Not a hard one to figure out – if a guest is rapacious enough in their appetite and consumes everything in the pantry, then one is eaten out of the house and home and forced to go out for more supplies – hopefully having evicted the house-guest. H proved a difficult letter to find suitable phrases for, but with this one, we get the chance to consider the many phrases whose origins are ascribed to the great William Shakespeare – this particular phrase comes from Henry IV, Part 2, Act 2 Scene 1. As I said under apple of my eye, another phrase ascribed to the Bard, I cannot but help wondering, sacrilegious as it may be, whether Shakespeare originated all these phrases or was simply the first to commit them to paper. The Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust have no doubts though and have a webpage called Shakespeare’s Phrases which cites the phrase and the play in which it appears – make up your own minds…
Here are a few:-
“The clothes make the man” Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3
“The be all and end all” Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7
“Wild goose chase” Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 4
“Brave New World” The Tempest Act 5, Scene 1.
The last one gives an example of how one phrase has been propagated – Aldous Huxley, surely a man well-educated in the Classics and Shakespeare, used “Brave New World” as the title of one of his own masterpieces which has in turn become a shortcut in any article describing utopian/dystopian paradigms but for all our familiarity with the phrase now, was it in common usage since Shakespeare and before Huxley or only a quote known to the cognoscenti, the literate class? Just as we have already encountered phrases which have multiple theories as to their origins, theories which multiply faster than rabbits in the warren of the World Wide Web (how’s that for a mixed metaphor!) – so with Shakespearean phrases, only by searching all written material and all recorded word, and counting all the occurrences could we truly know the answer…
Lastly, we have only one “H” Cant language example from Wikipedia‘s excellent article on the subject… Hijra Farsi, from South Asia, used by the hijra and kothi subcultures (traditional indigenous approximate analogues to LGBT subcultures)