Figurative Language From Flintlocks

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

This is Robin.

I’m calling from San Luis Obispo, California.

Hey, Robin.

Glad to have you.

What’s up?

My family were watching a sporting event, me and my mom and my dad, and we heard the term a flash in the pan for a d an athlete who, you know, d performed very well for a short period of time and then sort of fizzled out.

And we were talking about that between the three of us, and we’re just wondering about the origins of that.

Had something to do with gold mining, a a flash of gold in a pan.

I hadn’t really ever given it too much thought, but when I’d heard that before I’d thought of like like flambey or you know, using wine and cooking and something flaring up and instead of Googling the origin, we thought that it would be more fun to give you guys a call.

Well we are glad that you called.

So the pan we’re talking about here is a different pan, and it’s not as common as those other ones.

At least it isn’t now, but it used to be, and it’s the pan on a flintlock musket where you put the powder.

And so a flash in a pan is a misfire because the powder burns, but the gun doesn’t really fire.

So you you put the powder in the pan, you pull the trigger, the hammer strikes a flint, makes a spark, the powder goes poof, and it’s supposed to travel the fire that’s made is supposed to travel through a touch hole to ignite the main charge, it’s in the barrel, but when you have a flash in a pan, that last part doesn’t happen.

You only get the initial burst of poof of the of the powder and nothing else.

And so it’s an explosion that doesn’t really lead to much, just exactly the same way we use it figuratively now.

And we have it in a literal sense from the very early 1700s and from a figurative sense from the very early eighteen hundreds to and it was described I think the very first non literal use I know of they were talking about a journey that was slow to start.

So not quite the same sense.

But but sometimes it’s about hesitating more than it is about having an initial success and then petering out to nothing.

So there’s a couple of different nuances there that have changed over the years.

Well that’s very interesting that you know I, thought that b that both of our thoughts could be were were perfectly valid and but they were they were not the right one.

Not the right ones.

And another one that often comes up that is also not right is old style photography where you have this pan full of powder to make the flash so that you can get a lot of extra light on your subject.

Okay.

Martha, we have a bunch of these from that era of weaponry, right?

From the the Flintlock era.

Yeah, I’m trying to think muskets and well I thought about half cocked where they the literal became figurative.

Or lock stock and barrel or keep your powder dry.

Or if we talk about somebody being ramrod straight, the ramrod is this long straight tool you use to to drive that charge home in the barrel.

Right.

And it’s a you know at one time people would think of a ramrod as a very good example of a straight thing, but we just don’t have that intimacy with that kind of weapon anymore.

Yeah, those are that’s I I d would never have guessed that that was something that came from from from weaponry.

Yeah that’s very interesting.

Yeah, unlike baseball, which is still a a regular part of everyday life and has given us so much figurative language, we just this has passed on into history.

So we don’t have that that daily intimacy with that kind of weaponry that we used to when it might have been at one time the very first thing you thought of because you knew it more than anything else.

You knew it more than flameth cooking or or gold panning.

Right.

Sure, sure.

Yeah.

Well Robin, thanks for the question and say hello to your parents for us.

Oh, absolutely will.

Thank you guys so much.

Sure, yeah.

Take care of yourself.

Bye-bye.

All right, you too.

Bye-bye.

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