Man flu

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As night falls 2010 – Bluray 720p

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Early Doors

"They try to play a very physical game and get on top of you early doors." That comes from a report on a football match I read recently. Early doors? What's that all about? It means 'at an early stage in the proceedings'.

But why 'doors'? Where did that come from? Nobody knows for certain, but the best guess is that it originally referred to theaters, music halls and similar places opening their doors in advance of the time when the advertised entertainment was due to begin.

Customers who slipped in then had a much better choice of seats than people who left it to the last moment, so from the outset 'early doors' implied gaining an advantage by taking action at the first opportunity.

Another strand in the phrase's history may be that until recently pubs in Britain had to close during the afternoon, so there'd be quite a rush for the bar when the doors reopened around 5 o'clock.

But wherever it came from, it seems to have reached a wider audience thanks to sports commentaries on television. It came to be associated especially with the outspoken British television soccer pundit Ron Atkinson, who could be relied on to use the phrase at least once a match.

And now, it seems to be popping up all over the place, including non-sporting contexts – as in "She had a bad cold, and retired to bed early doors" – so much so that it’s become something of a cliché.

Down the pan

A second-hand toilet seller takes a break in the Philippines. Photo: Romeo Ranoco / Reuters

Today's phrase
If something goes 'down the pan' or 'down the toilet' it means it is wasted or ruined.

For example:

Bottle and Bottler

Brown the Bottler' the placards said. Gordon Brown had recently taken over as prime minister of Britain in 2007, and he'd been thinking of holding a general election, to confirm his leadership. Then he suddenly seems to have been struck by terrible doubts over whether he'd win, so he decided not to have an election after all. His enemies accused him of being scared, of, to use a different metaphor, chickening out. That's what 'bottler' means in British slang: a person who lacks the courage to go through with something.

But why? It all goes back to a rather strange use of 'bottle' to mean 'bravery' or 'nerve', which has been around for nearly a century now. So if someone has lost their bottle, they've lost their nerve, they're afraid. The verb 'to bottle' soon followed: you could 'bottle out of' something, or simply 'bottle it', if you didn't have the guts to do it. And so we got 'bottler'.

But the original question why remains. There's an old slang expression 'no bottle' meaning 'no good' which may have something to do with it, and it's often claimed that it's linked with Cockney rhyming slang 'bottle and glass'. That stands for 'arse', and various not entirely convincing attempts have been made to connect that with the idea of courage.

And a word of warning: in Australia, 'bottler' means 'someone or something excellent' (as in "That try he scored was a real bottler"). A slippery thing is slang.

Big mouth

A man opens a camel's mouth wide at a camel fair in Pushkar in India. Photo: Roberto Schmidt / AFP

f you 'are a big mouth' or 'have a big mouth' it means you talk too much, especially about things which should be kept secret or avoided.

For example:

Faith, Hope, Love and Gratitude

Do you have the four qualities that determine the mindset of a survivor?

Published on November 22, 2012 by Dale Archer, M.D. in Reading Between The (Head)Lines

Resilience is defined in psychology as the capacity to cope with stress, traumatic events and adversity. There has been a tremendous amount of research on this subject with respect to Hurricane Katrina, the Tsunami, Haitian earthquake and Chilean miners in terms of predicting who would thrive and who would struggle after these horrendous disasters.
My own experience when dealing with .....