Surprise, Surprise!

I’m still on my Regency romance reading kick, and it’s continuing to provide me with ideas to research and write about for blog posts, the latest of which features today. “Surprise, surprise!” says one of the characters to another when he comes upon an unexpected situation. But would the lady really have used this phrase in Regency days?

The answer to that question is that she probably wouldn’t have. The word “surprise”, of course, has been around for centuries, but the OED only records the use of it repeated twice as an interjection from 1953, so it is a relatively modern idiom. In the UK, the phrase became famously associated with the late singer and TV personality Cilla Black, who hosted a TV show actually called Surprise Surprise, where she, well, surprised members of the public. She also frequently sang, among other songs, the show’s theme song, which – surprise, surprise! – was called Surprise Surprise. So maybe next time you choose to use this idiom, you might want to burst into song yourself.