IN TWO WORDS: AN AMAZING LITTLE DICTIONARY OF TWO WORD PHRASES
W. Terrence Gordon


excert from page 53:

hemlock cup

the cup from which the philosopher Socrates (470-399 B.C.), condemned to death by his fellow Athenians for corrupting youth by his allegedly seditious teaching, drank the poison of the common hemlock tree

herring pond

Used humorously from the sixteenth century to refer to the sea, and particularly to the North Atlantic, the phrase has gradually faded from use in the twentieth century.

hey nonino

The phrase has undergone transformations such as "hey noninoni" without distorting the meaning of the original from Shakespeare: "It was a lover and his lass/With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino/That o'er the green corn-field did pass"

hitherandthithering waters

one of James Joyce's images for the river Liffey/Anna Livia Plurabelle at the center of his great novel Finnegans Wake

Hobson's choice

no choice at all. According to Richard Steele, writing in The Spectator for 14 October 1712, Thomas Hobson (1544-1631), a Cambridge livery-stable keeper, would offer his clients only the horse nearest the door.

hocus-pocus science

This was Irish-born actor and sometime playwright Charles Macklin's (1697-1797) dismissive epithet for the law. It is recorded in his play Love la Mode, written in 1759, some twenty-four years after Macklin's firsthand experience of the law came by way of his own trial for murdering a fellow actor in a dispute over a wig.

holey dollar

One of the first problems that Lieutenant Governor Charles Smith of Prince Edward Island faced when he began his term in 1813 was a chronic shortage of coinage. He hit on the idea of issuing holey money, Spanish silver dollars punched out like doughnuts. Smith declared the outer ring acceptable at face value and the cut centers at one shilling. Nice idea, but with the total value of a punched out coin being higher than a whole coin, counterfeiting and fraud soon raised their ugly heads and tails. His Excellency's Executive Council was obliged to withdraw the holey dollar from circulation. If the good governor had known that one of the counterfeit cut coins would fetch $2,300 at public auction a century and half later, he might have cried "Holy dollar!" Cf. almighty gold.

Hollywoodland Realty

This real estate company erected the Hollywoodland part of their name to advertise themselves in white letters forty-five feet high. When the land part of their sign fell down, Hollywood, or rather HOLLYWOOD, was left in place, since that was the name of the place. It was only incorporated as a city for seven years (1903-1910) before it became annexed to Los Angeles.

holographic will

a last will and testament written, dated, and signed by the testator. Holographic comes from the Greek words for whole and writing, signifying, in this case, that the whole document was written by hand by the signatory.

Holy Deadlock

Sir Alan Patrick Herbert (1890-1971) used this phrase as the title of his 1934 novel satirizing the paradoxes of British divorce law. Happily married himself, Herbert was an unlikely champion of liberalized divorce law, but he maintained that marriage was too fine an institution to lend its name to unions without bonds, enduring because neither spouse would accept to be branded an adulterer in public.




Holy See

The phrase has nothing to do with the verb "to see," from the Old English verb s'on; it comes, via Old French, from Latin sedes, the word for seat, and refers to the Pope's jurisdiction, court, or office. The Holy See is also known as the See of Rome.

honest water

because it leads no man astray, or as Shakespeare put in Timon of Athens: "Here's that which is too weak to be a sinner/Honest water, which ne'er left man i' the mire." The words are inscribed on the drinking fountain in the market square of the bard's home town, Stratford-on-Avon.

honey barge

navy slang for a garbage scow

honour bright?

Used only as a question meaning "Do you pledge your word?" The questioner implicitly asks if the addressee's honour is bright enough to banish any shadow of deceit.

hugger mugger

Reduplicated words, those that emphasize by repetition, are common in many languages. English is rich in them, but they are not as easily understood as ding-dong, tip-top, mumbo-jumbo when we find them in the works of Shakespeare. "In hugger mugger to inter him" comes from Hamlet, where the context makes it clear that hugger mugger means "secrecy."

humble pie


originally had nothing to do with humility. The humble of humble pie comes from the Old French numbles, meaning cheap cuts of meat. It came into English as umble. An umble pie might be prepared with relatively unappetizing organs, often of a deer, such as brains, heart, and entrails, but in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield we find: "I ate umble pie with an appetite." Eating umble pie referred at first to poverty rather than to humiliation, but the pressure of folk etymology (see folk editing) turned umble into humble.

humbly dumbly

An echo of Humpty Dumpty? Probably. The phrase is from the final monologue of the river Anna Livia Plurabelle/Liffey in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake: "If I seen him bearing down on me now under white-spread wings like he'd come from Arkangels, I sink I'd die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup." Humpty Dumpty is drawn into the unbroken cycle of death and resurrection, of end and new beginning (like Finnegan and the Wake), of the river flowing into the sea, by the words "down...humbly dumbly...up."

hundred days

a period of approximately a hundred days marked by special events. The phrase was first applied to Napoleon's last campaign, the 116 days between his escape from exile in Elba and his defeat at Waterloo. The phrase came into use again, soon after U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt began his first term of office, to describe the period 9 March to 16 June 1933--during which the Seventy-third Congress passed historic legislation for public works and other relief measures to combat the effects of the Great Depression. This period in the FDR presidency is sometimes referred to as "the first hundred days" and marks the beginning of the New Deal, the social program that Roosevelt offered the American people.

hundredth monkey

An urban legend (see below) goes exotic: When Japanese scientists gave potatoes to monkeys on Koshima Island in the 1950s, one monkey taught himself to wash the potatoes and was soon teaching others to do the same. Once the hundredth monkey got the hang of it, every monkey on the island suddenly had the know-how. Hundreds of miles away, on other islands, monkeys were suddenly washing potatoes. This "miracle" has been recounted in various books and a feature film. Less well known are the documented facts: there were twenty monkeys on Koshima, when one of them did start washing the dirt off the sweet potatoes scientists were giving out to keep the little critters from raiding farm fields. The "sudden" acquisition of potato-washing skill took ten years, by which time the monkeys were fifty-nine in number, but twenty-three of them still did not have a clue about how to clean up their gritty vittles. And elsewhere? Yes, some reports of similar activity; in fact, some predating what happened at Koshima and entirely independent of the hundredth monkey that never existed in the Koshima colony. Did some prankster get this all started just to put a parapsychological twist on "Monkey see, monkey do?"