Page:Farmer - Slang and its analogues past and present - Volume 1.pdf/50

 Brought Bob, the poet, on his legs soon,-- My eyes, how prettily Bob writes! Talk of your camels, hogs and crabs, And twenty more such Pidcock frights-- Bob's worth a hundred of these dabs, All Lombard Street to ninepence on it.

All Moonshine, adverbial phr. (popular).--Moonshine is in old-fashioned and provincial English 'an illusive shadow,' 'a mere pretence' [Halliwell]. The expression it is all moonshine is now variously applied, whether as referring to empty professions, to vain boasts, to promises not trustworthy, to questionable statements, or to any kind of extravagant talk. There exist in several languages so many words of lunar connection, all implying variableness or inconstancy, that possibly this phrase also, it is all moonshine, may have been primarily employed to express some degree of fickleness, or caprice; in allusion to the inconstancy or changeableness of the moon, or rather moonlight. When anyone professes or promises great things, which we do not expect to see realized, we say it is all moonshine, for moonshine is very shifty; one week we have it, another we have it not; nay, it shifts from night to night. 'Lunes' in old English, are not only fits of insanity, but freaks. And the term 'lunatic' itself did not properly signify a person always insane, but one who was mad at intervals, dependent as was supposed on the phases of the moon. This distinction is still very accurately maintained in Spanish philology: 'Lunatics, El loco, cuya demencia no est continua, sino por intervalos que proceden del estado en que se halla la Luna.' Hence also in French, modern and old: 'Il a des lunes,' he is whimsical or fantastic. 'Tenir de la lune,' to be inconstant, mutable; 'Avoir un quartier de la lune,'[** drop -'-?] en la teste,' or Il y a de la lune, he is changeable, giddy, capricious. In the 'language of symbols' the moon is the emblem of hypocrisy, as in the following device:

'La lune avec ces mots, Mentiri didicit. (Elle trompe toujours.)

Pour l'hypocrisie, dont la lune est le symbole.' Menestriar, Philosophie des Images, vol. I., p. 266.

Another emblem is the following:

'La lune, Non vultus non color unus, Pour une personne qui n'est pas sincère.' Ibid, I., p. 269.

Moonshine, in conformity with these ideas, was probably employed originally in characterising the talk of persons too mutable to be relied on from one time to another.--Notes and Queries.

1714. Spectator, No. 597. Several of my correspondents have been pleased to send me an account how they have been employed in sleep, and what notable adventure they have been engaged in during that moonshine in the brain.

1874. Mrs. H. Wood, Johnny Ludlow, I[**1? P2] S., No. xxii., p. 397. 'They are all pig-headed together ... they are blinded by specious arguments that will turn out, I fear, to be all moonshine.'

All Mouth, adv. (common).--Applied to a loquacious talker. Cf., All jaw.

All My Eye, adv. phr. (common).--Variations in form are: all my eye and Betty Martin--my elbow--Tommy--and my