Two weeks ago, I ended a column with the phrase, “Good Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.” After almost every column, sharp-eyed readers will correct me on either a grammatical or factual error. For this, I am thankful. It has inspired me to write a column on the origin of sayings we all use, even though we have no idea from where they came.
Some people insist I should have capitalized “creek” in that first sentence. They say it warned of an uprising by the Creek Indians, dating back to the 1800s. Others say it simply refers to rising waters. I’m leaning toward the rising waters.
There is also a fascinating tale about “He was drunker than Cooter Brown.” If you ever heard someone described like that, you know he was wasted. It turns out Cooter was a real person who lived along the Mason-Dixon Line during the Civil War. He had family on both sides, but he figured if he stayed drunk, neither side would enlist him. It worked, and Cooter Brown became the drinking man’s hero.
I guess you could say that Cooter “fell off the wagon” at some point, another signal that he liked his liquor. Where did that one come from? There are several theories behind that expression of when a former alcoholic is indulging again in drinking. We know that wagons carried only water to citizens during the Prohibition era, so if you were drinking booze, you were off the wagon.
That leads to another intoxication-inspired saying: “Let’s paint the town red!” Of course, when we say that, we don’t mean it literally. But it happened, at least once. In 1837, a notorious English troublemaker led some friends on a night of drinking through the town of Melton. The jolly revelers knocked over flowerpots, broke windows, and topped off their drunken mischief by painting the doors of several homes with red paint. The pranksters later paid the town for their misdoings, but their wild night became legendary because they literally painted the town red. Thankfully, we do it in a somewhat less damaging way today.
Have you ever “let the cat out of the bag?” We get accused of that if we tell a secret, or reveal an important piece of information before it is supposed to go public. This one goes back to the 19th century. Merchants would sell piglets to farms in bags. The dishonest ones would stick a cat, a much cheaper animal, in the bag instead. The poor farmer had no idea he was being hoodwinked, until he let the cat out of the bag.
During a baseball telecast, the announcer will tell us that a certain player is “hands down” the best hitter in the game. Since hands are a necessary component in swinging a bat, I often wondered where that little phrase came from. After all, when we use “hands down,” it usually means “easily.” It turns out the phrase came from a different sport: horse racing. In the mid-1800s, it was used to describe a jockey who was so far ahead, he could stop holding the reins of his horse, actually put his hands down, and still win the race.
And finally, when we hear some questionable information, we often ask for the source. When the response is, “I got it straight from the horse’s mouth,” we are assured the story came from someone on the inside. Apparently, this originated with a horse’s teeth. When selling a horse, the owner might be tempted to lie about its age to charge a higher price. Since the most reliable way of determining a horse’s age is by examining its teeth, the truth about the horse’s age can be checked by looking at its mouth. So the truth would come “straight from the horse’s mouth.”
Since some of these phrases go back hundreds of years, much of this is pure speculation. But if more facts become available, you can count on me to spill the beans.
