Meaning
Including every flaw, defect or unflattering detail, with nothing smoothed over. Used of honest, uncensored portrayals, as in a 'warts-and-all biography' or a documentary that shows the team 'warts and all', and as an adverbial tag for total honesty about a person or institution. Informal and broadly positive, signalling honesty and completeness rather than malice. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The words are traditionally put in the mouth of Oliver Cromwell, said to have told his portraitist to paint him exactly as he was, 'roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything', refusing flattering idealisation; the story is usually told of Sir Peter Lely, while the miniature Samuel Cooper painted in 1653 is the commission most often linked to it. The documented record is thinner: the anecdote first surfaces in Horace Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting in England (1764), reported at second hand via the Duke of Buckingham more than a century after the sitting, and The Phrase Finder finds no convincing evidence that Cromwell ever used the words, despite scores of biographies that never record them. The exact phrase reaches print only in 1824, in a Massachusetts address by Alpheus Cary: 'Paint me as I am, warts and all!' Its popularity owes as much to that memorable abridgement as to Cromwell.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a warts-and-all portrait
- the warts-and-all approach
- warts and everything
Usage Examples
- The documentary follows the squad warts and all, training-ground rows included.
- She insisted the centenary volume be warts and all, documenting the failed ventures as fully as the triumphs.
- His autobiography is engaging precisely because it is warts and all; he confesses the career mistakes he would rather forget.