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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This is a 360 degree panorama that I took of the inside of Grace Episcopal Church in Cullman, AL

Panorama of Grace Episcopal Church – Sanctuary on CleVR.com