over the top

Example: “The fireworks at their wedding were a bit over the top.”

Origin: Coined in the trenches of the First World War, describing the moment infantry climbed out of their trench and over its parapet to charge across open, exposed ground toward the enemy line — a genuinely terrifying, often fatal action given a name in a 1916 issue of The War Illustrated. American volunteer Arthur Guy Empey, who served with the British army, used the phrase as the title of his own 1917 war memoir, defining it in an appendix as "a famous phrase of the trenches." The figurative sense, describing behavior or expression that goes beyond all reasonable limits, developed decades later — the earliest documented figurative use traces to 1935, in the writer Lincoln Steffens's letters, with the sense of general excess or excessiveness fully established by 1968.