Elbow Grease

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant. This is Deanna calling from Dundee, Quebec, Canada.

Hi.

Hi there. What’s up?

Not much.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

How can we help you, Deanna?

Okay, so I have to give you a little bit of background to this story before I can ask my question.

Okay.

So my husband is originally from Slovakia, and he moved to Canada, into Quebec, when he was a child, and as such learned French when he learned English when he was a teenager.

So English is his third language.

When we bought our first house together, it was, I guess the best way to describe it is a fixer-upper, and it needed a lot of work and a lot of cleaning as it had sat vacant for several years.

So when we were first getting everything ready, we were cleaning the kitchen and having a really tough time removing some grime from the walls and the cupboards in order to paint them.

We tried a couple different cleaning products, all different stuff. Nothing was working very well.

So finally he kind of gave up and just left it to me.

So a couple hours later he came back, and I had gotten most of it clean.

And he said, well, what did you use to get it clean?

And I said, oh, well, elbow grease.

So he looks at me for just a second and pauses and says, well, where do you buy that?

I wish.

Yeah, exactly.

So after I laughed at him for a second, I explained to him that it was a euphemism that meant hard work.

But he replied that that doesn’t make sense, as so many things in English don’t.

And honestly, once I thought about it, I realized it really doesn’t.

So how did elbow grease come to mean hard work?

No, that’s a really good question.

Do you have some theories there?

Not really.

I kind of understand how you would, like, grease an elbow of a pipe or a fitting to make it move, but I still can’t really figure out how that would mean hard work.

Huh, I hadn’t even thought of that one.

Usually elbow grease just refers to sweat.

When you work very hard, you sweat.

And the first citation that I can find for it is from a book of Proverbs from 1670 where they say to smell of elbow grease, meaning to smell of sweat.

You have been working hard and you are covered in this you know product of your exertions and so elbow grease is a euphemism not euphemism I guess is a idiom referring to hard work.

Is just kind of 400 years on here we are with the phrase still at play yeah working with your hands.

Moving those arms yeah I would have never made that connection.

Yeah, it’s just it’s just sweat.

Sometimes it’s been a little more abstracted from that and people kind of forget that it refers to sweat and it becomes a little more figurative or a little more separated from the actual hard labor.

In fact, you might talk about a government putting in elbow grease to solve a problem, meaning collectively they’re working on it. They’re not physically working on it.

Yeah, I would have thought the grease was more metaphorical, more not perspiration per se.

In the beginning, at least, it usually came back to real hard work.

You might talk about polishing furniture or the servants polishing the silver. They’re actually using elbow grease.

Okay, so no animals were harmed in the production of this product.

Except for the human animal, yes.

Sore joints, a little gout.

Well, thank you so much.

All right, well, thank you for calling me.

Yeah, thanks. Best of luck.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We’ll share some pages from this proverb dictionary on the website.

It’s pretty cool.

They do real page scans.

And so you can actually see the old-fashioned S’s and all that kind of thing and the annotations in the side.

Oh, I’d like to hear more, yeah.

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