Phrases – Interesting Literature

‘The More the Merrier’: Meaning and Origin

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The more the merrier’ is a famous phrase, but what does it mean? And where – and when – did this saying originate? And what do its origins have to do with a heart-wrenching medieval lament for a dead child?

Let’s take a closer look at ‘The more the merrier’, to understand both its meaning (and what’s so curious about that meaning in light of another well-known proverb) and its origins in a work of literature written over seven-hundred years ago.

‘All’s Well That Ends Well’: Meaning and Origin

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The phrase ‘all’s well that ends well’ has attained the status of a proverb, so that may lead us to believe that it should be attributed to that most prolific of all authors, ‘Anon.’ But in fact, the phrase can be fairly confidently ascribed to a particular writer.

But which writer? Before we explore the meaning of ‘all’s well that ends well’, let’s have a quick quiz question. Which writer is the first known person to use the phrase ‘all’s well that ends well’?

‘Sight for Sore Eyes’: Meaning and Origin

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

We might say that a cliché is a truism plus time. And yet if we grant that the phrase ‘a sight for sore eyes’ is a cliché, we have to ask how such an odd turn of phrase came to be so well-known.

Why should the speaker’s ‘eyes’ be ‘sore’, and how did this phrase come to be universally adopted as an English idiom, and then – in time – a cliché?

The Meaning and Origin of ‘Good Fences Make Good Neighbours’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning of a well-known expression

Here’s a question for you: who first wrote the line, ‘good fences make good neighbours’? Although it was the American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) who first used that particular wording, the sentiment, expressed in slightly different (though only very slightly different) words, is considerably older. So where did ‘good fences make good neighbours’ originally come from, and what does it mean in the Robert Frost poem in which it appears?

The Meaning and Origin of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls; It Tolls for Thee’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the origins of a famous phrase about human sympathy and mortality

‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ This phrase has become world-famous but its origins, and even its meaning, are often misconstrued or at least only partially grasped. Many people would be able to identify the origins of ‘never send to know for whom the bell tolls’ in the work of John Donne (which would be correct), with quite a few of them thinking that the line originated in a poem of Donne’s (which would not be correct).