My students in class this morning had not heard the 'hold your mouth right' as an idiom. It appears that many of the online dictionaries do not have a good definition. Michael Jordan in this video does not use the term but describes my understanding, i.e. sometimes when you are really concentrating in trying to do something, your mouth assumes a stressed shape without your conscious effort. If you succeed at your task, you must have held your mouth right. If not, you did not hold your mouth right.
Have you heard it? And, where?
I have heard this all my life. Mostly now from older people. (50 and up) Your explanation makes sense but I have always taken it to mean, "If you have some luck."
I have never heard that expression. Grew up in the Midwest, living in Arizona now. EmmettRedd's (and Jordan's) explanation seemed to make sense at first, then I looked at Ngrams and checked a few of the usages. Most of the earliest references have some connection to hunting/fishing/camping and related activities. No real clues to the etymology though. Probably just one of those many colloquialisms that made it into common use, and for which the origin is lost in the haze of time.
Heimhenge said
I have never heard that expression. Grew up in the Midwest, living in Arizona now. EmmettRedd's (and Jordan's) explanation seemed to make sense at first, then I looked at Ngrams and checked a few of the usages. Most of the earliest references have some connection to hunting/fishing/camping and related activities. No real clues to the etymology though. Probably just one of those many colloquialisms that made it into common use, and for which the origin is lost in the haze of time.
Here is a snippet view of a 1942 'dictionary' from the Ngram above that appears to support my understanding of the phrase. I wish I could have thought of the word 'grimace'.
BTW, I keep having an image of Opie Taylor on the Andy Griffith Show holding his tongue out while trying something difficult. Sure enough, it is discussed here.
EmmettRedd said: BTW, I keep having an image of Opie Taylor on the Andy Griffith Show holding his tongue out while trying something difficult. Sure enough, it is discussed here.
Thanks for that link. I was always a fan of the Andy Griffith show, and thought I'd seen pretty much all the episodes, but not the one where Opie kills a bird ... and I definitely would have remembered that scene, since I had a similar experience when my dad let me loose unsupervised with a single-shot lever-action 22. When I watched that clip, it was a Déjà vu that dragged me back to my childhood. And like Opie, I too shed tears. Might be why I never got into hunting, which made me a bit of an outcast among my Midwestern friends.
But I digress. Getting back to the main topic, the etymology is starting to make more sense to me now. I suspect that what you do with your mouth/tongue/lips when you're focused and concentrating may be a universal human trait. Makes me wonder if there are equivalent phrases in other languages.