Sauce for the goose: the origin of legal clichés

It is a truth universally acknowledged that no financial remedy hearing can properly conclude until one or other advocate has declaimed “…the wife must cut her coat accordingly” “…sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” or “going forward” the husband “…having made his bed must lie in it”.

In Politics and the English Language (1946) George Orwell wrote: “As soon as certain topics are raised the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse”.

One imagines Orwell sitting alongside a judge hearing a First Appointment or FDR squirming while submissions are made.

This article is not intended as a pious sermon against clichés – not least because the writer is in no way qualified to give such advice. It is a consideration of five of the more unusual sayings that have become commonplace to the extent that they are frequently cited...

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