English Words

HUMBLE PIE
I am still the same John Bull, who of glory once supped full,
Faced Europe with my subsidies, my soldiers, and my ships;
When I’d bites behind my barks, when I hit straight at my
[8.2]
106 ENGLISH WORDS

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marks,
And found my foes in fisticuffs, as I found my friends in tips:
But now I’m all for a quiet life, ‘jowk, and let the jaw go by’;
Keep my feelings in my pockets, and put up with HUMBLE PIE.
Once foreigners looked up to me: a high head I could hold:
If my prestige cost me millions, those millions’ worth was mine:
Strong and safe were laid my bulwarks with British blood and
gold;
Of a grander God than Mammon my island was the shrine: 
Honour was given to honour, in those darkened days gone by;
Now honour’s sold for money…and my dish is HUMBLE PIE.
Then, in dealing with a bully, I was game to hold my own;
And the ground once wisely taken I stood to, stiff and stout:
In smooth tongues I had little faith, but much in teeth well
shown,
And hands as strong to use the sword as slow to take it out.
The only kind of fighting I disliked was fighting shy,
And the one dish I would not eat, in those days, was HUMBLE
PIE!
‘If the right cheek’s smitten, turn the left,’ was written then as
now,
But the Quakers were the only sect who to that rule would
agree:
So with so much Christian doctrine waiting practice, I allow,
I applied that text to friends, not foes, and hit them who hit
at me:
But now it’s ‘Give your coat to those who to steal your
waistcoat try,’
And the end is peace and plenty—that is, of HUMBLE PIE!
Hear Baxter and Bow Lowe prove as plain as tongue can speak,
How of all possible Governments this Government is the best,
Who cares for the foreigner’s laugh in his sleeve, the foreigner’s
tongue in his cheek?
The smaller John Bull sings, ’tis clear, the warmer he lines his
nest.
Once shame, they say, made him bilious and lean, but that is
all my eye—
There’s no meat he so thrives upon (see Baxter) as HUMBLE
PIE!
As you can see in [8.3], the structure of idioms is similar to the structure of ordinary syntactic phrases. The
same rules that generate ordinary syntactic phrases also generate idioms: 
WORD MANUFACTURE 107

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Obviously, knowing the grammatical structure and the meaning of the words in the idiomatic expressions in
[8.3] is no help in understanding what the idioms mean. The meanings of these idioms must be listed in the
dictionary along the lines shown in [8.4]:
[8.4]
Idiom
Example
a. save someone’s bacon ‘save someone a lot of trouble’
Thanks for talking to the police officer. You have
saved my bacon.
b. take something with a pinch of salt ‘be sceptical’
I’d take whatever any politician says with a pinch of
salt.
c. keep tabs on someone ‘check up on’ (‘keep an eye on’) Probation officers keep tabs on young offenders on
parole.
d. in high spirits ‘slightly drunk and excited’
They were in high spirits when they got back from the
party.
An indefinitely large number of syntactic phrases can be turned into idioms by assigning them
idiosyncratic, lexicalised meanings. This is one of the ways in which a limitless supply of lexical items is
assured, and another reason why all the lexical items of a language cannot be listed in a dictionary.