What was it like going over the top in WW1? Edward Glendinning gives an account of his harrowing experience.
(via BBC)
Not long after his disastrous campaign in Russia, the former ruler of all France, who once cut a swathe through Europe, was demoted to rule only Elba—reduced to "swishing with his stick at the flowers" as he walked through his garden
ECONOMIST.COM
Napoleon's journey from sublime to ridiculous
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https://www.thoughtco.com/going-over-the-top-2361017
"Over the Top" Phrase Origin
The people in Emily Hahn's frank and unapologetic memoir, "China to Me," seem like characters in a Noël Coward play, making an entrance, uttering their bon mots, then sweeping off stage. The palmy world of 1940s prewar Shanghai and British-governed Hong Kong is rendered in swish dinner parties and horse races attended by dashing expatriates knocking back champagne. Hahn, an American writer who cared not a whit for public opinion, kept gibbons for pets and had a baby out of wedlock with a married British intelligence officer. ("I don't know why I have always had so little conscience about married men," she writes languidly.) Cut to the war and the horror; she describes it all with appro priate solemnity but never loses the tone of a supremely acerbic society gadabout confiding in you at a cocktail party.
Modern Meaning
Today, the idiomatic phrase "over the top" or "going over the top" is used to describe someone making an effort that is excessive or more than is required to accomplish a task. Sometimes the phrase is used to describe an action that is judged to be fool-hearty or needlessly dangerous. But it is a peculiar phrase to have such a meaning, and you might well wonder where the idiom came from, and how it came to have the popular meaning it now holds.
Origin of the Idiom
The first documented instance of the term being used was from World War I when it was used by British troops to describe the moment when they emerged from trenches and charged out over open land to attack the enemy. Soldiers did not look forward this moment, and certainly many of them must have regarded it as foolhardy and dangerous. And example comes from a 1916 edition of "War Illustrated":
Some fellows asked our captain when we were going over the top.
It's reasonable to assume that returning veterans may have kept using the phrase when they returned home from war, and it's likely that at this point it became a way of describing civilian actions regarded as foolhardy or dangerous, or in some cases just comically outrageous.
Continued Usage of the Phrase
A 1935 edition of Letters, by Lincoln Steffers, has this passage:
I had come to regard the New Capitalism as an experiment till, in 1929, the whole thing went over the top and slid down to an utter collapse.
The phrase is now so common that it has received its abbreviated acronym: OTT, which is widely understood to mean "over the top," and is now used to mean any action viewed as outrageous or extreme.
But a parent who humorously describes his toddler's tantrum as being "over the top" probably has no idea that it was first spoken by a World War I soldier as he prepared to leap from a muddy trench into a bloody battle from which he might not return.
ADJECTIVE
- 1Of very great excellence or beauty.‘Mozart's sublime piano concertos’‘experiences that ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous’
- 1.1 Producing an overwhelming sense of awe or other high emotion through being vast or grand.‘a sense of the sublime’
- 1.1 Producing an overwhelming sense of awe or other high emotion through being vast or grand.
- 2(of a person's attitude or behaviour) extreme or unparalleled.‘he had the sublime confidence of youth’
swish
/swɪʃ/
verb
gerund or present participle: swishing
- 1.move with a hissing or rushing sound.
"a car swished by" - 2.BASKETBALLsink (a shot) without the ball touching the backboard or rim.
Web results
To rustle clothes from friends - Swishing parties are for all those women who want to combine glamour, environmental protection and frugality.
Swishing refers to swapping an item or items of clothing or shoes or an accessory with friends or acquaintances.
When a woman sucks the entire genitalia of of a male. This is includes the entire penis as well as the scrotum. Usually the penis and balls are small enough to ...
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