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Chalk and Cheese
deaconB
744 Posts
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2015/06/22 - 5:36am

I don't recall running across "like chalk and cheese" or "as different aws chalk and cheese" before, but I ran into it on Discus, and thought that's a useful idion; I bet it's not original.

Ngrams has a dead line on "chalk and cheese" until 1802 or so when it starts picking up.  The oldest cite they have seems to be 1952's Thesaurus Linguae Latinae Compendiarius which describes itself as being primarily for the British nations.  The Phrase Finder says

There must have been a time in the development of English when we had no standard phrase to express the idea that two things were 'as different as X and Y'. When someone coined such a phrase, and that someone may well have been Gower in 1390, clearly he needed candidates for the roles of X and Y. That doesn't sound difficult, after all most things are different from most other things.

"Maybe, 'as different as a cormorant and a lamp-post'", thinks our coiner, "or 'as different as floorboards and greengrocers'". "No, 'as different as chalk and cheese' sounds better". Why? For no better reason that the fact the 'chalk' and 'cheese' are short and snappy words that alliterate. The English language is packed full of phrases that contain pairs of rhyming or alliterating words - often just because the person who coined them liked the sound of them; for example, hocus-pocusthe bee's kneesriff-raff etc.

Dick Francis' Decider, he has a jockey saying an architect isn't clever enough to design new stands for the horse track she is partial heir to.  He doesn't know the difference between a rabbit and a raceway.  Dogs chase a rabbit at Florida racetracks, but the jockey means the woodworking terms.  A rabbet is the step-shaped recess a tongue goes in, while a raceway is a channel in which something - a door perhaps - runs. It's a significant clue to the mystery, but it's interesting that the mystery is set in England, the characters are English and Francis is himself English (he used to ride the Queen Mother's horses), but rabbet is mostly a North-American term. 

I presume Francis fabricated the idiom.  Google doesn't chart any ngrams for eiither rabbit and raceway, or rabbet and raceway, and although I've  been waiting for years for the opportunity to say someone is so ignorant, they don't know the difference between a rabbet abd a raceway, the dolts I want to inisult wouldn't know what either is, much less the difference.  Would you insult a lousy cook by claiming he wouldn't know the stars on the Orion constellation?  "Oh, lack of depth, where is thy sting?"

But now, I'll be looking for an opportunity to toss in a comparison between cheese and chalk.  I don't think comorant and lamp-posts will work - particularly when I can't tell a comorant from a loon.

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2
2015/06/22 - 12:47pm

deaconB said: But now, I’ll be looking for an opportunity to toss in a comparison between cheese and chalk.

Me too. I like the alliteration, and the way it rolls off the tongue. Thanks for the interesting research. But I'll have to break a lifelong habit to start using that phrase. For as long as I can recall, I've used the phrase "as different as night and day." No alliteration there, but plenty of contrast. I've a strong feeling that phrase is at the top of the charts when it comes to a metaphor for contrast or difference.

Didn't have time to check the individual citations, and no doubt there's some astronomy mixed in with the rest, but Ngrams gives this result for "different as night and day" compared to "different as cheese and chalk" (allowing for variations on the order in both).

I find it interesting that "cheese and chalk" comes up bust. But "day and night" at least shows some results. Curious why that might be. Any ideas?

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