Two familiar terms that have inspired lots of bogus etymologies are “dead ringer” and “spitting image.” “Dead ringer” probably comes from horse racing, where a ringer is a horse that may look like other horses in a race but is actually from a higher class of competitors, and therefore a sure bet. The dead in this sense suggests the idea of “exact” or “without a doubt,” also found in such phrases as “dead certain.” As for the term variously spelled “spitting image” or “spittin’ image” or “spit and image,” Yale University linguist Larry Horn has argued convincingly that the original form is actually “spitten image,” likening a father-son resemblance to an exact copy spat out from the original. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Dead Ringers and Spitten Images”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Yeah, hello. This is Steve Pond from Burlington, Vermont.
Hi, Steve. Welcome to the program.
Hello, Steve. What can we do for you?
Well, we were having a dinner party a few weeks ago, and after a couple glasses of wine, we decided to discuss things like where the words of spitting image and dead ringer came from. So I thought, well, I’ll call you guys and see if you have any ideas.
So what was the substance of the conversation? Different theories floating around?
Yeah, well, we have one particular friend that’s kind of a cerebral type, and he just sort of all of a sudden pops up with these things. And we’re like going, well, yeah, I guess so. I’m not sure where they do come from. So between maybe horseshoes and whatever else you could come up with, we really couldn’t find any particular solution to the problem.
So dead ringer is one of those you mentioned?
Yeah, dead ringer and spitting image. Sometimes you talk about somebody’s a spitting image of somebody or they’re sort of similar in what they’re going for, I guess.
Yeah, dead ringer is just exactly the same image, right?
Right. Somebody who’s a dead ringer looks exactly like somebody else that you know, right?
Right, right. And you mentioned horseshoes. Interestingly enough, dead ringer may come from horse racing and the fact that in horse racing, the term ringer has been used for a horse that’s entered in a race that’s actually a higher class of horse than all the other horses in the race. And so it’s not really a fair race because you have this ringer in the race and people in the know are going to bet on that ringer and win in an unfair way.
And the dead in dead ringer is just, this sense of dead is the sense of absolutely. Like if you’re in a dead heat, for example, it’s just an exact deadline finish. Or a dead shot directly on the target.
Yeah, you’re dead right about something. Absolutely right. It’s absolutely. So a dead ringer is somebody who absolutely is just like a DNA carbon copy of somebody else. And just for the record, dead ringer does not come from that email you were forwarded that suggests it had to do with people buried alive ringing bells on the surface so they could be rescued. It has nothing to do with that.
Yeah, who wasn’t forwarded that email?
Yes, that is not a true story, at least as far as this origin goes.
That’s right. If you get that email that is—
I did read that, and I said, well, that’s an interesting sight, right? It doesn’t seem to make any sense, but—
No, no. If you get that email that says, life in the 1500s, just send it to your—
Delete it.
Yeah. Delete it to your—
Send it to your trash can.
And now spitting image has some interesting complications as well, and a number of folk etymologies there. These stories that may or may not be true, it’s much harder to pin spitting image down. But the gist of it is there’s a linguist by the name of Larry Horn at Yale, who for years has been working on the idea that the spit and image or spitting image came from an older form of the verb to spit. The past tense would be spitten, as in beaten, you know, S-P-I-T-T-E-N.
We don’t really conjugate verbs in this way anymore in English except the ones that we’ve kept on from the older forms of English. What’s interesting about this, there’s been a lot of theory that it comes from spit in image, spit ding image, spit and image. And a lot of times, though, it’s about he’s the spitting image of his father. It’s so often male. It’s the son said to look like the father.
And what Larry’s done is put together this 27-page paper. It’s in the Journal of American Speech published 10 or so years ago. And in this paper, he finds other versions of this expression in a bunch of other languages. And it turns out all of these other expressions give real credence to the idea that what we’re talking about here is the idea that it’s as if the son were spit from the father’s mouth or from his body in a way that makes him exactly like the father.
And so we are talking about the verb to spit, and the verb is the most important part, not the image part, and it’s the spittin’ image. It’s spittin’ as past tense.
Right. So the image of his dad, you know?
Yeah. Really interesting. He finds versions of it in Italian, French, some far less common language like Asturian, Flemish, Croatian. It’s in Greek and Irish. Just a wide variety of these have all had this idea that a son looks like his father.
Yeah, because I read something, I researched it a little bit, and there was some dimension of, like, if a carpenter wants to make a paneling of identical pieces of wood, you know, that sort of bookmatch each other, you split it. And when you split it, you have opposing sides that are identical to each other. And so somebody thought maybe the word got more from splitting image to spitting somehow.
Yeah, that’s another one of those false trails. We do find a number of uses where people misinterpret the word as split, S-P-L-I-T, instead of spit, S-P-I-T. But those are unusual. They’re not very old. They’re not nearly as old as this expression is itself. And they always look like reinterpretations or misinterpretations.
And so people have kind of come up with these fake etymological ideas in order to explain their misinterpretation, and they just don’t hold water.
Right, right. All right. Very good.
Okay, Steve, thanks for calling.
Thanks, Steve. Bye-bye.
All right. Bye-bye.
