"We realized that the important thing was not the film itself but that which the film provoked."
Fernando Solanas
Search This Blog
All bark and no bite
The meaning of this phrase seems pretty apparent. A dog that barks and barks and barks but never follows it through with an actual bite is not as scary as it may seem. According to Wiktionary the phrase officially means: (idiomatic) Full of big talk but lacking action, power, or substance; pretentious, (idiomatic) Describes someone who often says cutting remarks, but actually has a soft personality underneath.
The literal use of this phrase hails from 1838 when the phrase originally was "call it half a day" to mean leaving work early. (source) The modern use of the phrase is to indicate ending something due to false sense of accomplishment.
There are two probable origins for this idiom and I think both are equally plausible. The first one is that when you spread butter on bread you are buttering it up like one would do when trying to flatter someone. The second is in ancient India there was a practice of throwing balls of butter at statues to ask for favor, i.e. buttering them up. ( source ) When we use the phrase today we generally mean that extreme flattery is used to gain information or favor. It's not always necessarily a compliment.
This phrase was used a lot in 1953 but an earlier citation puts it at 1940 in a Metals and Plastics Publications advertisement. Read about it here . The phrase means you get more for your money.
Comments
Post a Comment