More expressions than you can shake a stick at

I grew up in a house where things were rough as a cob, the sky was clear as a bell, and there were more expressions than you could shake a stick at. But don’t call them cliches. When my dad speaks, he uses the expressions he got from his father as naturally as breathing.  They never sound tired or worn out.  In fact, when I was young I didn’t even think of them as expressions.  It was as if there were no other way to say it.

For fun, I thought I would explore a few of these, most of which seem to be American in origin.

ROUGH AS A COB

Traditionally, this is used to describe people or circumstances that affect you personally.  “That guy was rough as a cob” would mean he was abrasive, someone who rubbed you the wrong way. As far as I can remember, My dad never used it that way.  In fact, being a boater and a sailor,  he would say,  “The bay is as rough as a cob out there.” I wonder if he even knows that the expression refers to the use of corn cobs in the outhouse for personal hygiene.

FORTY-ELEVEN

If there is more of something than you care to count–say, varieties of candy at the store–then you might conclude that there are forty-eleven different kinds. George Thompson of the American Dialect Society traces the word back as far as 1836. He speculates that it might be a Black expression, but my guess is it is merely Southern.

[Cornelia Latting, a young colored woman, sentenced to 2 years, months; she tells the court] that she did not care a d–n if they had sent her up for forty-eleven years.

New York Transcript, February 15, 1836, p. 2, col. 4.

Another reference he found:

I never go into one [a toy store] without wishin’ it was Christmas once a week, and I had forty-eleven children to buy toys for.

S. Annie Frost, “The Daffodils Prepare fot a Fancy Fair,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, July, 1866, p. 52, col. 2 (Proquest’s Amer Periodicals)

It’s a little like “umpteen,” I suppose.

A BUCK THREE-EIGHTY

If your wife asks you how much that gleaming new piece of hardware for your boat cost, you might not want to tell her, so you downplay the cost as if it is inconsequential and you say, “oh, about a buck three-eighty.”

COULDN’T STIR ‘EM WITH A STICK

This is a simple one used to describe a crowd.  In other words, “thick.”  There were so many people, you couldn’t stir ‘em with a stick.  It might be people, but it could also be boats in the harbor or roaches in the motel room. Which brings us to another similar stick-related expression:

MORE THAN YOU CAN SHAKE A STICK AT

This one could just be a simple variant of “more than you can count” or more than you can point out.”  However, something about that stick shaking seems to hint at something else. Nobody knows for sure.  The best explanation I have found is in World Wide Words, an online newsletter by Michael Quinion:

Its recorded history began — at least, so far as the Oxford English Dictionary knows — in the issue of the Lancaster Journal of Pennsylvania dated 5 August 1818: “We have in Lancaster as many Taverns as you can shake a stick at”. Another early example is from Davy Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East of 1835: “This was a temperance house, and there was nothing to treat a friend that was worth shaking a stick at”. A little later, in A Book of Vagaries by James K Paulding of 1868, this appears: “The roistering barbecue fellow swore he was equal to any man you could shake a stick at”.

The modern use of the phrase always exists as part of the extended and fixed phrase “more … than you can shake a stick at”, meaning an abundance, plenty. The phrase without the “more than” element is rather older, but not by much.

Shaking a stick at somebody, of course, is a threatening gesture, or at least one of defiance. So to say that you have shaken a stick at somebody is to suggest that person is an opponent, perhaps a worthy one. The sense in the second and third quotations above seem to fit this idea: “nothing worth shaking a stick at” means nothing of value; “equal to any man you could shake a stick at” means that the speaker is equal to any man of consequence.

Where it comes from can only be conjecture. One possibility that has been put forward is that it derives from the counting of farm animals, which one might do by pointing one’s stick at each in turn. So having more than one can shake one’s stick at, or tally, would imply a great number. This doesn’t fit the early examples, though, which don’t have any idea of counting about them. Another idea is that it comes from battle, in which one might shake a stick at one’s vanquished enemy. This could possibly have led into the early usages.

Following publication of this piece in the World Wide Words newsletter, Suzan Hendren and Sherwin Cogan suggested that it might have come from the Native American practice of counting coup, in which merit was gained by touching a vanquished enemy in battle. In that case, “too many to shake a stick at” might indicate a surplus of fallen enemies, and “not worth shaking a stick at” would equate a person with “an enemy who is so cowardly or worthless that there is no merit to be gained from counting coup on him”, as Sherwin Cogan put it. An intriguing idea, but there’s no evidence that I know of.

FAIR TO MIDDLIN’

Both “fair” and “middling” are cotton classing terms.  Cotton has to be classed according to quality, and these classes are rather average. So if somebody asks, “How are you,” and you say “fair to middlin’” (the “g” is dropped in the South), you are basically saying “could be better, could be worse.”

CLEAR AS A BELL

No doubt, this simile originally would have been used to describe a pure, resonating sound.  The radio station came in clear as a bell. That makes sense. But somewhere along the line, someone decided that the sky was clear as a bell.  For me, this is no longer a simple comparison; it is poetry. Describing how something looks by comparing it to to how something else sounds–that’s awesome.

Sure you’ve heard it over and over.  Believe me, I’ve heard it at least 100,000 times. “It’s clear as a bell, not a cloud in the sky.”  But it still resonates for me, makes the sky seem deeper somehow. And I think that the idea of the sky as a dome helps with the bell analogy. If God were to flick it with his finger it would ring mighty and true.  I wonder who first used the phrase in this way.

The O.E.D. devotes almost four pages to the word “clear.” There I found a line of Dickens (from Oliver Twist): “Real, fresh, genuine port-wine . . . clear as a bell, and no sediment.”  Not about the sky, of course, but the same wonderful mixing of the senses.

For more expressions, click here.