To sustain life, often just barely. This term, frequently used to describe a job that pays scarcely enough to live on, rests on the idea that the soul gives life to the body, which dies when the soul is separated from it. Dating from the early eighteenth century, it became a cliché by the mid-nineteenth century or so. Writing on prostitution in the Manchester Guardian in 1974, Suzanne Lowry quipped, “Keeping body and soul together is never as difficult as trying to keep them separate.”