Home > The Magazine > The Week

Saturday 6 September 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Clemency Burton-Hill

Clemency suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth

Wednesday, 31st October 2007

When Gisela Stuart was talking to the dear old editor on the wireless the other morning, she used the phrase ‘between a rock and a hard place’.

As for the American rock and hard place, the earliest source found is a publication called Dialect Notes (1921), which gives the meaning ‘to be bankrupt’, adding, ‘Common in Arizona in recent panics; sporadic in California’. So the context seems to be mining. It is true that, in 1917, 1,000 striking copper miners in Arizona were deported, but the reference is doubtless wider.

Internet philologists try unhelpfully to make the phrase fit the tale of Scylla and Charybdis, from the Odyssey. Scylla does live on a cliff, but she is not a rock, she is a monster with six heads on long necks, each with three rows of teeth to ‘crunch anyone to death in a moment, and she sits deep within her shady cell thrusting out her heads and peering all round the rock, fishing for dolphins’, as Circe warns Odysseus, in Samuel Butler’s translation. Charybdis is the monster that operates the nearby whirlpool thrice a day. Circe advises Odysseus to keep to the Scylla side, ‘for you had better lose six men than your whole crew’. That’s what he does, but he is sickened by the death of his six men.

Perhaps it is a measure of our cultural poverty that we have dumped Scylla and Charybdis for a figure that is scarcely clearer but certainly duller.

Previous page 1 | 2

More articles from: Dot Wordsworth | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Mind Your Language

Dot Wordsworth

Dot Wordsworth continues her look at BBC booklets on pronunciation published in the 1930s

Letters

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Make your excuses and go

The Spectator on the difficulties engulfing the Government

Diary

Tony Parsons

Tony Parsons visits Tokyo

Politics

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

The peculiarities of a realist

Philip Hensher

Fine just the way it is: Wyoming stories by Annie Proulx

Dearly beloved Meg

Jonathan Sumption

Sir Thomas More was the most dedicated of Henry VIII’s Chancellors before becoming the most famous of his victims.

High Life

Taki

That’s not fair play

America is still the nation whose eyes say ‘yes’

Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray tours a country despondent about its presidential race and increasingly uncertain about Barack Obama. Yet the world still needs America’s strengths