Blake's Blog

Someone is walking over my grave

Meaning

A response to a sudden unexplained shudder or shivering.

Origin

‘Someone is walking over my grave’ seems a rather odd thing for a living person to say when experiencing a sudden shudder, so why is it said?

The 18th saying derives from an earlier folk legend that a sudden cold sensation was caused by someone walking over the place that one’s grave was eventually going to be. This belief is in line with the workings of people’s minds in England in the Middle Ages, in which the distinction between life and death was much less clear than we see it now. There was then an unambiguous belief in the everyday communication between the afterlife in heaven or hell and the physical world of the living. When someone dies in our day and age we a likely to hold a commemorative gathering where we talk about the deceased person. Mediaeval mourners would hold wakes, in which they spoke to the deceased, in the belief that their words were being heard and understood. A person’s final resting place would also have been understood to be predetermined and ‘someone has walked over my grave’ would have been said in the belief that a real person had actually walked over the ground where the speaker would be interred.

The earliest known record of the phrase in print, which is of course an indication of the earliest date that we can prove that the phrase was in public use, is in Simon Wagstaff’s A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, 1738. (Simon Wagstaff was one of the many pseudonyms of the celebrated writer Jonathan Swift):

Miss [shuddering]. Lord! there’s somebody walking over my Grave.

The old folk belief is recorded by the Yorkshire novelist Harriet Parr, who also used a pseudonym, that of Holme Lee, in Basil Godfrey’s Caprice, 1868:

Joan shuddered – that irrepressible convulsive shudder which old wives say is caused by a footstep walking over the place of our grave that shall be.

The expression is sometimes found in the form of ‘a goose (or occasionally, a rabbit) walked over my grave’. These are later and chiefly American variants and the ‘goose’ version at least appears to be a back-formation, derived from ‘goose bumps/goose pimples’ which are associated with a sudden feeling of chilliness.

The modern-day scientific explanation for sudden unexplained shuddering and for goose pimples is that they are caused by a subconscious release of the stress hormone adrenaline. This may be as a response to coldness or an emotional reaction to a poignant memory. Fanciful it may be, but somehow, I prefer the mediaeval version.

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Off his own bat

Meaning

By an individual’s own efforts.

Origin

One question that I’ve been asked several times about the figurative expression ‘off his own bat’ is “should that be ‘off his own back’”? Well no, it shouldn’t. ‘Off your own back’ originated as a mishearing of the former expression. It has gained sufficient currency to be considered as a viable everyday alternative of the correct version, but purists dismiss it as a straightforward error.

Bats come in many forms of course and, as is always the case with such words when they occur in phrases where the context clear, the meaning is open to fanciful interpretations. So, as with the yards in ‘the whole nine yards‘, which are guessed to be any number of things, the ‘bat’ in ‘off his own bat’ has been said to be one of these: the flying mammal, a butter pat, a tool used in brickmaking etc, etc. In fact, the bat in question is a cricket bat and the first activity that was said to be done ‘off someone’s own bat’ was to score runs.

The first citation of ‘off his own bat’ in print comes from the pen of the celebrated cricket historian and statistician Henry Thomas Waghorn, in Cricket Scores, 1742:

“The bets on the Slendon man’s head that he got 40 notches off his own bat were lost.”

The ‘Slendon man’ was probably Richard Newland, the star of the Slindon Cricket Club and cricket’s first great all-rounder.

It is worth noting that the phrase is found in print several times during the next century and all of the known citations are explicit cricket references – the other supposed derivations of ‘bat’ in this context owe everything to imagination and nothing to evidence. There’s an example in Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery, by Mary Russell Mitford, 1824:

“William Grey got forty notches off his own bat; and that brilliant hitter Tom Coper gained eight from two successive balls.”

Why runs that were scored ‘off someone’s own bat’ were worth mentioning derives from the arcane rules of cricket. Runs, which were often referred to as ‘notches’ in early references to the game, may be scored in cricket in several different ways. These include various forms of ‘extra’ runs, for example, bowling misdemeanours like wides or no balls; various forms of ‘bye’, in which the batsmen run without first hitting the ball; and overthrows, where a fielder throws the ball at the wicket and misses, giving time for the batsmen to run again. All of these are counted towards the batting side’s score, but it is the runs that a batsman scores ‘off his own bat’ that gain kudos for the player.

The first usage of ‘off his own bat’ as a figurative, i.e. non-cricket, phrase is in Fragment on Irish Affairs by the Rev. Sydney Smith, May 1845:

“Dr. Hodgson is a very worthy, amiable man… but [I] suppose he had no revenues but what he got off his own bat.”

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Cotton-picking

Meaning

A general term of disapproval, of something that is troublesome or a nuisance.

Origin

It can come as as little surprise that the term ‘cotton-picking’ originated in the southern states of the USA. It began life in the late 1700s and differs from the 19th century Dixie term, ‘cottonpicker’, in that the latter was derogatory and racist, whereas ‘cotton-picking’ referred directly to the difficulty and harshness of gathering the crop. Of course, ‘cotton-picking’ must have been in use as an English adjectival phrase for as long as English-speaking people have picked cotton. There are numerous citations of ‘cotton-picking’ seasons/jobs/machines etc. since the late 1700s. J & E Pettigrew’s Letters has an early example, from 1795:

‘One of the students was banished… for going to a cotton picking after eight at Knight.’

Our folk memory of grizzled cowboys in Hollywood B-features ‘fixin to run that cotton-picking greenhorn outta town’ etc., might give us cause to think that the use of ‘cotton-picking’ as a figurative term originated in the 19th century wild west. In fact, it didn’t, and it doesn’t even seem to have been spoken in any of Hollywood’s numerous early cowboy movies. It isn’t until the 1940s that the term began to be used in any other context than that of the actual picking of cotton. The earliest such reference that I have found is in the Pennsylvania newspaper, The Daily Courier, November 1942:

It’s just about time some of our Northern meddlers started keeping their cotton-picking fingers out of the South’s business.

Where memory doesn’t play tricks is when recalling the works of the sainted Bugs Bunny. While not originating the term, Bugs can claim to have done more to fix it into the language than the rest of rabbitkind, especially in its most often used form ‘Wait just a cotton-picking minute’. There’s an example in Bully for Bugs, 1953:

“Just a cotton-pickin’ minute, this don’t look like the Coachella Valley to me!”

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Old codger

Meaning

An old man, especially one who is eccentric, curmudgeonly or grotesque.

Origin

An episode of the UK Channel4 archeological series Time Team, in April 2009, featured an item on falconry. A falconer, suitably dressed in mock-tudor doublet and hose, explained that the frame that was used to carry falcons to the field was called a cadge (probably a variant of ‘cage’). Frame carrying was said to be a job for elderly falconers, who came to be called ‘old cadgers’ and later, ‘old codgers’. He also threw in for good measure that this was also the derivation of ‘cadging a lift’ (a.k.a. ‘cadge a ride’).

Time Team includes senior academics who expect a good standard of historical and archeological evidence to support theories about the origins of the buildings and the artefacts that they dig up. Regrettably, those standards go out of the window when it comes to words and phrases. The ‘old codger’ assertion came with no evidence at all and yet it was confidently broadcast as fact. In truth, it is a highly dubious claim.

The ‘cadge a lift’ theory is certainly wrong. That phrase isn’t known until the 19th century, well after falconry had become uncommon and, in any case, that ‘beg/borrow’ meaning of cadge was in use as a general term for ‘obtaining without payment’ and only later became used in ‘cadge a lift’. As to ‘old codger’, it is the begging sense of cadge rather than the falcon transport meaning that is much more likely to be linked to ‘cadger’ and later ‘codger’.

The earliest meaning of ‘cadger’, which pre-dates the naming of falconry cadges by a good two hundred years, was as the name of itinerant dealers who traded in butter/eggs etc., which they transported by pack-horse. This dates from the 15th century and was referred to in Robert Henryson’s The Morall Fabillis of Esope, circa 1450:

"A Cadgear, with capill and with creils". [horse and baskets]

Over time, less respectable tramps, beggers and smugglers also began to be called cadgers. Cadging changed from ‘trading’ to begging/borrowing’. By the early 19th century, any ne’er-do-well who made a living by questionable means might be called a cadger. William Hone’s The Every-day Book, 1825, lists that meaning:

"A rosinante [a worn-out horse], borrowed from some whiskey smuggler or cadger."

The link between cadger and codger is complex. In some parts of England the two words were used interchangeably, whereas in other regions they were separate words, one meaning ‘beggar’ and the other ‘eccentric/grotesque fellow’. The latter meaning is the one used in an early example of ‘old codger’, David Garrick’s farce Bon Ton, 1775:

"My Lord’s servants call you an old out-of-fashion’d Codger."

Men who had fallen on hard times and had resorted to any means possible to keep body and soul together were often those who were too old to find work. A cadger was likely to be a grizzled character wanting to borrow or steal from you; a codger was a peculiar and unfashionable chap, and both were likely to be old. ‘Old codger’ is most likely to be the linguistic merging of all those images. What is less likely is that the first such codger was seen carrying a cage of falcons.

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La-di-da

Meaning

Used to highlight and ridicule snobbish forms of behaviour or speech.

Origin

‘La-di-da’ was fading out of use in the language until it staged something of a comeback following its use by the eponymous heroine of the 1977 film Annie Hall. Diane Keaton’s character actually said ‘La-di-da, la-di-da, la la’. This wasn’t a reference to swanky or snobbish behaviour – it was used as a meaningless phrase, spoken out of context when nervous, to emphasize Hall’s ditzy personality.

The expression was in general use by the 1880s. This usage was probably advanced by the inclusion of ‘la-di-da’ in some songs of the day. George Duckworth Atkin and others collected many of these in the journal House Scraps, which was published around 1883, and included these two songs:

We are a Merry Family, We are! we are! we are!

Jack, he deals in Canadas,
In Trunks, one, two, or three;
Willie, he gives turns away,
But not to you or me.
The young ‘un goes to music-halls,
And does the la-di-da;
We are a shiney family,
We are! we are! we are!

Untitled:

La-di-da, La-di-do,
He’s a well-known old Adonis,
La-di-da, La-di-do,
You may tell it by his nose,
La-di-da, La-di-do,
For the colour all his own is,
It’s a pleasing combination
Of the beetroot and the rose.

‘La-di-da’ sounds as though it may be of French origin. In fact, it isn’t and derives from the earlier reduplicated phrase ‘lardy-dardy’. That phrase was cited in Lacy’s Acting Edition of Plays, Dramas, Farces and Extravagances, 1849:

One of those haw-haw fellows, who used to hang around you – lardy dardy, pois’ning the atmosphere with their pomadey. [Note: pomade has two meanings - either a type of cider or a sticky, scented gel used to dress hair. We can safely assume the above citation refers to the latter.]

That example shows ‘lardy dardy’ used as an exclamation. Other contemporary sources used it in the current descriptive manner, for example, this piece from Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novel Three times dead; or, The secret of the heath, 1859:

You’re not much good, my friend, says I, with your lardy dardy ways, and your cold blooded words.

Reduplicated expressions like lardy-dardy usually have one word that supplies the meaning and a secondary rhyming word, which is added for emphasis. In this case the significant word is ‘lardy’. These days, ‘lardy’ just means ‘full of lard’, like lardy cakes, the sweet, fatty ‘heart attack on a plate’ buns that are still sold in the UK without any form of health warning. ‘Lardy-dardy and ‘la-di-da’ have nothing to do with lard. It is more likely that ‘lardy’ was a corruption of ‘lady’ or ‘lordy’, which match the meaning of the phrases.

See other reduplicated phrases.

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Rule of thumb

Meaning

A means of estimation made according to a rough and ready practical rule, not based on science or exact measurement.

Origin

The ‘rule of thumb’ has been said to derive from the belief that English law allowed a man to beat his wife with a stick so long as it is was no thicker than his thumb. In 1782, Judge Sir Francis Buller is reported as having made this legal ruling and in the following year James Gillray published a satirical cartoon attacking Buller and caricaturing him as ‘Judge Thumb’. The cartoon shows a man beating a fleeing woman and Buller carrying two bundles of sticks. The caption reads "thumbsticks – for family correction: warranted lawful!"

It seems that Buller was hard done by. He was notoriously harsh in his punishments and had a reputation for arrogance, but there’s no evidence that he ever made the ruling that he is infamous for. Edward Foss, in his authoritative work The Judges of England, 1870, wrote that, despite a searching investigation, "no substantial evidence has been found that he ever expressed so ungallant an opinion".

It’s certainly the case that, although British common law once held that it was legal for a man to chastise his wife in moderation (whatever that meant), the ‘rule of thumb‘ has never been the law in England.

Even if people mistakenly supposed the law to exist, there’s no reason to believe that anyone ever called it the ‘rule of thumb’. Despite the phrase being in common use since the 17th century and appearing many thousands of times in print, there are no printed records that associate it with domestic violence until the 1970s, when the notion was castigated by feminists. The responses that circulated then, which assumed the wife-beating law to be true, may have been influenced by Gillray’s cartoon or were possibly a reaction to The Rolling Stones’ song ‘Under My Thumb‘, which was recorded in 1966.

The phrase itself has been in circulation since the 1600s. In 1692, it appeared in print in Sir William Hope’s training manual for aspiring swordsmen, The Compleat Fencing-master:

"What he doth, he doth by rule of Thumb, and not by Art."

The origin of the phrase remains unknown. It is likely that it refers to one of the numerous ways that thumbs have been used to estimate things – judging the alignment or distance of an object by holding the thumb in one’s eye-line, the temperature of brews of beer, measurement of an inch from the joint to the nail to the tip, or across the thumb, etc. The phrase joins the whole nine yards as one that probably derives from some form of measurement but which is unlikely ever to be definitively pinned down.

The earliest such ‘measurement’ use that I can find referred to in print is in a journal of amusing tales with the comprehensive title of Witt’s Recreations – Augmented with Ingenious Conceites for the Wittie and Merrie Medicines for the Melancholic. It was published in 1640 and contains this rhyme:

If Hercules tall stature might be guess’d
But by his thumb, the index of the rest,
In due proportion, the best rule that I
Would chuse, to measure Venus beauty by,
Should be her leg and foot:

The ‘rule of leg’ never caught on.

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The proof of the pudding

Meaning

To fully test something you need to experience it yourself.

Origin

‘The proof of the pudding’ is just shorthand for ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’. That makes sense at least, whereas the shortened version really doesn’t mean anything. Nor does the often-quoted incorrect variation ‘the proof is in the pudding’. The continued use of that meaningless version is no doubt bolstered by the fact that the correct version isn’t that easy to understand.

The meaning become clear when you know that ‘proof’ here means ‘test’. The more common meaning of proof in our day and age is ‘the evidence that demonstrates a truth’ – as in a mathematical or legal proof. The verb form meaning ‘to test’ is less often used these days, although it does survive in several commonly used phrases: ‘the exception that proves the rule’, ‘proof-read’, ‘proving-ground’, etc. Clearly, the distinction between these two forms of the word was originally quite slight and the proof in a ‘showing to be true’ sense is merely the successful outcome of a test of whether a proposition is correct or not.

‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating’ is a very old proverb. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations dates it back to the early 14th century, albeit without offering any supporting evidence. The phrase is widely attributed to Cervantes in The History of Don Quixote. This appears to be by virtue of an early 18th century translation by Peter Motteux, which has been criticised by later scholars as ‘a loose paraphrase’ and ‘Franco-Cockney’. Crucially the Spanish word for pudding – ‘budín’, doesn’t appear in the original Spanish text.

The earliest printed example of the proverb that I can find is in William Camden’s Remaines of a Greater Worke Concerning Britaine, 1605:

“All the proof of a pudding is in the eating.”

The prrof of the pudding is in the eatingIt is worth remembering that, as the phrase is quite old, the pudding wouldn’t have been a sticky toffee pudding from the sweet trolley, but a potentially fatal savoury dish. In Camden’s listing of proverbs he also includes “If you eat a pudding at home, the dog may have the skin”, which suggests that the pudding he had in mind was some form of sausage. THE OED describes the mediaeval pudding as ‘the stomach or one of the entrails of a pig, sheep, or other animal, stuffed with a mixture of minced meat, suet, oatmeal, seasoning, etc., and boiled’. Those of you who have ventured north of the border on Burns Night will recognize this as a fair description of a haggis – “the great chieftain o’ the pudding-race”, as Burns called it in the poem Address to a Haggis, 1786. Mediaeval peasants, faced with a boiled up farmyard massacre, might have thought a taste test to have been a wise choice.

See also: the List of Proverbs.
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Every week I get an email called Phrase of the Week. It’s a very informative weekly mailing that will tell you the origin of phrases that you may or may not have heard of… so here’s this week’s!

—

A skeleton in the closet

Meaning

A secret source of shame, potentially ruinous if exposed, which a person or family makes efforts to conceal.

Origin

The phrase ‘a skeleton in the closet’ was coined in England in the 19th century. Since then the word closet has become used primarily in England to mean ‘water closet’, i.e. lavatory – a possible hiding place for a skeleton I suppose, but not one with much potential. The English now usually use ‘a skeleton in the cupboard’, with ‘skeleton in the closet’ more common in the USA.

‘A skeleton in the closet’ undoubtedly originated as an allusion to an apparently irreproachable person or family having a guilty secret waiting to be uncovered. The close-at-hand domestic imagery of a closet or cupboard gives a sense of the ever-present risk of discovery. What isn’t clear is whether the origin of the phrase lies in fiction or with real life, so to speak, skeletons.

The phrase was first used in the early 1800s. The first reference I can find in print is a figurative one in a piece by William Hendry Stowell, in the UK monthly periodical The Eclectic Review, 1816. The ‘skeleton’ in this case was the desire to keep a hereditary disease secret:

Two great sources of distress are the danger of contagion and the apprehension of hereditary diseases. The dread of being the cause of misery to posterity has prevailed over men to conceal the skeleton in the closet…

The dramatic device of a hidden body was used widely in the Gothic novels of the Victorian period. Edgar Allen Poe was the master of such tales, for example, this extract from The Black Cat, 1845 :

"Gentlemen, I delight to have allayed your suspicions", and here, through the mere frenzy of bravado, I rapped heavily upon that very portion of the brick-work behind which stood the corpse of the wife of my bosom. The wall fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators.

It has been suggested that the phrase derives from the era of the notorious body snatchers, i.e. prior to 1832, when the UK’s Anatomy Act allowed the more extensive use of corpses for medical research. The theory goes that, in a scenario like that of the concealment of Catholic priests in priest holes in domestic houses in Elizabethan England, doctors would conceal in cupboards the illegally held skeletons they used for teaching. There’s no evidence at all to corroborate that theory. Concealed skeletons are occasionally found walled-up in houses but they are usually those of unwanted infants.

The notion of a skeleton in the closet as shorthand for the grim evidence of a murder was widely adopted into the language due to the writings of the popular Victorian author William Makepeace Thackeray. He referred to ‘a skeleton in every house’ in a piece in 1845 and explicitly to ‘skeletons in closets’ in The Newcomes; memoirs of a most respectable family, 1854–55:

Some particulars regarding the Newcome family, which will show us that they have a skeleton or two in their closets, as well as their neighbours.

Whether Thackeray was alluding to actual skeletons or whether he was responding to the imagination of authors like Poe, we are never likely to know. One person he certainly wasn’t referring to was the 18th/19th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham – despite his being the best-known actual skeleton in a cupboard. Bentham was hardly aiming to keep his skeleton a secret, as he willed that his body be preserved in a wooden cabinet. It is on public display in University College, London.

The American expressions ‘come out of the closet’ or simply ‘come out’ began to be used in the 1960s and are, of course, direct follow-ons from ‘a skeleton in the closet’. As far as I’m aware, no one in the UK has declared themselves as gay by coming out of a cupboard.

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