#1561 Where do lily-livered, carpetbagger, mad as a hatter, pleased as punch, turncoat, bigwig, rule of thumb, and skeleton in the cupboard come from?

Where do lily-livered, carpetbagger, mad as a hatter, pleased as punch, turncoat, bigwig, rule of thumb, and skeleton in the cupboard come from? All of these expressions have fascinating origin stories. Let’s look at them one by one.

Lily-livered is a British phrase that means someone is cowardly. If you are not British, you may have heard it used in pirate movies. Shakespeare used it in several of his plays as well. It means cowardly because hundreds of years ago, people thought that all of our health and emotions came from a perfect balance of bodily fluids, called the four humors, which were produced in the liver. We had blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. More blood made you cheerful, optimistic, and social. More phlegm made you calm, unemotional, and rational. More black bile made you pensive, reserved, and despondent. More yellow bile made you passionate, decisive, and aggressive. If you didn’t have enough of these humors, your liver was white, or lily colored, and you were a coward. As an aside, we get the word “sanguine” from the blood humor, “phlegmatic” from phlegm, “melancholic” from black bile, and “choleric” from yellow bile.

A carpetbagger is a term for a politician who moves to a new district or state solely for the purpose of running for office. They are outsiders trying to exploit the area for their own gain. The term comes from the Reconstruction period after the US Civil War, when northerners went to the south for their own fortune and they carried small suitcases made of pieces of carpet.

Mad as a hatter was popularized by Alice in Wonderland, but it is used to refer to someone who is slightly insane. It is often used jokingly, but its origins are theorized to come from the hat trade in 18^th century England. Hats were made from felt, which is made from beaver, rabbit, or hare skin. It was treated with mercury to make the fur fibers more pliable and smoother. The process produced a lot of mercury vapor, which is highly toxic and sent many hatters insane.

Pleased as punch means to be extremely happy, usually with a sense of too much self-satisfaction. Its origins come from a children’s puppet show in the UK that started in the 1600s called “Punch and Judy”. The character of Mr. Punch is extremely happy throughout the entire story, which entails him killing his wife, a policeman, a doctor, a lawyer, a hangman, Death, and the devil. He is always happy and says, “That’s the way to do it!” after each murder. Punch and Judy shows still exist, but the storyline has changed. Mr. Punch does awful things gleefully with a lot of self-satisfaction, leading to “as pleased as punch”.

The origin of the term “turncoat” is much easier to understand. It means a traitor, or someone who has switched sides. These days, armies wear different kinds of camouflage, but armies used to wear solid colors to differentiate each side. For example, the French army wore blue, and the British army wore red. A turncoat was someone who had switched their uniform coat for the other sides, or who had turned their uniform coat inside out so the color could not be seen.

Bigwig is also relatively straightforward. A bigwig is someone who is very important, and it comes from the 18th century, when people used to wear wigs. The fashion for wigs started in France with Louis XIII, and it spread through the aristocracy of Europe. A wig was fairly expensive to buy and then needed a lot of care and upkeep. Only the very wealthy could afford large, well-made wigs, and the more important somebody was, the more money they would have, and the bigger the wig they could afford.

These days, there is a myth that rule of thumb comes from when men were allowed to beat their wives so long as the stick they used was no wider than their thumb. This myth started in the 1780s and is not actually the origin of the expression. The expression comes from artisans in the early 17^th century who used their thumbs to approximately measure things. Its first appearance is in 1685 when a Catholic preacher talks about Christian builders being foolish because they just used the rule of thumb. The myth came from an English judge called Sir Francis Buller, who said that a husband could beat his wife. However, he never used the expression “rule of thumb”. It was attributed to him in satirical cartoons. The first actual use of the expression in regards to domestic violence was in a Mississippi court in 1824.

Skeleton in the cupboard means to have a hidden secret that is very shameful. It seems that the origins of this phrase go back to the medical profession in the UK in the early 19^th century. Doctors needed to dissect bodies to learn about human anatomy, but they were not legally allowed to until Parliament passed the Anatomy Act of 1832. This gave doctors and teachers of anatomy a legal right to dissect donated bodies. Before this, the only way doctors could get their hands on bodies was to use those of executed criminals or illegally dug up bodies. There was quite an illegal trade in corpses at the time, which finally pushed the government to pass this law, and also led to our phrase. Any doctor who had an illegal body for dissection needed to hide the evidence of it, so they would hide the skeleton in the cupboard and hope they weren’t found out. And this is what I learned today.

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