back [OE] Old English back has been prolific in forming compounds, phrases and popular expressions. If you get someone’s back up you make them annoyed. The image is that of a cat arching its back when angry or threatened. The idea is recorded as early as 1728: a character in The Provok’d Husband, a comic play of that year by John Vanbrugh (c.1664–1726) and Colley Cibber (1671–1757), remarks, ‘How her back will be up then, when she meets me!’ Sir Walter Scott was the first to use the back of beyond, in 1816. In America there have been backwoods since the early 18th century. Failure has sent people back to square one since the 1950s. This possibly comes from a board game such as Snakes and Ladders, in which the board has some squares that send a player who lands on them back to the start. Use of back to the drawing board seems to have been inspired by a cartoon in the New Yorker in 1941 which shows an office type with a roll of paper walking away from a plane crash as others race towards it, with the caption ‘Well, back to the old drawing board’. Andrew Johnson, the 17th president of the USA, gave us the phrase to take a back seat. He said in 1868 after the American Civil War that ‘in the work of Reconstruction traitors should take back seats’. In the 20th century the car brought with it the back-seat driver [E20th].