Meaning
To call in a powerful rescue force or reinforcements when a situation has become desperate; to summon expert help at the last possible moment. The cavalry can be anyone who arrives to save the day, from backup technicians to senior lawyers, and the phrase often carries wry relief, as in the cry 'here comes the cavalry'. Often wry or self-deprecating, since calling for the cavalry admits matters got out of hand. Watch the spelling: cavalry is the rescue troop, calvary is the hill; confusing them is a classic error. Regional use: American English in origin, now general English.
Origin
Rests on the cavalry's battlefield job as the mobile arm a commander dispatched to relieve a beleaguered force. Cavalry entered English by 1591, in a translation by the courtier John Harington, borrowed from French cavallerie - verified directly on the OED factsheet. Wiktionary records the figurative sense of the noun, a source of rescue especially in an emergency, illustrated by call in the cavalry, and Farlex covers the dispatch formula under send in the troops. The heroic rescue image was fixed by Hollywood Westerns, in which an Army troop rides to the rescue at the climax: John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) has the besieged coach rescued in time by the 6th Cavalry, the template for decades of last-minute arrivals. Google Books data show literal uses of send in the cavalry from the mid-1830s, while figurative call in the cavalry climbs through the late twentieth century. No major dictionary prints a first-use date for the exact phrase.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- call in the cavalry
- here comes the cavalry
- send in the troops
Usage Examples
- The servers crashed an hour before launch, so we sent in the cavalry from the platform team.
- When the caterer cancelled, Mom called in the cavalry: two aunts and a borrowed van.
- Here comes the cavalry - the night-shift engineers just logged on.