black-coated workers Referring to prunes as laxatives, this term, of earlier origin, was popularized from 1941 onwards in an early-morning BBC programme The Kitchen Front by the ‘Radio Doctor’, Charles (later Lord) Hill. He noted in his autobiography, Both Sides of the Hill (1964): ‘I remember calling on the Principal Medical Officer of the Board of Education…At the end of the interview this shy and solemn man diffidently suggested that the prune was a blackcoated worker and that this phrase might be useful to me. It was.’ Earlier, the diarist MP Chips Channon was using the phrase in a literal sense concerning the clerical and professional class when he wrote (8 April 1937): ‘The subject was “Widows and Orphans”, the Old Age Pensions Bill, a measure which affects Southend and its black-coated workers’ – Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon, ed. Robert Rhodes James (1967).
(the) black dog Used notably by Winston Churchill to describe the fits of depression to which he was sometimes subjected, this is an old phrase. It was known by the late 18th century, as in the country/nursery saying about a sullen child: ‘The black dog is on his back’. Brewer (1894) has the alternative, ‘a black dog has walked over him’. The reference here is to the devil, as in J. B. Priestley’s The Good Companions (1929): ‘He [Jess Oakroyd] was troubled by a vague foreboding. It was just as if a demoniac black dog went trotting everywhere at his heels.’ A perfect explanation appears in a letter from Samuel Johnson to Mrs Thrale (28 June 1783): ‘The black Dog I hope always to resist, and in time to drive though I am deprived of almost all those that used to help me…Mrs Allen is dead…Mrs Williams is so weak that she can be a companion no longer. When I rise my breakfast is solitary, the black dog waits to share it…’
black dwarf See POISONED CHALICE.
Black Friday Originally this was a description of Good Friday, when clergymen wore dark vestments. However, there have been any number of specific ‘Black Fridays’ so designated. In Britain, on one such day (15 April 1921), certain trade unions withdrew support from the hard-pressed miners, a general strike was cancelled, and this is recalled in the Labour movement as a day of betrayal. In the USA, the ‘first’ Black Friday was on 24 September 1929 when panic broke out on the stock market. During the Wall Street crash there were similarly a Black Wednesday, a Black Thursday – the actual day of the crash – and a Black Tuesday. In 1987, on stock markets round the world, there was a Black Monday (October 19) and another Black Thursday (October 22).
(a) black hole A term in astronomy for what is left when a star collapses gravitationally, thus leaving a field from which neither matter nor radiation can escape. The term was in use by 1968 and is sometimes used figuratively to describe the place to which a person has gone who has inexplicably just disappeared.
(the) Black Hole of Calcutta In 1756, 146 Europeans, including one woman, were condemned by the Nawab of Bengal to spend a night in the ‘Black-Hole’ prison of Fort William, Calcutta, after it had been captured. Only 23, including the woman, survived till morning. Subsequently the phrase has been applied to any place of confinement or any airless, dark place. From Francis Kilvert’s diary entry for 27 October 1874 (about a Church Missionary Society meeting): ‘The weather was close, warm and muggy, the room crowded to suffocation and frightfully hot, like the Black Hole of Calcutta, though the doors and all the windows were wide open’ (Kilvert’s Diary, Vols.1–3, ed. William Plomer, 1961).
black is beautiful The Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jnr launched a poster campaign based on these words in 1967, but Stokely Carmichael had used the phrase earlier at a Memphis Civil Rights rally in 1966, and it had appeared in Liberation (NY) on 25 September 1965. The phrase may have had its origins in the Song of Solomon 1:5: ‘I am black, but comely.’
black list See ENEMIES LIST.
black mark, Bentley! Jimmy Edwards chiding Dick Bentley in the BBC radio show Take It From Here (1948–59). Frank Muir, the co-scriptwriter, commented (1979) that it arose from the use of ‘black mark!’ by James Robertson Justice in Peter Ustinov’s film of Vice Versa (UK 1947).
black power A slogan encompassing just about anything that people want it to mean, from simple pride in the black race to a threat of violence. Adam Clayton Powell Jnr, the Harlem congressman, said in a baccalaureate address at Howard University in May 1966: ‘To demand these God-given rights is to seek black power – what I call audacious power – the power to build black institutions of splendid achievement.’ On 6 June the same year, James Meredith, the first black person to integrate the University of Mississippi (in 1962), was shot and wounded during a civil rights march. Stokely Carmichael, heading the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, continued the march, during which his contingent first used the phrase as a shout. Carmichael used it in a speech at Greenwood, Mississippi, the same month. It was also adopted as a slogan by the Congress for Racial Equality. However, the notion was not new in the 1960s. Langston Hughes had written in Simple Takes a Wife (1953): ‘Negro blood is so powerful – because just one drop of black blood makes a coloured man – one drop – you are a Negro!…Black is powerful.’
black velvet Name of a drink made up of equal parts of champagne and stout (especially Guinness) and which derives from its appearance and taste. Also used to describe the sexual attributes of a black woman, according to Partridge/Slang. Known by 1930 in both senses.
blah-blah-blah ‘Blah’ or ‘blah-blah’, signifying ‘empty talk; airy mouthings’, are phrases that have been around (originally in the USA) since the end of the First World War. More recently the tripartite version (although known by 1924) has become marginally more frequent to denote words omitted or as another way of saying ‘and so on’. Ira and George Gershwin wrote a song called ‘Blah, Blah, Blah’ for a film called Delicious (1931) which contains such lines as ‘Blah, blah, blah, blah moon…Blah, blah, blah, blah croon’. Other examples are: ‘Burt [a journalist]: “You wouldn’t object to that angle for the piece? Here’s what he says: The Family bla-bla-bla, here’s how he lives…”’ – Peter Nichols, Chez Nous (1974); ‘Saul Kelner, 19…was the first person in line to see the president. He arrived at the White House…111/2 hours before the open house was to begin. “We didn’t sleep,” he said. “What we did, we circulated a list to ensure our places on line. ‘We the people, blah, blah, blah,’ and we all signed it”’ – The Washington Post (22 January 1989); ‘Bush referred to the diplomatic language [after a NATO summit conference in Bonn] in casual slang as “blah, blah”’ – The Washington Post (31 May 1989). The latter caused foreign journalists problems: ‘After all, how do you translate “blah, blah” into Italian?’
(the) bland leading the bland This coinage is anonymous and is quoted in Leslie Halliwell, The Filmgoer’s Book of Quotes (1973). It probably alludes to ‘Television is the bland leading the bland’, which occurs in Murray Schumach, The Face on the Cutting Room Floor (1964). The trope also occurs in J. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958): ‘These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification, the bland lead the bland.’ That same year (2 November 1958), The Sunday Times reported critic Kenneth Tynan’s view on his joining another paper: ‘They say the New Yorker is the bland leading the bland…I don’t know if I’m bland enough.’ Compare (THE) BLIND LEADING THE BLIND.
(to kiss the) Blarney Stone