June 11, 2001

safe as houses

Watching British sitcoms, I have heard a phrase that I believe to be safe as houses. I had always assumed it to be an idiom with which, as an American, I was unfamiliar. Recently, reading a British historical novel set in the late 1800s, I read the phrase "safe as Couts'." Have I been victim of a mondegreen? If not, who is Couts and what does the phrase mean?

Nope. A mondegreen isn't the culprit here, but rather an enduring and productive cliché.

Coutt's & Co. is Britain's oldest private bank, distinguished by the fact that it's where the Royal Family stashes its hoard (a bit smaller these days, one presumes, now that they've got to pay taxes like the commoners). Its main branch is off Trafalgar Square in the geographic heart of London, on the Strand opposite the Savoy Hotel. The gossip magazine Hello! has an online version now, which reported in May 2001 that Coutt's is about to install a cash machine inside Buckingham Palace for the convenience of the palace staff. (The staff are probably the only exceptions to the general rule that one must have at least GBP500,000, or twice that in assets, to open an account at Coutt's.) All this to say that Coutt's is regarded as an exceedingly safe place to store one's money.

That makes Coutt's a fitting blank-filler in the expression as safe as..., along with a wealth of other options that have been recorded since 1600. In roughly chronological order from 1600 to 1910, here are some from Partridge's A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (8th ed.) and Farmer & Henley's A Dictionary of Slang:
a mouse in a mill
a mouse in a malt-heap
a crow in a gutter
a mouse in cheese
the bellows
coons
houses
the bank (Coutt's is obviously a variant)
a church

Some of these are obviously more transparent today than others; as is typical of slang, references to contemporary events or objects are clear to their users, but are obscured by the passing of time. This expression means 'perfectly safe', but some of the variants refer to physical safety, whereas others are used in the context of 'a sure bet'. As safe as houses, first recorded in 1859, has endured in both meanings to the present day. Partridge quotes Hotten's A Slang Dictionary as an explanation of its origin, saying that the meaning may have arisen "when the railway bubbles began to burst and speculation again favoured houses."

Perhaps Coutt's is a safer bet, however: in the late 1980s in England, after the stock market crash and the bust of the housing speculation boom, I heard owners of homes with negative equity saying "as safe as mattresses."

Wendalyn