Ass Over Teakettle

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello there, this is Stacy, and I’m calling from Menasha, Wisconsin.

Hello, Stacy, welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

Thanks.

Well, my husband and my son were driving home from school one day, and they saw a boy on a skateboard, and he hit a rock or something and just went tumbling.

And my husband said, wow, he went ass over a tea kettle.

And my son, who’s 12, said, what are you talking about?

And my husband said, you know, he rolled, he tumbled, he went ass over tea kettle.

And my son said, that’s not a real thing.

And he came home and said, Mom, is that a real thing?

And I said, well, I’ve heard it before.

And I said, yeah, I think it’s a real thing.

So I called my parents, and I’m actually from northern Minnesota, and that’s where they grew up as well.

And I said, Mom, you’ve heard this, right?

And she said, oh, yeah.

And same with my dad.

And I said, do you remember when the first time or where you heard it?

And they just said, nope, just, you know, people around the farm, people that would stop over.

I’ve just heard it before.

So I’m wondering where it came from.

Great question.

It is a really good question.

There’s a lot of variations of this, and they’re all lost.

Their origins are lost to the mists of time.

But I can tell you the first use that I find of ass over tea kettle, meaning head over heels, is in a story from the 1930s by William Carlos Williams called The White Mule.

And so it’s really significant that it should appear in the writing of such a great writer.

But we’ve also got things like head over tin kettle, head over tin cups, dolly over tea kettles, ace over apex, some British ones that we can’t say on the air because they involve other body parts, crude words for other body parts.

And the whole suggestion is that your head is where your bottom is supposed to be and your bottom is where your head is supposed to be.

Plus, it sounds noisy to me.

Oh, the tea kettle one.

Yeah, I could see the clatter and the bang.

I thought maybe the tea kettle was standing in for the person’s head.

It looks vaguely like a head with a nose and a mouth.

Yeah, like a pot, yeah.

So it has nothing to do with a kitchen accident?

No, they’re all just a clever, funny way of talking about people falling down.

Yeah, no one famous kitchen accident from 1907 or anything like that.

Now, the earliest version of this whole idea, an idiomatic expression that talks about falling over in this way is from 1800s, late 1800s.

And then suddenly there’s a flurry of variations in the 20s and the 30s and the 40s until we kind of get to the modern era when we’re all more boring and don’t come up with new expressions all the time.

Well, okay.

I will make my kids listen to this and I will make sure they know it’s a real thing.

Make them.

Make them.

Stacy?

Well, you know, moms on the radio, they don’t care.

Oh, right, right, right.

They’re like, whatever, mom.

You could be the first woman on Mars and be like, whatever, mom.

Whatever, mom.

Great.

Well, Stacy, thank you so much for calling.

Yeah, and thank you.

Have a good day.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We do try to solve these family mysteries, at least tell you a little bit more than you came in with.

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