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Of course, anthropologically, people do, in fact, in remote conditions live under rocks for shelter from the elements.
The expression seems to gain figurative currency in the 1950s, at first with a focus on appearance. A person looks like they live under a rock if they are pale. It seems to be extended to someone who looks disheveled, or unkempt.
By the early 1960s the focus quickly shifts and fixes to being out of touch or behind the times or lacking some common knowledge.
But my personal guess is that the popularization of this expression has to do with extreme atomic bomb fear in the late 1940s, through the 1950s, and well into the 1960s. Some particularly anxious folks took to living in remote underground bomb and fallout shelters. I suspect such people would occasionally make the news or surface in other ways during this period. But I have no definitive proof that this anxiety is what popularized the expression.
Fallout Shelters
October 6, 1961: Kennedy urges Americans to build bomb shelters.
This expression makes me picture not people in a remote wilderness, but the grubs you find when you turn over a large rock that hasn't moved for years. They often give the impression that the unexpected exposure has panicked them and they scurry around frantically trying to restore the cover that is all they've ever known.
A former girlfriend of mine once had the plumbing replaced in her house. The foundation hadn't been disturbed in at least thirty years. For weeks afterwards, the outside of the house was swarming with tiny white lizards.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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