My husband may not often be right, but he had some cogent criticism of the much-quoted words of Geoffrey Howe at his resignation in 1990: ‘Rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.’
As my husband remarks, it is no easy task to break a bat and conceal the deed from the opening batsmen until they are already at the crease. No matter. Cricket does inspire figures of speech, and one is ‘off his own bat’.
You’ll often hear it as ‘off his own back’, which is misconceived. An early citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Sydney Smith, that witty clergyman, in an 1845 defence of Irish priests charging fees to support themselves.
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