SHAGGY DOGS:BIG BROTHER is a phrase we have come to use to describe being watched over by the authorities at all times. It is one of the most frequently employed idioms today, thanks to a certain popular reality television show, writes Albert Jack.
In 1948, George Orwell wrote his classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-four in which the government exercises dictatorial control by watching every move of its citizens.
Orwell called this cynical, oppressive head of a totalitarian state Big Brother: "On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster gazed from the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features.
"It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran. Nobody has ever seen big brother. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen.
"We may be reasonably sure he will never die, and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was born. Big brother is infallible and all-powerful."
Also featured in this book is the dreaded Room 101, where you would be tortured by the thing you feared the most, and from which it was thought nobody would ever return.
Incidentally, Room 101 was the office Orwell had assigned to him at the BBC when he worked for the corporation during the second World War.
A Hooray Henry is a disparaging term used in Britain to describe a loud-mouthed, upper-class, public school idiot.
Jim Godbolt coined the phrase in 1951 when he used it to describe the fans of Old Etonian jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton who would turn up in droves to the 100 Club in Oxford Street, London, to hear him play. Between songs, Lyttelton's supporters could be identified by the loud, upper-class voices shouting "Hooray, Hooray".
The full expression derives from a character in Damon Runyon's story Tight Shoes (1936) who is described as "strictly a Hoorah Henry".
Lyttleton himself seemed to confirm this association, while distancing himself from the term, when he said, during an interview: "In jazz circles, aggressively 'upper-class' characters are known as Hoorays, an adaptation, I believe, of Damon Runyon's 'Hooray Henries'."
Extracted from Shaggy Dogs and Black Sheepby Albert Jack (Penguin Books)