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Tuesday 7 October 2008

Mind Your Language

Dot Wordsworth gives it her best shot

I hardly wish to interpose my body between Anthony Horowitz and Simon Hoggart, even though the former invoked me. He declared (Letters, 10 May) that he is puzzled by Mr Hoggart’s remark in his television column that ‘in 1945 nobody ever said, “I’ll give it my best shot”,’ as someone was made to in Foyle’s War.

This is not just a matter of finding the two words best and shot next to each other. In Treasure Island, the answer to the question ‘Who’s the best shot?’ is Squire Trelawney. No, the shot we’re talking about is neither the discharge from a firearm nor the person who makes it. A shot predates gunpowder, and just as shooting was transferred from bow and arrow to gun and bullet, so a shot was happily applied to a stroke in a ball game.

When illustrating the exclamation ‘Good shot!’ the Oxford English Dictionary cites P.G. Wodehouse. In Love Among the Chickens (1903) Wodehouse, as an accurate stylist, gives it as ‘Oh, shot, sir! Shot, indeed!’

But Mr Horowitz puzzles me when he says that the OED ‘ascribes’ the phrase ‘give it my best shot’ to Dorothy L. Sayers. Certainly the dictionary quotes her Murder Must Advertise (1933), along with Wodehouse, to illustrate good shot. That is not the same as ‘give it my best shot’, which it lists under best. There the earliest citation is from 1952, from the Traverse City Record-Eagle, which sells in the counties of Antrim, Benzie, Charlevoix, Cheboygan, Crawford, Emmet, Grand Traverse, Kalkaska, Leelanau, Manistee, Missaukee, Otsego and Wexford, in Michigan. So the metaphor is unlikely to come from cricket.

The denotation of shot in give it my best shot is ‘attempt’. That meaning has been around for 130 years, for in 1889, Edward FitzGerald wrote in a letter: ‘I cannot understand why I have not yet taken to Hawthorne... I will have another shot.’

It is not easy to guess the age of a colloquial phrase. To make a shot in the sense of ‘guess’ certainly dates from the 19th century. The phrase like a shot has two senses; meaning ‘immediately, rapidly’, it is found in the early 19th century; meaning ‘most willingly’, not until 1894. Perhaps if someone looked hard for earlier examples of both senses, they might be found. My husband does not remember the phrase ‘give it my best shot’ from the second world war, but he was only a boy. Examples in print might have gone unnoticed. Has any reader found one?

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