Reporting a case of corruption recently, the Yorkshire Post quoted an observation about a culprit: ‘Any work he was doing was off his own back and he should not have been paid.’ Meanwhile the Cambridge Evening News reported the deliverance from a custodial sentence of a ‘nuisance drunk’ in Newmarket who had waved a samurai sword at police (what a lot of people possess samurai swords; not a recommendation of character, I’d have thought), but had ‘aspirations to become a landscape gardener and is now attending drink counselling off his own back’.
Back should, of course, be bat. This is a typically mangled example of a dead metaphor, a cliché if you like, or, more respectably, an idiom. The phrase is not examined by the speaker, or, if it is examined cursorily, it seems to make a kind of sense. After all, we do not always know the literal references of the metaphors we use. Charles Moore was recently wondering on a neighbouring page what board it is in across the board.
That phrase had hardly come in before it has, if reports are correct, begun to disappear. The board was a bookmaker’s. The phrase was noted some time before 1950. It is an Americanism, and the OED wisely quotes Webster: ‘Across-the-board, embracing all classes or categories without exception; — from placing a combination wager on a race horse to win, place, or show, that is, betting “across the board”.’ Though it seems literally to mean little different from each way, it was for some reason taken up enthusiastically by labour-relations professionals. (And who, now that we are among the across figures of speech, would realise that to come across well or to get it across is a metaphor from the theatre, the things across which you come or get being the footlights?)
Mr Moore finds that across the board is giving way to across the piece.
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