Chapter Stump Up to Sucre of S by Brewer's Phrase & Fable

Stump Up to Sucre

Stump Up Pay your reckoning; pay what is due. Ready money is called stumpy or stumps. An Americanism, meaning money paid down on the spot- i.e. on the stump of a tree. (See Nail .)

Stumps To stir one's stumps. To get on faster; to set upon something expeditiously. The stumps properly are wooden legs fastened to stumps or mutilated limbs. (Icelandic, stumpr.)

“This makes him stirre his stumps.”
The Two Lancashire Lovers (1640).

Stumped Out Outwitted; put down. A term borrowed from the game of cricket.

Stupid Boy St. Thomas Aquinas, nicknamed the Dumb Ox by his school-fellows. (1224-1274.)

Sty or Stye. Christ styed up to heaven. Halliwell gives sty = a ladder, and the verb would be to go to heaven, as it were, by Jacob's ladder. The Anglo-Saxon verb stigan means to ascend.

“The beast
Thought with his winges to stye above the ground.”
Spenser: Faerie Queene, bk. i. canto xi. 25.

Stygian (3 syl.). Infernal; pertaining to Styx, the fabled river of hell.

“At that so sudden blaze the Stygian throng
Bent their aspect.”
Milton: Paradise Lost, x. 453.

Style (1 syl.) is from the Latin stylus (an iron pencil for writing on waxen tablets, etc.). The characteristic of a person's writing is called his style. Metaphorically it is applied to composition and speech. Good writing is stylish, and, metaphorically, smartness of dress and deportment is so called.

“Style is the dress of thought, and a well-dressed thought, like a well-dressed man, appears to great advantage.”- Chesterfield: Letter ccxl. p. 361.

Styles Tom Styles or John a Styles, connected with John o'Noakes in actions of ejectment. These mythical gentlemen, like John Doe and Richard Roe, are no longer employed.

“And, like blind Fortune, with a sleight
Convey men's interest and right
From Stiles's pocket into Nokes's.”
Butler: Hudibras, iii. 3.

Stylites or Pillar Saints. By far the most celebrated are Simeon the Stylite of Syria, and Daniel the Stylite of Constantinople. Simeon spent thirty-seven years on different pillars, each loftier and narrower than the preceding. The last was sixty-six feet high. He died in 460, aged seventy-two. Daniel lived thirty-three years on a pillar, and was not unfrequently nearly blown from it by the storms from Thrace. He died in 494. Tennyson has a poem on Simeon Stylites.

“I, Simeon of the Pillar by surname,
Stylites among men- I, Simeon,
The watcher on the column till the end.”
Tennyson.

Styx The river of Hate, called by Milton “abhorrëd Styx, the flood of burning hate” (Paradise Lost, ii. 577). It was said to flow nine times round the infernal regions. (Greek, stugeo, hate.)
The Styx is a river of Egypt, and the tale is that Isis collected the various parts of Osiris (murdered by Typhon) and buried them in secrecy on the banks of the Styx. The classic fables about the Styx are obviously of Egyptian origin. Charon, as Diodorus informs us, is an Egyptian word for a “ferryman,” and styx means “hate.”

“The Thames reminded him of Styx.”- M. Taine.

   Styx, the dread oath of gods.

“For by the black infernal Styx I swear
(That dreadful oath which binds the Thunderer)
`Tis fixed!” Pope: Thebais of Statius. i.

Suaviter in Modo (Latin). An inoffensive manner of doing what is to be done. Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re, doing what is to be done with unflinching firmness, but in the most inoffensive manner possible.

Sub Cultro Liquit He left me in the lurch, like a toad under the harrow, or an ox under the knife.

Sub Hasta By auction. When an auction took place among the Romans, it was customary to stick a spear in the ground to give notice of it to the public. In London we hang from the first-floor window a strip of bed-room carpet.