24
This phrase was frequently used in the 1970s by footballers and their managers to express their delight at victory. This overuse was seized upon by the satirical magazine Private Eye, which proceeded to ridicule televised post-match interviews with the result that both over the moon and its counterpart sick as a parrot have become football cliches.
The allusion to feeling so high with excitement that one imagines one could jump or fly over the moon is easily understood. A definite origin for the phrase is obscure. Rees (1990) mentions that the family of William Gladstone’s wife invented idiomatic phrases which they used in private and over the moon is said, by some, to be one of these. Perhaps she was inspired by the well-known nursery rhyme ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’.
Hey diddle, Diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed
To see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
‘Excitabat fluctus in simpulo’ is a neat little metaphor used by Cicero. Translated it reads, ‘He whipped up waves in a ladle.’ Some commentators suggest that the storm in a teacup is a variation of this saying. According to Partridge, other distinguished people have played with the expression, notably the Duke of Ormond’s ‘storm in a cream-bowl’ (1678), Grand Duke Paul of Russia’s ‘tempest in a glass of water’ (cl790) and Lord Thurlow’s ‘storm in a wash-hand basin’ (1830). Storms in teacups do not appear to have arisen until the nineteenth century.
For all that, his sympathies had been entirely with her in the recent squabble. ‘What a ridiculous little storm in a tea-cup it was!' he thought with a laugh.
MURRAY’S MAGAZINE, 1887.
Sources:
Flavell, Linda, and Roger Flavell. Dictionary of Idioms and Their Origins. London: Kyle Cathie, 1992. Print.
Cervera, Ivonne, Francisco Bouret, and Guillermo Gómez. "Students Committee British Council Mexico." Facebook.com. Web.