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Our ancestors as football fans and the echo of their chants, from our family history to the present day Also revealed: Chubby Victorian footballer who inspired 'who ate all the pies'.(Please see next page link below for full article with images) The findings have been put into a new dictionary, with Foulke being the most interesting and intriguing. Foulke kept goal for Sheffield United, Chelsea and Bradford City between 1894 and 1907. Sheffield Utd footie fans playfully directed the chant at Foulke in 1894 who was in the Guinness Book of Records at the time as the heaviest ever footballer. It has been used from the terraces at anyone with a less than Twiggy-like figure including ex-Newcastle United frontman Mickey Quinn who took the phrase 'Who ate all the pies?' as the title of his autobiography. But it is not just the fans who are recycling antique catchphrases. Managers and players who claim to be 'over the moon' are using an expression first coined by Victorian and Edwardian aristocrats. An upper class crowd nicknamed The Souls developed their own language so they could exclude outsiders and took 'over the moon' from the nursery rhyme line 'the cow jumped over the moon' to mean joyous. The dictionary uncovered hundreds which had their origins in sport from the expression 'you can run but you can't hide' to the US term 'taking a rain check.' Julia Cresswell, author of The Cat's Pyjamas: The Penguin Book of Clichés, delved through documents and records at Oxford University's Bodleian Library, to try and find the first recorded use for many phrases. The book's chapter on sport and games also shows 'you can run but you can't hide' was first coined by champion boxer Joe Louis of fleet-footed opponent Billy Conn in 1946. And 'taking a rain check' goes back to 1884 when a 'rain check' was a free ticket to another baseball game for fans who had bought tickets to a game called off for bad weather. The phrases 'off your own bat' and 'a safe pair of hands' both come from cricket but are now commonly used while a 'blow by blow' account and someone having a 'fighting chance' are both from boxing. Ms Cresswell said: "Where do clichés come from? Some have been in the language since our earliest records...others are news…..Fashion plays a role in their use as do changes in society." Other surprises uncovered by the book include 'mad for it', an expression associated with Manchester and in particular the Oasis brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher, and actually dates from documents published in 1670. It appears to have been used in much the same context as today to describe being excited about something, said Ms Cresswell. Some catchphrases go even further back. To get out of the 'wrong side of the bed' dates back to the Romans who thought the left hand side was unlucky and 'to strike while the iron's hot' was used by Chaucer. Men who like to 'sow their wild oats' can be traced back to a quote from 1576, 'blushing brides' were referred to in the 18th century and 'lie back and think of England' comes from a Lady's diary from the late 1800s. The phrase 'Kiss and Tell' was found in a book published in 1675 meaning exactly the same as it does now. And Shakespeare also takes the credit for many of today's popular expressions including beggars' belief, the unkindest cut, salad days, to the manner born, murder most foul, cruel to be kind and others.
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