To throw a spanner in the works is to deliberately sabotage, coined in more industrial times when lobbing a hulk of metal into a piece of functioning factory plant would have brought an early end to the workers' shift. Assuming this anti-military feeling - if it ever truly existed - has today dissipated, let the last thing ever sent to Coventry be this phrase. According to Brewer's dictionary, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, in his History of the Great Rebellion (1702-04), says that Royalist prisoners captured in Birmingham were sent to Coventry, which was a Parliamentary stronghold. So when a soldier was "sent to Coventry" he was ostracized.
The phrase comes from a 17th Century perception that the citizens of Coventry once so disliked soldiers that anyone seen speaking to one was instantly outlawed. Sending someone to Coventry means to ignore them.
With equine presence on the average British street restricted these days to flamboyant weddings or expensive funerals, perhaps the modern day metaphor should be putting the hybrid engine before the dual airbag release mechanism. In France, it is "mettre la charrue devant les boeufs" or "to put the plough before the oxen". According to Brewer's dictionary, one of its first mentions was in 1475 in the children's book, The Babees Book: "This methinks is playnely to sett the carte before the horse." Other languages have their own equivalents. Putting the cart before the horse means to reverse the natural order of things. The following might supply some inspiration. Tell us your suggestions for a new "Forth Bridge" metaphor using the form at the bottom of this page. What might take its place? "Like Northern Rock paying back taxpayers," suggests one reader of the BBC News website. The paint has an estimated life-span of 25 years, although it is hoped it will last closer to 40 years.īut what Network Rail, the owners of the Forth Bridge, stands to gain in productivity, the English language could lose a cherished aphorism.Īccording to the Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms, if "repairing or improving something is like painting the Forth Bridge, it takes such a long time that by the time you have finished doing it, you have to start again". With three coats of a special paint, similar to that used in the offshore oil industry, painting of the bridge is due to be completed in four years. After 100 years the painting of the Forth Rail bridge is to come to an end, depriving the English language of one its most treasured similes.
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