Normal

Okay - thank you (perhaps) Lizzi. I have not been overly inspired lately, but will be thinking on it. Announcement forthcoming soon.

Lizzi

OOPs! I was gone for 10 days and completely forgot about the challenge. Sorry !
First, thanks to OSilv for the history. And look at the entries. Not many but they cover most of those possibilities. Thank you to all participants and the baton goes to Normal !!

clorophilla

from a word to a world... of things!
thank you Qsilv, not to much info for me!

Normal

Here I was, picturing Clo "lurking" in the dictionary, while you neatly explained all our CHEESE expressions. Good going. Hope that clears things up. And where is our Lizzi??

Qsilv

Yeah, well, language is funny stuff. Besides being a formal code it's also emotional, musical, and rather stretchable, as in poetry.

And it turns out that "cheese" is a great word to play with.

Saying the long E in it causes you to smile a bit, so photographers used to force their victims... er.. subjects... to say "Cheese" while they took your picture. That makes for a kind of strained look so it's a cliche' but it lingers.
Recently I've heard people urging "Teeth! Teeth!" which I deem even worse, but hey... (shrug).

Up in the far northern part of the USA there's a state called Wisconsin, where Nordic folks settled and built a strong dairy industry, there's a very good Football team called the Packers. Their rivals joke around about having to play on "the frozen tundra" up there, and they call the Wisconsin folks "cheese heads" (a variant on Square Headed Swedes). Instead of getting insulted, Packers fans show their pride by wearing wedge shaped blocks of cheese as hats during the games.

In the 1920's a cereal company started making little 1-inch square, sharp-cheese-flavored crackers that have become hugely popular. The company has been bought out a couple times but the crackers endure as "Cheez-its". Another brand is Cheese Nips but they really do taste different.

"Cheese it" sounds enough like "Jesus" that it could easily have arisen in the classic way of someone starting to swear and then adjusting it so as not to offend.

Somewhere along the line, "cheese it" began to be used by young people (who always tinker with language in trying to grow their own special identity) as a quick, sharp way to say "Ooops! Run! Hide!" --and it was memorialized in a musical theater piece from the 1950's called West Side Story, which was deliberately (and very successfully) designed to be a re-telling of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet in modern New York City.

There... TMI (too much information!) with affection from Q ;>