British English has many words for a quick tongue, and one phrase for using too many words.
Dry: Funny in a quiet, serious-sounding way. “She has a very dry sense of humor” is praise.
Deadpan: Said with a straight face, so that the joke is easy to miss.
Quick-witted: Able to think of a clever reply at once.
A put-down: A short remark that makes someone look foolish.
Droll: Amusing in a quiet or odd way.
To labor the point: To keep explaining something that was already clear.
British English has many phrases that test an idea against experience, and several that make fun of ideas without it.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating: Something can be judged only by trying it.
Suck it and see: Try it and find out whether it works.
Fine in theory: It will not work.
Ivory tower: A place where people think without contact with real life.
Blue-sky thinking: Ideas with no practical limits. The phrase is often used with irony.
Management speak: Jargon that sounds impressive and says little.
British English has many words that make eagerness sound slightly suspect.
Keen: Eager. “He’s very keen” can be a gentle warning.
Trying too hard: Making an effort that others can see, and that therefore fails.
A bit much: Too enthusiastic, too friendly or too loud for the situation.
Full-on: Intense in a way that tires other people.
Smarmy: Friendly or flattering in an insincere way.
Salesy: Sounding like someone who is trying to sell something.
On 25 April 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick published the structure of DNA in Nature. Near the end of their short paper, they wrote: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”
The sentence pointed to how life copies itself. It has been described as possibly one of the biggest understatements in biology.
In a letter to Robert Hooke in 1675, Isaac Newton wrote: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” The image was old. In its earliest known form it is attributed to the twelfth-century scholar Bernard of Chartres.
A few writers have recently read the line as a sarcastic remark about Hooke’s appearance. Hooke was slight in build, but not particularly short. On either reading, Newton described his own achievement as a view from other people’s height.
In Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, published in 1908, Mr. Toad escapes and sings a song about himself. Grahame calls it “perhaps the most conceited song that any animal ever composed.” One verse runs: “The clever men at Oxford / Know all that there is to be knowed. / But they none of them know one half as much / As intelligent Mr. Toad!”
In Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, published in 1849 and 1850, the clerk Uriah Heep never stops describing himself as humble. “I am well aware that I am the umblest person going,” he tells David. He is the main villain of the second half of the novel, and his character is notable for its sycophancy.
The rule is not only to sound modest. A modesty that is used as a tool is read as a warning sign too.
In the introduction to On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, Charles Darwin calls the book an abstract: “This Abstract, which I now publish, must necessarily be imperfect. I cannot here give references.”
On 30 November 1954, his eightieth birthday, Winston Churchill gave a speech in Westminster Hall. Speaking about the war, he said: “It was the nation and the race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.”
In 1993, the supermarket chain Tesco introduced the slogan “Every little helps.” Marc Cave, then at the agency Lowe Howard-Spink, says the line came up over lunch while he and a colleague were talking about the project.