Introduction
The English language is full of wonderful sayings, catch-phrases and expressions. For the most part they are used without much consideration as to their origins. Some appear self-evident; "a storm in a tea cup" can have really only one basis, similarly "a stitch in time saves nine", but why do we say "a square meal"? Meals aren't square, but the expression is in almost everyday use. I spent most of my working life as a Consultant Pathologist at Frenchay Hospital in Bristol. I came to be fascinated by the histories of the City and Hospital in which I lived and worked. I also became greatly involved in trying to understand some of the intricacies of a certain type of skin cancer called malignant melanoma. The result?...over two thousand colour slides of Bristol as it has changed over the past few decades, several hundred slides of Frenchay Hospital since the turn of the 20th century and dozens of scientific articles on aspects of melanoma. The fascination also extended to bits of the English language; I kept asking myself, when I heard an expression that appeared to be "daft" - "why do we say that?" In 1990 I started to explore the backgrounds of as many sayings, idioms etc. that I came across. Since some of these are used only occasionally it took me about five years to collect a list of 450 or so. This book is my effort at trying to unravel the knots of origin. The first "edition" was produced personally in limited numbers (25) in the summer of 1996. At that time it seemed that a commercial edition of the book would appear, but this never materialised. In the meantime more origins came to light and I produced the next "edition" in the autumn of 1998. The index indicates the new additions, marked *.
One thing that became clear very early on was that many had a naval or military background. Another feature was that many are very old, often going back centuries. Other sayings are much more recent and many of the really modern ones last only a few years before they go out of fashion; I have not concentrated on these latter types. Never-the-less, some modern sayings are likely to survive and I have included those that seem less ephemeral; "Catch 22" will probably last for a few decades yet, if not longer.
The book is not intended to be a work of scholarship, more a source of enjoyment for browsing, stimulation and bed-time light reading, hence my title - "The Bedtime Browser". It is also a bit of a challenge to the reader since I have included items about which I have not been able to find an origin. Please let me know if you can fill the gaps. It is arranged in alphabetical order, governed by what I regard as the most important word in the text; e.g. a "wet blanket" is found under "blanket" and not under "wet".
As time passed the new
additions gradually increased. By early 2000 I was able to put an updated
version on the internet as part of my main web site, and this updating still
continues. By 2007 the site attracted up to 2000 visits per week.
