Defer to the older person. This phrase is traditionally used when inviting another individual to pass through a doorway before one. Eric Partridge described it as a mock courtesy uttered by a young woman to an older man. Currently it is used only ironically or sarcastically. According to an old story, it was said rather snidely by Clare Boothe Luce when ushering Dorothy Parker through a doorway, and Parker replied, “Pearls before swine.” A related cliché is after you, Alphonse—no, after you, Gaston, repeated a number of times (in Britain, after you, Claude—no, after you, Cecil). The American version is based on a comic strip by Frederick Burr Opper, Alphonse and Gaston, which was popular in the early 1900s, and pokes fun at exaggerated politeness.

What one person considers ugly may seem beautiful to another. The idea is very old and was stated in various ways from the sixteenth century on. Shakespeare’s version is close to the modern: “Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye” (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 2.1). Possibly the first exact statement of the cliché in print was in Margaret Hungerford’s Molly Bawn (1878).

A lovely appearance has no relation to more profound good qualities. “All the carnall beauty of my wife is but skin-deep,” wrote Sir Thomas Overbury (ca. 1613). Of course this observation was hardly new, having been made by many ancient poets long before (Virgil wrote, O formose puer, nimium ne crede colori, “O my pretty boy, trust not too much in your looks”). Although only skin deep, observed William Cobbett (Advice to Young Men, 1829), “It [beauty] is very agreeable for all that,” whereas H. H. Munro (Saki) punned “I always say beauty is only sin deep” (Reginald’s Choir Treat, 1904).

True loveliness (is a lasting quality). The complete thought is a line from John Keats’s great poem, “Endymion” (1818), and continues, “Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.” The thought is hardly original, but the expression caught on. In the twentieth century it began to be shortened and used simply to describe something lovely, often ironically. Eric Partridge mentioned a play on it made by “flappers,” fashionable young women of the post–World War I era: “A thing of beauty is a boy forever.” Today one is apt to say it of, for example, an elaborately decorated cake.