AboutTed Nesbitt Expertise I have an interest in the meanings of words and phrases, as well as how and when they became part of the English language. I enjoy
researching idioms, colloquialisms, dialects, and obscurities of
all kinds. I prefer short questions on a particular subject, and
I will not accept lengthy research projects or term papers. NOTE: ALLEXPERTS CLAIMS THAT I TRANSLATE FROM ENGLISH TO LATIN AND FROM LATIN TO ENGLISH. I DO NOT. ALLEXPERTS REFUSES TO DELETE THE LATIN-TO-ENGLISH SERVICE -- ONE THAT I DO NOT PROVIDE.
TRUST ME ON THIS: ALLEXPERTS IS WRONG. I DO NOT TRANSLATE FROM ENGLISH TO LANGUAGE. LOOK FOR A LANGUAGE EXPERT INSTEAD. ETYMOLOGY AND TRANSLATING SERVICES ARE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT. ALLEXPERTS SHOULD KNOW THAT. ALLEXPERTS DOES NOT KNOW THAT. I HAVE TRIED FOR MANY YEARS TO GET THEM TO CHANGE. THEY WILL NOT. SORRY, BUT I DO NOT TRANSLATE FROM ENGLISH TO LATIN.
Experience I am the bibliographic instruction and reference librarian at a public
college. My master's thesis concerns William Faulkner's tragic novels. I formerly taught advanced placement English at two schools in the Philadelphia area.
I have been a member of the grammar and writing section of Allexperts
for more than a year.
Education/Credentials Masters degrees in English, philosophy, and library science.
Would you be able to explain the origins of using the phrase 'pear-shaped' to mean things going wrong. eg. it's all gone a bit pear-shaped?
thanks,
Jess
Answer The expression -- according to The Oxford English Dictionary -- began as slang in England, shortly after World War II. A circle is a "perfect" shape, one that is difficult to achieve by humans. Try drawing one free hand! If the circle you try to draw becomes an oval or has a flattened bottom, it resembles the shape of a pear -- and you have "gone wrong."
Michael Quinion, of Great Britain, has a weekly publication online called "World Wide Words." He is an expert in the field of etymology, particularly with word and phrases that are English in origin. Here is his comment on the phrase:
It's mainly a British expression. “It's all gone pear-shaped”, one might say with head-shaking ruefulness, in reference to an activity or project that has gone badly awry or out of control.
There are plenty of things that are literally pear-shaped, of course, such as a person's outline, a particular cut of a diamond, or the shape of a bottle, anything in fact that is bulbous at the bottom but narrows at the top, like the pear. It isn't immediately obvious how the literal meaning turned into the figurative one, though we do know that it started to appear in the 1960s.
A common explanation, the one accepted by Oxford Dictionaries, is that it comes from Royal Air Force slang. However, nobody there or anywhere else seems to know why. Some say that it may have been applied to the efforts of pilots to do aerobatics, such as loops. It is notoriously difficult (I am told) to get manoeuvres like this even roughly circular, and instructors would describe the resulting distorted route of the aircraft as pear-shaped.
Another commentator also attributes the origin of the phrase to the Royal Air Force:
To go pear shaped is an expression used to indicate that a scheme has not been perfectly executed. The phrase seems to have originated in British English in the late 1940s or early 1950s. I have come across several suggested origins, but the best, for me, is related to training aircraft pilots. At some stage they are encouraged to try to fly loops - very difficult to make perfectly circular; often the trainee pilot's loops would go pear shaped.
