As JD has mentioned, I hide behind a beard and as a young shaver was inordinately proud of some rather impressive sideburns. Inspired by his use of a sesquipedalian word for bearded I looked into the etymology of sideburns and discovered they're named after the hirsute American Civil War General Burnside.
Our colonial cousins seem to have a penchant for flipping phrases in this way.
For example, the phrase "lock and load" so beloved of Hollywood scripwriters dates back to instructions issued for users of the US Army's Garand rifle in World War 2 – but the original instruction was to "load and lock".
3 comments:
one doesn't hide behind a beard. you put it out there for all to see and say "look at my face, it's more manly than yours".
I think it rather depends on the face in question (and possibly on the beard).
I'm kind of late to the party, but the phrasing in the instructions to load an M1 Garand make "Lock and Load" the correct order. The instructions call for "locking back the bolt using the operation rod" before loading the clip.
See: wikipedia
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