The Facts on File Dictionary of Allusions - Green Valley High School

end of the beginning
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God preserve. That would have been an exaggeration.
. . . However, the end is not yet. We were
talking about the beginning’ ” ( Joseph Conrad, <strong>The</strong>
Arrow of Gold, 1919).
end of the beginning An event that signals the
start of slow progress toward the eventual completion
of something, though that may still be a very
long way off. <strong>The</strong> allusion is to a speech delivered
by Winston Churchill on November 10, 1942,
greeting news of the Allied victory against Nazi
Germany at El Alamein: “This is not the end. It is
not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps,
the end of the beginning.” Churchill may have
had in mind a speech delivered nearly 150 years
earlier by the French statesman Talleyrand, in
which he greeted the news that Napoleon had been
defeated in battle with the words “It is the beginning
of the end.” Well, we might have a long way to go,
but I think we can call this the end of the beginning.
end of the rainbow A distant, almost unreachable
paradise where all the problems of life are
fi nally solved. <strong>The</strong> allusion is to the traditional
belief that a pot of gold lies buried at the point
where a rainbow touches the earth, if only the
viewer can get to it before the rainbow moves on.
<strong>The</strong> notion was substantially expanded in the 1939
fi lm <strong>The</strong> Wizard of Oz, which located the magical
land of Oz “somewhere over the rainbow.” She
dreams that some day she will reach the end of the rainbow
and she will be able to leave behind her troubled
past. See also wizard of oz.
Endor, Witch of See witch of endor.
Endymion (endimeebn) <strong>The</strong> archetype of a
beautiful young man. In Greek mythology, Endymion
was a handsome young shepherd who
attracted the attention of the moon goddess Selene
while sleeping on Mount Latmus. Having fallen
passionately in love with Endymion, Selene begged
Zeus to grant the youth a wish. Wishing to remain
perpetually youthful, Endymion asked for the gift
of eternal sleep. Selene was thus able to embrace
him each night without him knowing. Today his
name is most familiar from the celebrated poem
Endymion (1818) by John Keats. Washed and restored,
he looked like some young Endymion, so it was doubly
unfortunate when he turned out to have the table manners
of a satyr.
enemy of the people A person whose anarchic or
reformist views place him or her outside pop u lar
society and thus vulnerable to offi cial persecution.
<strong>The</strong> allusion is to Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An
Enemy of the People, which concerns the efforts of a
local doctor to close a profi t- making municipal
bath because of the risk it poses to public health.
<strong>The</strong> threat of fi nancial collapse unites pop u lar
opinion against the doctor, who fi nds himself
rejected by the rest of society. “<strong>The</strong>re was no one
to understand; no one he could take into the confi
dence of Decoud’s fate, of his own, into the
secret of the silver. That doctor was an enemy of
the people—a tempter . . .” ( Joseph Conrad, Nostromo,
1904).
enforcer See murder, inc.
En gland expects It is a matter of honor to perform
the duty that presents itself. <strong>The</strong> allusion is
to the signal that Admiral nelson had hoisted
from his fl agship HMS Victory at the start of the
Battle of Trafalgar on October 21, 1805: “En gland
expects that every man will do his duty.” In fact,
Nelson’s original message had contained the word
“confi des,” but this was changed to “expects” as the