fat [OE] People have been described as fat since Anglo-Saxon times. The English writer George Orwell said in 1939, ‘I’m fat, but I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?’ Cyril Connolly echoed this in 1944 when he said that ‘Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.’ For some women fat is a feminist issue—the title of a 1978 book by Susie Orbach. The Bible gives us live on the fat of the land [M16th] as a way of saying that we have the best of everything. It comes from the Book of Genesis, in Pharaoh’s promise to Joseph and his family, ‘Ye shall eat the fat of the land’. Fat here represents an old sense of the noun meaning ‘the richest or choicest part of something’, which now survives only in this phrase. The fat is in the fire is recorded from the mid 16th century, when it referred to the complete failure of a plan. People spending time chatting in a leisurely way can be said to be chewing the fat [L19th]. The origin of the expression is not clear—it may have first been used in the Indian Army.