Previously on this blog, I've discussed whether BrE and AmE are different in their singular for dice. Have a look at that blog post if that's what you're interested in.
This one is about the phrase to dice with death, meaning essentially, to take risks with one's life or safety. It's one of those things that I didn't reali{s/z}e was BrE until another American pointed it out to me. (Apologies if you were that uncredited American—I can no longer find the correspondence.)
The OED says the use of dice to mean 'risk' is especially associated with motor sports (a phrase that itself seems to be more BrE than AmE). It is not about chopping up death into cubes, but about 'gambling with one's life' (a phrasing that can be used in either language). Though Merriam-Webster includes this use of dice with an example from Newsweek, it's nowhere to be seen in the American portion of the GloWBE corpus.
The phrase raised two questions for me:
In this Google Books Ngram chart (click on it for details), the blue line shows dicing with death is already in existence in BrE during (BrE) the War. The green line is American use of it, intermingling early on with dancing with death. Dancing with death eventually catches up with dicing in AmE, while also rising in BrE, perhaps getting more currency as people have more distance from the 'risk' use of dice as a verb.
For what it's worth, it's slightly easier to find capital-D Death with dance than with dice, but it's far more common to find it lower-case.
This one is about the phrase to dice with death, meaning essentially, to take risks with one's life or safety. It's one of those things that I didn't reali{s/z}e was BrE until another American pointed it out to me. (Apologies if you were that uncredited American—I can no longer find the correspondence.)
The OED says the use of dice to mean 'risk' is especially associated with motor sports (a phrase that itself seems to be more BrE than AmE). It is not about chopping up death into cubes, but about 'gambling with one's life' (a phrasing that can be used in either language). Though Merriam-Webster includes this use of dice with an example from Newsweek, it's nowhere to be seen in the American portion of the GloWBE corpus.
- is it dicing with death or dicing with Death?
I imagined the latter, that it's playing a game of dice with the Grim Reaper. But none of the corpus examples treat death as a proper name, so perhaps I'm alone in that. - what's the relationship to dancing with death?
In this Google Books Ngram chart (click on it for details), the blue line shows dicing with death is already in existence in BrE during (BrE) the War. The green line is American use of it, intermingling early on with dancing with death. Dancing with death eventually catches up with dicing in AmE, while also rising in BrE, perhaps getting more currency as people have more distance from the 'risk' use of dice as a verb.
For what it's worth, it's slightly easier to find capital-D Death with dance than with dice, but it's far more common to find it lower-case.
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BrE has the word ‘dicey’ meaning risky - like walking on a frozen lake, crossing the road in traffic, or some surgical processes.
ReplyDeleteNot to be confused with ‘dodgy’ - dubious morally, likely to break down, possibly criminal activity.
Suddenly reminded of the comedian Norman Vaughan who had the cathcp-hrases "swinging" and "dodgy".
Delete"Dicey" is familiar in the US as well.
DeleteGerman has the word Totentanz from medieval times. So at least the idea has been floating around for a long time.
ReplyDeleteNice blog, and cool background with the books!
ReplyDeleteOf course, if you're Ingmar Bergman you don't dice with death, you [play] chess with death.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, The Seventh Seal has both chess with Death and (at the very end) dancing with Death.
DeleteI don't know that "dancing with death" needs to be an eggcorn. I think the metaphor works just fine on its own. If anything, I would expect it to be some sort of combination of the senses of "dancing on the edge of a cliff*" and "dicing with death".
ReplyDelete* There are a variety of other "dancing on the edge of a ..." metaphors that have similar senses, and all have close associations with risk.
I'm an AmE speaker from Florida and I've never heard the phrase "dice with death."
ReplyDeleteBut what I found interesting is that I immediately recognized the meaning of the phrase. Perhaps that's because I'm familiar with the expression "to throw/toss the dice," meaning to gamble. But certainly using "dice" as a verb is new to me.
Presumably you've never read Eliot's poem The Journey of the Magi, which includes the line "dicing for pieces of silver".
ReplyDeleteIt was customary for RFC squadrons to show that operations were planned for the following morning by placing a set of dice in a prominent position in the mess.
ReplyDeleteI heard dicing with death as a boy in the southern U.S.
ReplyDeleteThere are a couple of notable examples of "dicing with death" in 19th-century AmE:
ReplyDeletethe Recollections of a soldier from the Civil War (published by 1879)
a poem by Ambrose Bierce (published by 1892).
Neither 'dice with death' nor 'dance with death' are common phrases to my CdnE ears, though their meaning is immediately clear.
ReplyDeleteDice as a verb seems totally normal, more though from reading lots of high-fantasy books than from every day life.
From memory a nursery rhyme from my childhood:
A horse and a flea and three blind mice
Sat on a cerbstone shooting dice
The horse it slipped and fell on the flea
The flea said "Whoops there's a horse on me!"