open, Sesame
Language: English
Part of speech: phrase
Senses: examples: text: “Habit is ten natures,” went on being proclaimed in my ears; and at last it came home to me as a weighty saying, which might contain the educational “Open, Sesame!” I was in quest of.
ref: 1886, Charlotte M[aria] Mason, Home Education: A Course of Lectures to Ladies, Delivered in Bradford, in the Winter of 1885–1886, London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., […], page 70:
text: This is where education steps in, crying, “Open, Sesame!” to the locked secrets of nine-tenths of a universe, and causing to pass before the eye the variegated life and literature of nations inhabiting the uttermost parts of the earth.
ref: 1906 March 6, E[rnest] Bryham Parsons, “Languages”, in Pot-Pourri Parisien, New York, N.Y.: Broadway Publishing Company, published 1912, page 142:
text: After 1900, however, when prosperity came to Canada, reciprocity was almost forgotten, for there was now no need for it; evidently there were other ways of opening the cave of wealth than that of crying “Open, Sesame!” to the United States market.
ref: 1928, Herbert Heaton, A History of Trade and Commerce with Special Reference to Canada, Toronto, Ont.: Thomas Nelson & Sons, Ltd., page 323:
text: Soon he came to the rock and recognised it by its smooth surface and the great tree which grew above it on the hill. He stretched forth his two arms towards it, crying: “Open, Sesame!” and at once the face of the rock gaped to let him pass.
ref: 1929, E[dward] Powys Mathers, transl., The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night: […], volume VII, London: […] [F]or subscribers by The Casanova Society of London, pages 159–160:
text: She levered open the passenger door. It swung out like some Ali Baba mountainside to my unspoken “Open, Sesame.”
ref: 1990 January, Paul Di Filippo, “Living with the Giants”, in Amazing Stories, volume 64, number 5 (whole 550), Lake Geneva, Wis.: TSR, Inc., →ISSN, page 69:
text: But as I finished reading my broker’s letter, a phrase where he said: ‘I will take care of any sums to be carried forward’ brought to mind an almost equally hypocritical and professional expression, that the bath-house girl at Balbec had used when speaking of Albertine: ‘I took care of her personally,’ she had said. And these words, which I had never before recalled, had the effect of crying ‘Open, Sesame’, making the hinges of the dungeon spring open.
ref: 2002, Marcel Proust, translated by Peter Collier, “The Fugitive”, in Christopher Prendergast, editor, The Prisoner and The Fugitive: A New Translation (In Search of Lost Time; 5), London: Penguin Books, published 2003, →ISBN, page 605:
text: BB said the word door and I thought, “Open, Sesame!”
ref: 2015, Martine Delvaux, translated by David Homel, Bitter Rose, Westmount, Que.: Linda Leith Publishing Inc., →ISBN, page 44:
text: The carving was where I remembered it was. My palm fitted just fine, and I even saw a weak blue spark in the Sapphire, but nothing happened – none of the walls parted. “Open, Sesame,” I murmured, pressing harder, but the result was the same.
ref: 2017, Ray Zdan, Sparkles of Blue (Sleeper Chronicles), →ISBN, page 294:
glosses: Alternative form of open sesame.