What’s so fresh about ‘fresh hell’?
‘What fresh hell can this be?’ Dorothy Parker would ask if the doorbell rang. Now fresh hell has been freshly added to the Oxford English Dictionary. But was Parker the onlie begetter of the phrase? The hunt has been on to find earlier examples. The OED itself quotes a ghostly story within The Pickwick Papers (1837) for a parallel: ‘He started on the entrance of the stranger, and rose feebly to his feet. “What now, what now?” said the old man – “What fresh misery is this? What do you want here?”’ I’ve been doing what counts for me as research. In The Pickwick Papers, Dickens uses fresh twice as
