11.
FAMILIAR SAYINGS
We’ve all heard them, we all vaguely recognise them, we might even use them ourselves sometimes. It’s impossible to open a newspaper without coming across these everyday phrases; for instance, a recent magazine article about Indonesia’s Tommy Soeharto began with the words, ‘They seek him here, they seek him there . . . or so they say.’ (The Age, 16 June 2001) It’s a reference to the Scarlet Pimpernel but, if you don’t know that, it means you’re not getting the full meaning from the article.
Rick runs a bar in Casablanca, North Africa, during World War II. All the scum and riff-raff of the world seem to drift through the bar, along with one or two nice people. Many of the people who come to Casablanca are looking to escape the war, and more than anything they want a ticket to the United States. One night Ilsa, a woman whom Rick loved back in Paris, arrives with her new boyfriend, a French war hero whom the Nazis want to capture and kill. When Ilsa walks into the bar she sees the piano player, Sam, who was working for Rick in Paris. She says to him, ‘How’s Rick, Sam?’ and he says ‘Pretty good, Miss’. She says, ‘Play our song for me, Sam,’ and he says, ‘The Boss don’t allow anyone to play that song, Miss,’ but she insists, ‘Play it, Sam.’ So he does, launching into the beautiful love song, ‘As Time Goes By’. Rick hears the song, walks angrily towards the piano, saying, ‘I told you never to play that song,’ then, in a dramatic moment, sees that it’s Ilsa, the woman he still loves – and who still loves him.
The movie ends with Rick, having helped Ilsa and her boyfriend to escape to the United States, realising that he can no longer live in Casablanca. He’s made it too hot for himself. The corrupt police chief is in the same position. The two men walk off into the fog towards an unknown future, with the cop saying to Rick, ‘This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.’
The beautiful but ruthless Scarlett O’Hara has been making the lives of her different lovers a misery in one way or another. As the American Civil War unfolds, and Scarlett’s fortunes start to collapse, she uses men more and more savagely, even as she loves them and needs them. Eventually, however, Rhett Butler has had enough. She pleads for his help, at the same time trying to make herself sexy and seductive, but to her rage and frustration he simply walks away, saying, ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’
As in the book by Charles Dickens, so in the movie. During the French Revolution (1789) Charles Darnay is arrested and thrown into jail, where he is to be executed by the guillotine, which will sever his head from his body. Darnay and his friend, Sydney Carton, are in love with the same woman, Lucie, but Darnay is married to her, and she loves her husband. Carton decides to sacrifice his life for Darnay, so that the woman he loves can be with the man she loves. He carries out a tricky little scheme where he gets into the prison cell and drugs Darnay into unconsciousness, then has him carried out of the jail. Carton remains behind. Everyone assumes that Carton is Darnay, and in the morning he goes cheerfully and bravely to his execution; hence the words Dickens puts into his mouth: ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done . . . ‘
Australian outback legend Mick ‘Crocodile’ Dundee finds himself in New York, where he teams up with an American woman journalist. When a mugger pulls a knife on them she’s scared, saying to Mick Dundee, ‘Careful, he’s got a knife.’ Mick responds by pulling an enormous machete from his belt and saying in his best quiet but menacing tone, ‘That’s not a knife. This is a knife.’ The terrified mugger takes off like a kid who’s seen a dentist.
Julia Roberts plays a hooker who is picked up by a wealthy businessman, played by Richard Gere, to be his escort. They fall in love – gee, who would have picked that as a possible story line – but early in their relationship, when Julia goes into an exclusive and expensive shop – sorry, boutique – the staff realise that she’s a hooker and throw her out. Later, she comes back. Now she’s wealthy, elegant and powerful. She walks through the boutique with her shopping bags from Tiffanys, Saks, Macys, Bunnings – Bunnings? How did that get in there?! – and says to the cowering shop assistants, ‘Big mistake, guys, huge mistake.’
During the Battle of Balaclava (1854), in the Crimean War (1853–56), a wrong order was given to the Light Brigade of the British Army. They thought they had been told to charge into a valley, with the enemy Russian artillery in place on the heights above them. Because they were trained to obey orders, off they went: six hundred men on horses against an array of huge guns that tore them apart. There were only three hundred and sixty survivors. Now, when people say something was like the Charge of the Light Brigade, they mean that it was a wild and crazy rush.
A hugely popular novel called The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy tells the story of a sort of old-fashioned James Bond, an Englishman who rescues prisoners from the guillotine during the French Revolution. His name in the book is Sir Percy Blakeney, but his nickname is ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’, and his fans tease and taunt the French authorities with this little poem to remind them of their failure to identify or capture Sir Percy.
Your Achilles tendon is an actual part of your body but your Achilles heel, metaphorically, is your weak spot. The expression comes from an old Greek legend. Thetis wanted to dip her baby son Achilles into the River Styx so that nothing could harm him – he would be protected for life by the magical powers of the river. But, of course, she had to hold him by something when she lowered him into the river, and she chose the backs of his heels. As a result, these two spots were not touched by the water and he remained vulnerable there. And where do you think he, as an adult, copped an arrow that killed him? Yes, you guessed it.
Perhaps the legend is suggesting that, much as they might want to, parents can never entirely protect their children from harm.
If you’re sent to Coventry, it means no-one will talk to you, there is an agreement among everyone in the community that they will have nothing to do with you. No-one’s sure how the expression originated, although it could be from the old custom of sending someone to a convent when they’d been bad. There’s also a story about people in the English town of Coventry, years ago, who hated soldiers, so if a woman talked to a soldier no-one else would talk to her.
This is the idea that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else by a maximum of six degrees of separation. In other words, you are connected to a potato farmer in Bulgaria, whom you don’t know and will never meet, but your neighbour has an aunt who lives in Italy and her plumber’s mother-in-law was once booked for speeding in Romania, by a policeman who is the second cousin of the potato farmer in Bulgaria. Of course, the theory is impossible to prove, as you will never even know of your connection to this farmer.
Somehow the theory came to centre on Hollywood actor Kevin Bacon, and a game developed where people tried to work out how, say, Roald Dahl could be related to Kevin Bacon by a maximum of six degrees of separation (fairly easy in Dahl’s case, as he was married to a famous actress).
No-one knows who Rafferty was but the expression ‘Rafferty’s Rules’ means that no rules apply – it’s everyone for himself or herself.
This is short for the phrase: ‘You’ve got two chances, Buckley’s and none.’ In other words, you’ve got bugger-all chance. There was a real Buckley, a convict who escaped in 1803 and went bush. Everyone thought he was dead but he actually lived with Aboriginal people for thirty years, so if this is the origin of the phrase, it’s a bit of a paradox to say someone has Buckley’s, because Buckley did survive OK.
Another way the phrase might have originated is from a famous Melbourne shop called Buckley and Nunn.
This is out the back of nowhere. There probably never was an actual black stump, although quite a few Australian towns, including Coolah in New South Wales, claim they have the original one.
The movie Citizen Kane, called by many (though not by me) the greatest movie ever made, tells the story of a media billionaire named Kane. Based on the life of American media magnate William Randolph Hearst, it shows how Kane gradually becomes a mean-spirited tyrant. When he is dying he asks repeatedly for Rosebud, only no-one knows what he means. At the end of the film, the viewers are shown the identity of Rosebud. It was the sled that Hearst played with as a little boy. It seems like all his money and power counted for nothing compared to the brief but genuine happiness he knew as a child in a poor household.
The stories about the fictitious detective Sherlock Holmes, a genius who solved murders and other cases by using his brains, were written between 1891 and 1927 and were made into many films in the twentieth century. The books and the films were enormously popular – so popular that when the author, Arthur Conan Doyle, had Holmes die by falling over a waterfall, the public were so upset that Doyle had to bring him back to life and write more stories.
In almost all of the films, the phrase ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’ features. Holmes had a rather slow-thinking assistant named Dr Watson, and Holmes had to explain everything to him. When Watson didn’t quite get it, Holmes would say, patronisingly, that it was ‘elementary, my dear Watson’.