SHAGGY DOG:TO KNOW Where All the Bodies Are Buried puts a person in very strong position with their employers, as it means they know all the inner secrets of an organisation, and this may be damaging if that person should ever leave to join a rival company, writes Albert Jack.
Mainly an American expression, this is none the less widely used in business circles in Britain. It derives from the classic American movie Citizen Kane (1941), which was produced and directed by, as well as starring, Orson Welles. In one famous scene, Susan Alexander, Kane's estranged wife, remarks of the butler at Xanadu: "but he knows where all the bodies are buried". The phrase immediately caught on and has been particularly popular on both sides of the Atlantic since the cut-throat business boom of the 1980s.
Drinking at the Last Chance Saloon indicates that someone has run out of options and that now is the time to produce results, before it's too late. Usually a media term, the phrase can often be heard at the home of all silly cliches, the football world, where a player or a team might be so described when being offered their very last opportunity to improve. The source of this expression is probably the old westerns where the Last Chance Saloon was the inn at the end of town, the final chance for cowboys, outlaws and rustlers to have a good drink before riding off into the remote, sun-drenched, dusty plain - and no doubt falling off and discovered later proposing marriage to a cactus plant. The phrase became popular thanks to a famous Marlene Dietrich song in the film Destry Rides Again (1939). Most writers and authors find themselves in the Last Chance Saloon at one time or another but, readers be assured, it is much more fun in there than in the No Chance Saloon.
To Run Amok, or Run Amuck (depending on your preference), means to be in a wild, frenzied state and out of control. Such behaviour can now be witnessed in most English main streets of a weekend evening.
Although I doubt any of those involved would know the expression derives from the Malaysian word amoq which, literally translated, describes the behaviour of tribesmen who, under the influence of opium, would become wild, rampaging mobs attacking anybody in their path.
The phrase became well known in England during the 17th century when the great travellers-turned-writers of the day would show off their knowledge of far-away cultures by including such terms in their prose and poetry. Three hundred years later, the phrase was firmly established in the West. It appears, for instance, in PG Wodehouse's Uncle Fred in Springtime (1939): "So that when the policeman arrived and found me running amuck with an assegai, apparently without provocation, it was rather difficult to convince him that I wasn't drunk."
I doubt Wodehouse was high on opium either when he wrote this. (An assegai is a lance or javelin, by the way.)
Extracted from Shaggy Dogs and Black Sheep by Albert Jack (Penguin)