The Bank Holiday Moved Dates, But These Rest Phrases Never Changed Meaning

Most of the UK takes its August bank holiday on the last Monday of the month, but that has not always been the arrangement. Originally the holiday fell on the first Monday of August everywhere, and it was only in the late 1960s that England, Wales and Northern Ireland shifted it to the last Monday, leaving Scotland to keep the older date. A day that has moved around the calendar is a fitting excuse to look at some phrases about rest that have moved around in meaning just as much.

A change, a rest, and a bit of both

The phrase used to justify almost any bank holiday plan, whether that means going away or doing nothing at all, is a change is as good as a rest. It sounds like settled folk wisdom, but the wording took decades to arrive at its familiar form. An 1825 magazine piece had it as “Change of work is as good as play,” a version about swapping one task for another rather than about resting at all. The phrase we say now, with rest instead of play, only became fixed later, popularised as the title of a poem widely published from 1857 onward. The idea that a change of scene refreshes you as much as stopping altogether is now treated as obvious, but the sentence itself had to be rewritten to say it properly.

The wicked who never quite said it

If the bank holiday is meant to guarantee everyone a break, plenty of people will spend it working anyway, which is where no rest for the wicked comes in, usually said by someone heading back to a task with no real malice implied. The phrase is often assumed to be a direct line from the Bible, and it does come from scripture, specifically Isaiah 57:21, but not word for word. The original text says the wicked have no peace, not no rest. Somewhere between the pulpit and everyday speech, peace became rest, and the biblical warning turned into an ordinary complaint. It got a further push toward its modern comic tone after 1933, when the phrase served as the title of a Little Orphan Annie strip syndicated across American newspapers, which helped turn a solemn line into something closer to a shrug.

Laurels worth resting on

Then there is the person who has done enough for one bank holiday and, by extension, quite possibly enough for the rest of the year, prompting someone to warn them not to rest on their laurels. Today that is nearly always a criticism, aimed at someone who has stopped trying. It began as the opposite. In its earlier form, “repose on your laurels,” the phrase turned up in valedictory speeches for retiring soldiers or officials, a respectful way of saying someone had earned their rest. The 1723 Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz describes a duke “old enough to take his Repose under the Shadow of his Laurels,” a description of dignity, not laziness. The phrase kept its shape while its tone reversed entirely, from a compliment paid to the deserving to a warning aimed at the complacent.

None of these three phrases is really about the calendar. But a holiday that has itself shifted position over the decades is a reasonable moment to notice how much the language of rest has shifted too, usually without anyone announcing the change at the time.