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"I didn't know her face; she was a stranger, for you couldn't start a face in that town that I didn't know." - Mark Twain. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Kindle Location 953).
Google seems to recognize "start a face painting business" and start a Facebook whatever, but for just start a face or for start a face idiom, it has nothing relevant to offer, nor do any of the dictionary entries seem obvious.
Is he talking of giving someone new a start, as in startling them? It sounds like Huck is saying that you can't produce a local resident whose face was unknown to him. (This occurred when Huck was on a window-peeping reconnoiter, dressed as a girl.)
I swear I remember reading that line and also thinking about what it could mean. And it's been years since I read that book. I imagined that Huck was alluding to the process of drawing a face on a sheet of paper, and as soon as you started drawing it, he would know who it was. Maybe just by the shape of the head or hair, even before you got to the facial features. That's my $0.02 anyway.
Now that was before online anything. So I took a look and found this in The Annotated Huckleberry Finn: You couldn't introduce me to anyone in that town I didn't know. That interpretation by one Michael Patrick Hearn (who I'd never heard of).
That confirms the meaning of the phrase, but I think deaconB was looking for the etymology, and I couldn't find anything about that online. So I'll stand by my guess on that, but would also be interested to learn the etymology.
Ngrams provides the curious result that, even though the book was published in 1884-85, the citations start around 1918, and none (other than Twain's) are used in that context.
Martha Barnette
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Grant Barrett
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