In the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, released in 1975, King Arthur fights the Black Knight and cuts off his left arm. The knight replies: “‘Tis but a scratch.”
The line echoes Mercutio in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, who calls his fatal wound “a scratch, a scratch.”
At the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815, Lord Uxbridge, commander of the Allied cavalry, was hit in the leg by one of the last cannon shots of the day. In the popular story, he was beside the Duke of Wellington and said: “By God, sir, I’ve lost my leg!” Wellington replied: “By God, sir, so you have!”
The exchange may not have happened in these words. Horace Seymour, who helped carry Uxbridge from the field, told the politician John Wilson Croker another version, which Croker wrote in his diary in 1818: “I have got it at last,” and “No? Have you, by God?”
The Fabian Society, a socialist society that helped found the Labour Representation Committee, the forerunner of the Labour Party, took its name from the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus. His nickname was Cunctator, “the Delayer.” The society chose a tortoise as its emblem, for a slow, almost unnoticed transition to socialism.
In 1923, the leading Fabian Sidney Webb gave the presidential address at the Labour Party conference. His phrase from that speech is usually quoted as “the inevitability of gradualness.”
The House of Lords Act 1999 removed most hereditary peers from the House of Lords. Under a compromise, 92 of them were allowed to stay. The government offered this on an interim basis and expected a second stage of reform to follow.
The second stage came 27 years later. The House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2026 repealed the section of the 1999 Act that had kept the 92.
In 1943, the Board of Trade issued a booklet called Make Do and Mend. It showed households how to repair, alter and reuse the clothes they already had. The campaign urged people to save resources for the war effort, and a character called Mrs Sew-and-Sew became well known as part of it.
William Heath Robinson (1872 to 1944) was an English cartoonist who drew elaborate machines that performed simple tasks. His name entered the language. The earliest citation for “Heath Robinson” in the Oxford English Dictionary, describing an absurdly complicated contraption, is from 1917.
Today, a “Heath Robinson” contraption perhaps most commonly means a temporary fix made with ingenuity and whatever is at hand, often string and tape.
At work, correction often begins with a phrase that sounds like a small request.
Can I have a quiet word?: I need to correct something, in private.
Just a gentle reminder: This is late, and I have noticed.
It might be worth a second look: This is wrong.
I’m not angry, just disappointed: This is a serious rebuke.
The Acas Code of Practice on Disciplinary and Grievance Procedures sets out how employers should handle discipline at work. Its foreword says that many potential disciplinary or grievance issues can be resolved informally. It adds: “A quiet word is often all that is required to resolve an issue.”