Get on Like a House on Fire

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Maeve and I’m calling from San Diego.

Hello, Maeve. How are you?

I’m very good, thank you.

What’s up?

So I used an expression at work a while ago, and it definitely caused a couple of eyebrows to be raised. I was talking about two people who got along very well, and what I said was that those two people got on like a house on fire.

And this caused people to raise their eyebrows?

It definitely did because they didn’t know if I was saying that they got on very well or not very well at all. So they had just no idea what it meant.

Oh, I see.

So I actually heard the term when I was growing up in Ireland. I never really thought about the sense that house burning down would actually not be a very good thing. And so how come this phrase came to be when in terms of when it’s used with two people that it is actually a very good thing?

Well, I’d say that in general it’s – how shall we call this? It’s an intensifier that falls under the category of like whopping and honking. Like that’s a whopping big bruise you have there. Or he had this honking big piece of cake and he ate it all in 10 seconds. It kind of just does the job of making whatever is being said more of the same. So to say that Martha and I get along like a house on fire means that we get along superbly. At the same time, to say that the economy is improving like a house on fire is optimistic and unrealistic, but never mind.

So your question is why do these kind of contradictory uses seem to go and coexisting?

Yes, yes.

Right.

Yeah, I’m surprised that people didn’t understand what you were saying. I have a hard time imagining it being something negative in just regular speech like that.

Well, I think it was because it was a phrase that they weren’t very familiar with, so that probably threw them.

Yeah, yeah. We’re more familiar with houses on fire here in San Diego for unfortunate reasons.

Yeah.

But there’s a little bit we know about the history of this. You might be surprised to find that it goes back more than 200 years.

Oh, okay. In digging on this, I can see a couple of uses that I think are funny. One of them is there’s a list of slang from Cambridge in the UK from the 1870s, and they use as an example sentence, it’s raining like a house on fire.

That seems very odd.

Which is very odd. And then another one, it’s used from 1830. It says the home industry, meaning the building of homes, was raging like a house on fire.

Oh, no. That’s not the idiom I want to use when I’m talking about the home industry. Block that metaphor. That’s terrible.

Again, if you’ve ever seen a wooden house or any kind of wooden structure go up, have you ever seen this? I mean, this is probably the time of thatched roofs, and most houses were made of wood, and only the wealthy had stone houses or brick houses. A wood structure burning goes up like nobody’s business. It’s just we’re talking about before lumber was treated to make it less flammable.

Right.

Rippingly, roaringly, energetically.

Yeah, it’s just astonishingly fast. You know, these recent fires in Australia, I heard somebody on the news talking about the speed of the fires. He said they were so fast that you couldn’t outrun them with a car. And that’s astonishingly fast. And that’s what I think of. That’s the kind of speed of fire that I think of when I think of this phrase.

Okay.

Okay. Maeve, it was good talking with you. Thanks for calling.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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