take Falsehood’s clothes, went naked. Appealing as this tale may be, the image of unvarnished truth is not that exotic. Tennyson used it in Idylls of the King: “Mere white truth in simple nakedness.” William Safire pointed out that in the 1970s it was a favorite term with journalists, who thus contributed to its survival.

name dropping Also, to drop names. Mentioning the names of famous persons to imply that one is on familiar terms with them. The term dates from the mid-1900s. J. D. Salinger had an amusing take on it in Franny and Zooey (1962): “There’s an unwritten law that people in a certain social or financial bracket may name drop as much as they like just as long as they say something terribly disparaging about the person as soon as they’ve dropped his name.”

name is mud, one’s One is discredited. This term apparently originated in the British Parliament in the early nineteenth century, when it was used for any member who disgraced himself, through either a singularly bad speech or an overwhelming defeat in an election. (In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mud was slang for “a fool” or “a stupid fellow.”) Some ascribe the usage to Dr. Samuel Mudd, who helped John Wilkes Booth escape after assassinating President Lincoln. Apart from the different spelling, this derivation is a bit of folklore.

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