I’ve found the origin of the football cliché ‘over the moon’. Or I thought I’d found it. In a speech written in 1857 for W.E. Gladstone by Lord Lyttelton, his brother-in-law, in a family dialect known as Glynnese, comes the following sentence: ‘The Dolly was over the moon with a magpie sandwich which she took like pork.’ This may be translated as: ‘The dowager was in high spirits with an underdone sandwich, which she took without any feeling of gratitude.’
I’ve always been in two minds about Glynnese. Sometimes it makes me laugh, with its presupposition of a houseful of larks and children. Its great exponents were Catherine, Mrs Gladstone, and her sister Mary, Lady Lyttelton. The latter was known as ‘Mother of Millions’, and herds of children were often found at her house at Hagley or her sister’s at Hawarden.
Mary died in 1857, as the ODNB says, rather unnecessarily, ‘exhausted by childbearing, and leaving eight sons and four daughters’.
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