(a) chip of(f) the old block (or same block) Referring to a child having the same qualities as its parent, this expression’s use was established by the 1620s. Edmund Burke said of the first speech in the House of Commons by William Pitt the Younger (in 1781): ‘Not merely a chip of the old “block”, but the old block itself’ (that is, William Pitt the Elder, 1st Earl of Chatham).
(to have a) chip on one’s shoulder Meaning ‘to bear a grudge in a defensive manner’, the expression originated in the USA where it was known by the early 19th century. The Long Island Telegraph explained in 1830: ‘When two churlish boys were determined to fight, a chip [of wood] would be placed on the shoulder of one, and the other [was] demanded to knock it off at his peril.’
chips See CASH IN ONE’S.
(when the) chips are down Meaning ‘at a crucial stage in a situation’, this phrase alludes to the chips used in betting games. The bets are placed when they are down, but the outcome is still unknown. ‘If when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation…acts like a pitiful helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world’ – Richard M. Nixon, TV speech (30 April 1970); ‘There is a substantial body of opinion in Britain – and in Chobham – that holds that Lloyd’s Names deserve all the suffering they have got. In a sense, it is this factor that has turned their calamity into a tragedy. Now that the chips are down, communities aren’t rallying round’ – Independent on Sunday (19 March 1995).
chips with everything Phrase descriptive of British working-class life and used as the title of a play (1962) by Arnold Wesker about class attitudes in the RAF during National Service. Alluding to the belief that the working classes tend to have chips (potatoes) as the accompaniment to almost every dish at mealtimes. Indeed, the play contains the line: ‘You breed babies and you eat chips with everything.’ Earlier, in an essay published as part of Declaration (1957), the film director Lindsay Anderson had written: ‘Coming back to Britain is always something of an ordeal. It ought not to be, but it is. And you don’t have to be a snob to feel it. It isn’t just the food, the sauce bottles on the cafe tables, and the chips with everything. It isn’t just saying goodbye to wine, goodbye to sunshine…’
chivalry See AGE OF.
(a) chocolate soldier Bernard Shaw’s play Arms and the Man (1894) was turned into a musical in Germany, Der Tapfere Soldat [Brave Soldier] (1908). The title of the English version of this musical (New York, 1909) was The Chocolate Soldier. The story concerns Captain Bluntschli, a Swiss officer, who gets the better of a professional cavalry soldier. Shaw’s phrase for Bluntschli was, rather, ‘the chocolate cream soldier’. Later, during the First World War, ‘chocolate soldier’ seems to have become a term of abuse about a certain type of recruit who complained of the conditions. This was not how Shaw viewed Bluntschli. The character was not a coward but an admirable, realistic soldier who saw the sense of keeping alive. That was why he carried chocolate creams, not bullets. Subsequently, the Australian Army of the Second World War, the Militia (who volunteered to serve only within Australia) were known as the Chocolate Soldiers because of their chocolate-coloured shoulder patches. Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was nicknamed the ‘chocolate sailor’ during the Second World War because, though a Commander of the RNVR, he never actually went to sea. In 2002, during a court case, the model Naomi Campbell mistakenly sensed that a journalist who had described her as a ‘chocolate soldier’ was indulging in racist abuse. As someone commented at the time, the reference was more probably to the expression ‘as much use as a chocolate teapot/kettle’, i.e. useless. In 1943, there was an American song ‘Chocolate Soldier from the USA’ that did describe a black soldier fighting for his country and so was not considered derogatory.
Christmas See ALL DRESSED; BY CHRISTMAS; DO THEY KNOW. ’Christmas comes but once a year’ – thank God! The allusion is to a 16th-century rhyme (’…and when it comes it brings good cheer’); the sour comment – presumably from someone objecting to the commercialization of the season or the exhaustion of having to organize the festivities – was known by the 1940s.
Christmas has come early this year Meaning, ‘We have had some good fortune or welcome [usually financial] news’. Beginning a report in The Guardian (8 April 1988), Michael Smith wrote of the Volvo purchase of the Leyland Bus operation: ‘Christmas has come early for management and staff at Leyland Bus, the sole UK manufacturers of buses which changed hands last week’ – they stood to enjoy a windfall of £19 million. The previous week, Lord Williams had said of another sale – that of Rover to British Aerospace: ‘Christmas has come rather early this year.’ From McGowan & Hands’s Don’t Cry for Me, Sergeant-Major (1983) (about the Falklands war): ‘De-briefings afterwards…related that the SAS “thought Christmas had come early”. They couldn’t believe their luck. There were at least eleven Argentine aircraft virtually unguarded.’
Christmasses See ALL OF.
chuck it—! Meaning, ‘Abandon that line of reasoning, that posturing’. An example from the BBC’s World at One radio programme in May 1983 during the run-up to the General Election: Roy Hattersley complained that he was being questioned only on the ten per cent of the Labour Party manifesto with which he disagreed. Robin Day, the interviewer, replied: ‘Chuck it, Hattersley!’ This format was used earlier and notably by G. K. Chesterton. In his ‘Antichrist, or the Reunion of Christendom’ (1912), he satirized the pontificating of F. E. Smith (later 1st Earl of Birkenhead) on the Welsh Disestablishment Bill: ‘Talk about the pews and steeples / And the cash that goes therewith! / But the souls of Christian peoples…/ Chuck it, Smith!’
cigar See END OF ME; GIVE THE MAN.
cigarette See AH, WOODBINE.
Cinderella See COULD MAKE ANY.
circumstances See DUE TO.
circuses See BREAD AND.
(a) citizen of the world Cicero has this phrase as ‘civem totius mundi’, meaning ‘one who is cosmopolitan, at home anywhere’. Similarly, Socrates said, ‘I am a citizen, not of Athens or Greece, but of the world.’ The OED2 finds the English phrase in Caxton (1474) and, ‘If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world’ in Francis Bacon’s ‘Goodness, and Goodness of Nature’ (1625). The Citizen of the World was the title of a collection of letters by Oliver Goldsmith purporting to be those of Lien Chi Altangi, a philosophic Chinaman living in London and commenting on English life and characters. They were first published as ‘Chinese Letters’ in the Public Ledger (1760–1), and then again under this title in 1762. James Boswell, not untypically, in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1786) reflects: ‘I am, I flatter myself, completely a citizen of the world…In my travels through Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, France, I never felt myself from home; and I sincerely love “every kindred and tongue and people and nation”.’
—City PHRASES. The suffix ‘—City’, applied since the 1960s, is a way of elevating a place or situation, concrete or abstract, to a higher status. ‘Fat City’, meaning ‘an ideal situation’ or ‘wealth’ (often illegally gained), however, may have been around since the 1940s. Fat City was the title of a film with a boxing theme (US 1972). ‘Nose City’ featured in the BBC Radio show The Burkiss Way (20 December 1977). ‘Cardboard city’ was the name applied to an area on London’s South Bank where homeless people would shelter in cardboard boxes (1980s). ‘Depression City – one of a number of wholly imaginary localities invented in the early 1980s, as the symbolic dwelling places of people in certain states of mind. It originated as the obverse of “Fun City”, as New York was christened in 1966 by a Herald