Erin in Austin, Texas, asks about at loggerheads, meaning stuck in a stubborn disagreement or being at an impasse. The idiom is about 400 years old and likely draws on more than one sense of loggerhead. One is a log-like head, or blockhead, suggesting stubborn people who won’t budge. Another, a little newer, is a bulb-ended metal poker heated in a fire and plunged into drinks to mull wine, an object easy to imagine in a fight. Loggerhead turtles make a tempting folk explanation, but they’re not the likely source here. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of ““At Loggerheads” Describes Stubborn Disagreement with No Way Forward”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Erin, and I’m in Austin.
And well, I want to ask about the word loggerheads.
My boss asked a couple of us at work who are either from the north or word nerds if we knew where it originated.
I mean, I know the word, but I don’t know anything about it.
How would you use it in a sentence?
I’ve always heard it as at loggerheads, like at an impasse.
Like, there’s no way forward.
You’re asking about at loggerheads, and you’re like, oh, this is a weird English word.
Yes.
When I talked with my mom, she’s like, I think it comes from the turtles.
And I was like, that seems reasonable, I suppose.
Oh, yeah, the turtle, the loggerhead turtles.
Do you have those in Texas?
Yeah, okay.
And are they kind of snapping turtle?
I think so.
I didn’t go look them up, but she seemed to know what loggerhead turtles were.
And she’s from the north, so I don’t know if that’s why or she just knows that’s some random trivia.
Well, loggerheads, to be at loggerheads, we’ll talk about the turtles in a minute.
To be at loggerheads goes back about 400 years or so, and it relates to behaving like a blockhead.
Basically. So because one meaning of loggerhead is to have a log like head, L-O-G, like a part of a tree.
Log. You’re a log. You’re thick. You’re dense. You’re a blockhead.
So if two people are at loggerheads, they’re both.
Yeah, they’re both kind of thick headed and neither one will budge for the other.
They’re stubborn. Yes.
There was a word that appeared centuries later that suggests there might have been a loggerhead device that was a block of wood used to keep animals like horses in check.
But the evidence for that is pretty scant.
There is another meaning of loggerhead, which is a little newer.
It’s about 350 years old instead of 400 years old, which is a kind of metal poker used to heat drinks.
It’s a long rod about the size of a fireplace poker.
And on the end is this metal bulb.
Sometimes they’re ornate, kind of fancy.
You put it in the fire until it’s very hot, maybe even red hot.
And then you thrust it into the drink to make the drink steam and bubble.
This is how you mull, M-U-L-L, how you mull wine.
And that is also a loggerhead.
So you can imagine that two people fighting with these loggerheads could be said to be at loggerheads.
It might even involve drunken fighting because they’re in a place that serves mulled wine.
So we don’t know which of these is the first one.
We’re pretty sure that they both contributed to the idiom, however.
Often you’ll find that in language where there’s kind of a cross-pollination,
Where two terms from slightly different origins kind of work together to provide an idiom.
It’s oomph.
It’s kind of semantic force.
And I think that’s what’s happening here.
But without a time machine, you can say for certain.
Right.
Well, thanks for joining our nerd club on the air.
We appreciate it, Erin.
Thank you.
This is fun.
All right.
Thanks, Aaron.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
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