Hand Over Fist

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Betsy Foran-Owens from Stanford, Connecticut.

Hi, Betsy. Welcome to the program.

How are you?

Super duper. What can we do you for?

Well, we were having a conversation at dinner the other night, and the expression, making money hand over fist, came up. And we didn’t know where it came from, what’s the origin of it. So my two daughters came up with their own theories. One was using the old baseball tradition of putting your hands on a bat and the person who wins puts his hand or his fist on the top. And then my other daughter said, no, no, no, it goes back to rock, paper, scissors, where you’ve got your fist as a rock and then your hand as the paper and the person with the paper wins. So we thought we would go to you and see what’s the truth.

Hand over fist. Both those explanations are really clever, but wrong.

Oh, wow. They’re very picturesque. Very intelligent daughters, but they’re not right. And so this was a celebration at dinner. Did somebody get a big raise or something, win the lottery? And so you’re talking about what you’re going to do with your windfall, and you’re talking about money, getting money hand over fist?

Grant, I can’t even tell you anymore. I think that we were just talking about just the economy and other things, and maybe it might have gotten into the lottery. It certainly was a big win that week.

It does have a fairly strong known history, which, as you know, when you listen to the show, a lot of times we were like, oh, I don’t know. But this one, this has got a pretty solid origin story, doesn’t it, Mark?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It’s just basically the motion of one hand over a fist, like you’re pulling in a rope or something. You know, one hand is going over with your hand open and the fist is pulling it back.

Right, because you’re just pulling the rope. Just do the gesture. We’re both doing it in this studio. Pulling the rope in. And so there are these certain maneuvers that you have to do when you’re on a sailing ship where you have got to pull a rope in super fast to get the sails where you want them, right? Or else, like, terrible things are going to happen. So you’re pulling that rope as fast as you can. The sail will fall down on your head. And so the image of pulling money in at the same speed, you know, it’s very much like in pulling a rope. Like somebody’s handing your money so fast you can barely take it, right? You are pulling in money hand over fist as if it were a rope on a sailing ship.

The idea of pulling the money in from hand over fist than just making the money.

Yes. It was originally hand over hand, and then somewhere along the way, the idiom became hand over fist. And it’s been with us for a good long time, what, 150 years or more, Martha?

Yeah, I’d say.

Yeah, early 19th century.

Yeah, mm—

Yeah.

So a sailing term, more or less, that made its way into money.

Yeah.

We’re all about money. It’s funny. There’s all these… I’m just saying as a people, Americans have a lot of idioms that have to do with money. And the thing is, even though sailing isn’t really a part of our culture much for most of us anymore, it’s left some residue behind in the language, like horses have too, right? Or like card playing or gold mining.

Yeah, well, and if you’re pulling in a horse, you’re making the same gesture, right?

That’s true.

If you broke them, yeah. I could just see the horse splayed on all four legs, resisting with all its might.

So that’s the idea. That was actually the answer you were going to give them, right?

Right, exactly.

Right. You just wanted to make sure.

So, Betsy, thanks for listening.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you so much. You’ve really clarified and ended a discussion at the table. So thank you.

All right.

Our pleasure. Call us again sometime, will you?

Take care, Betsy.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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