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Mon 3 Apr, 2006 09:00 am
"the force stood primed and poised"
What does it mean?
"The force stood primed and poised, ready for whatever would happen next". Rather "calm"?
"Primed and poised" might have terrific alliteration with the "P" sounds, but the metaphor is mixed.
"Primed" means ready to fire. Old rifles had to be primed so the powder would catch.
"Poised" means ready-to-go as a dancer or athlete would be poised and ready to go into action.
Your character here can't be both a gun and an athlete/dancer.
Ummm, Noddy - don't you think the two words rather reinforce each other?
As in: "the character is prepared with whatever equipment is necessary and ready to use it at once, if need be".
Tom--
Sorry--I see coupled cliches.
I swear that when I saw this title the image of Lord E's avatar popped into my head.
I swear when I saw Green Witch's avatar, the family motto popped into my trousers.
"Primed and poised" is not actually a mixed metaphor. When getting ready to fire the long muzzle-loading 18th-century musket, first you primed and loaded it - which could take as many as 12 separate motions, depending on which drill-book you were using - but because the thing was so long and unwieldy you also had to poise it, that is bring it to and hold it in a balanced, still position, so that you could present and fire in an orderly way. If an officer ordered his men to present and fire without poising first, the muzzles of their muskets might swing around and fire in any direction. If they weren't both primed and poised, they weren't ready.
syntinen wrote:"Primed and poised" is not actually a mixed metaphor. When getting ready to fire the long muzzle-loading 18th-century musket, first you primed and loaded it - which could take as many as 12 separate motions, depending on which drill-book you were using - but because the thing was so long and unwieldy you also had to poise it, that is bring it to and hold it in a balanced, still position, so that you could present and fire in an orderly way. If an officer ordered his men to present and fire without poising first, the muzzles of their muskets might swing around and fire in any direction. If they weren't both primed and poised, they weren't ready.
I can find no evidence to confirm this, and I believe it to be false.
I think therefore that the phrase is a mixed metaphor.
(Or perhaps is from US usage...certainly "to poise" has as one of its meanings "to balance", but I am not sure that this phrase has come down to us intact from the field of musketry.)
Quote:I can find no evidence to confirm this, and I believe it to be false.
Well: -
Humphrey Bland's Treatise of Military Discipline, 4th edn 1740, gives the command after loading is completed: "
Poize your Musket".
In the new Manual Exercise ordered by George III for the British Army in 1764 the command is given as "
Poise your Firelocks!"
The command appears in the the American Revolutionary drill book written by Baron von Steuben in 1779 as "
Poise - Firelock!"
By the time of the Napoleonic wars the long 18th-century musket was no longer in use. The Brown Bess (British) and Springfield (American) muskets that replaced it, being much shorter, no longer needed the "poise" and the command was dropped from subsequent drillbooks. But for more than half a century, infantry in the English-speaking world had needed to be "primed and poised" in order to fire a volley.
Okay, I bow to superior knowledge and withdraw.
Well done, good post. Primed and poised it is.
Syntinen--
Thanks for the correction.
Don't mention it!
There is a strange popular thirst to devise and believe fanciful naval (or at least nautical) origins for English phrases, but there seems to be no corresponding urge to concoct military ones. So whereas naval origin stories proffered for phrases are very often completely untrue and should always be treated with suspicion (cf. let the cat out of the bag, the devil to pay, square meal, on the fiddle, no room to swing a cat, flogging a dead horse, etc. etc, ad infinitum), military ones ( e.g. flash in the pan, go off at half-cock, primed and poised) are quite often genuine.
Two exceptions to this, however, are cut the mustard, which is often asserted to be a form of "cut the muster" (i.e. a military muster) but almost certainly isn't, and the whole nine yards, which is sometimes claimed to refer to WWI machine-gun belts, but probably doesn't. But there are far fewer outright inventions in this field than there are for things naval; I don't know why this should be.
syntinen wrote:Don't mention it!
There is a strange popular thirst to devise and believe fanciful naval (or at least nautical) origins for English phrases, but there seems to be no corresponding urge to concoct military ones. So whereas naval origin stories proffered for phrases are very often completely untrue and should always be treated with suspicion (cf. let the cat out of the bag, the devil to pay, square meal, on the fiddle, no room to swing a cat, flogging a dead horse, etc. etc, ad infinitum), military ones ( e.g. flash in the pan, go off at half-cock, primed and poised) are quite often genuine.
Two exceptions to this, however, are cut the mustard, which is often asserted to be a form of "cut the muster" (i.e. a military muster) but almost certainly isn't, and the whole nine yards, which is sometimes claimed to refer to WWI machine-gun belts, but probably doesn't. But there are far fewer outright inventions in this field than there are for things naval; I don't know why this should be.
Well said syntinen. "To the bitter end", "son of a gun", "go by the board", or "freeze the balls off a brass monkey" could be added to your
ad infinitum list.
It's all very interesting I think. I have got on my shelves "A Word in your Shell-Like", Nigel Rees' book of curious phrases (which BTW does not to my obvious embarrassment include "primed and poised") and it's often surprising as well as enlightening to learn where certain everyday phrases come from.
"Go by the board" I always thought actually was a perfectly good nautical term. I'm sure I have read in 19th-century and early 20th-century accounts of voyages sentences such as "the mizzenmast went by the board" - i.e. went over the side. Is it not originally nautical?
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