Definition from Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Jump to: navigation, search. 1.1 Etymology; 1.2 Adverb. Small town festivals are great festivals. If you want to go to one of the very best head to northern New Brunswick for August 15 and the Tintamarre.
World Wide Words: Beat the band. QFrom Tracey: What is the origin of to beat the band, as in phrases like it was raining to beat the band. Is there any reason — beyond muddling one’s phrases — why one would use to beat the banshee instead of to beat the band? A I’ve come across a few examples of to beat the banshee; it makes a sort of sense, banshees in legend being known to wail loudly; but as they traditionally do so only when somebody is about to die, it’s perhaps not a good analogy when you are trying to say that something is being done or is happening to a superlative degree.
But you’re right, of course, to suggest that it’s a variation on the older to beat the band. There’s quite a history of attempts to explain this phrase. Banagher is a town on the Shannon in County Offaly, Ireland; before the Great Reform Act of 1. Parliament but which had a tiny electorate controlled by the local magnate, who therefore had the election “in his pocket”. It is said that when somebody referred to a particularly egregious example of a rotten borough, say one in which every voter was a man employed by the landowner, the reply might come back “Well, that beats Banagher”. The story sounds highly suspect, not least because there’s an entry in Captain Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue of 1.
To Beat the Band is a 1935 American romantic comedy directed by Ben Stoloff using a screenplay by Rian James based on a story by George Marion, Jr. Beat the Band was a musical quiz show heard on NBC radio from 1940 to 1944 in two distinctly different series. The program popularized the show business catch phrase. Synonyms for to beat the band in Free Thesaurus. Antonyms for to beat the band. 370 synonyms for beat: batter, break, hit, strike, knock, punch, belt, whip, deck.
He beats Banaghan; an Irish saying of one who tells wonderful stories. Perhaps Banaghan was a minstrel famous for dealing in the marvellous”. So it’s far from certain that the original had anything to do with Irish rotten boroughs. Firstly, the American version of the Banagher story always seems to have been in the form that bangs Banagher, as here from The Living Age of 1. That bangs Banagher, and all the world knows Banagher bangs the devil”. Secondly, to beat the band appears only at the end of that century (it’s recorded first from 1.
As here in a story, The Transit of Gloria Mundy (ho, ho) by Chester Bailey Fernald in The Century magazine in 1. Then it was . And here in a little skit of 1. Guy Wetmore Carryl, The Sycophantic Fox and the Gullible Raven, in which he humorously retells Aesop’s fable.
Sweet fowl,” he said, “I understand. You’re more than merely natty: I hear you sing to beat the band. And Adelina Patti.
Pray render with your liquid tongue. A bit from . Just for once, the common- sense explanation may be the correct one, and there’s no need to invoke Irish towns or Irish storytellers, let alone banshees.
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