Kick Out of Bed for Eating Crackers

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is David from Trophy Club, Texas.

So I have an expression that my parents used pretty much my entire lifetime growing up, and it’s called, I wouldn’t kick her out of my bed for eating crackers. And I know what it means. It basically means if you violate a very important rule, it’s okay. We like it that much. But my question is, what is the origin of that phrase? I’m assuming you may have heard of it before.

Mm—

And how was it used in your house? Is this a funny thing that you might say?

Yeah, it’s a funny thing. It basically means if I’m doing something that’s a violation of a major rule, like, you know, eating crackers in bed, which is a bad thing, it means if you’re doing something bad like that, we like you so much we’re willing to waive it, to ignore it, and to like you anyway.

Origins for expressions like this are really hard to do, but I do have a few bullet points to share with you of some different places it’s popped up over the last hundred years or so that may shed some light on it.

Okay. We’ll see how this goes.

The first use that I know of in print of anybody talking about, well, anybody using this version of this expression was from 1945 as a remedy for insomnia. There’s also a little earlier than that, 1942, there’s a woman talking about meeting her husband for the first time. So this is right after the start of World War II for the United States, right after we’d entered the war. She’s talking about meeting a man and they’re kind of negotiating this new kind of friendship and trying to figure out whether or not it’s going to become something more. She says, wouldn’t it be awful that if she ate crackers in bed? And he says, oh, I don’t know. I don’t think I’d throw you out of bed for eating crackers. And so this is 1942, and there’s a lot of innuendo in this piece. I mean, this is in a newspaper, and you can kind of read between the lines where they’re talking about family relations in bed as much as they’re talking about romantic relations outside of bed. So there’s like a couple levels here.

And almost always when you see this pop up, there’s this second notion about you’re so amazing or would be amazing in the sack, so to speak, that I wouldn’t kick you out of bed for eating crackers. It’s not just sleeping next to someone. It’s doing the other things that happen in bed. So, yeah, there’s always this tension there between the kind of normal sounding phrase and this understanding it’s referring to. It’s kind of like Netflix and chill. It’s like the Netflix and chill of its day. We’re not just talking about Netflix and chill, are we? We’re talking about something else.

Well, I asked my parents about it and my dad, who was a child during the Great Depression and World War II, around the time that you mentioned you saw the origin. He said that he would be in bed sick and his mother would bring him, you know, a very common remedy, soup and crackers. But she wouldn’t give him the crackers because you’re not supposed to have crackers in bed. And she would say, I wouldn’t kick you out of bed for eating crackers. But I guess she didn’t trust him that much.

Yeah, interesting. What’s amazing to me is how often eating crackers in bed pops up in the printed media. This is pretty much how we track these expressions. We don’t know what people said unless they also wrote it down. And so in 1915, there’s a little kind of line filler at the end of a column that says, no crumbs of comfort come from eating crackers in bed. Oh, wow.

And then another one that comes up, and this is a well, in baseball circles, this is well known. There was a Hall of Fame pitcher named Rube Waddell who played for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1902 to 1907. And he liked to eat crackers in bed. But he had to share that bed on the road with a teammate. The teammate’s name was Ozzy Shrek, spelled a little differently than the green troll. And Ozzy required, before he would re-sign with the athletics, he required that a clause be written into his contract that forbade Waddell from eating crackers in bed because he was tired of sleeping with crackers. And there’s a couple of really hilarious lines. We have the letter that he wrote. He says, I have done all that I could. I didn’t mind him bringing snakes, lizards, mockingbirds, and a pair of white mice in the room to amuse himself at night. But I do object to his eating crackers in bed. Not a night passed that summer that he didn’t hit the hay carrying a half pound of crackers in his southpaw. Most of them were in the shape of animals like those you see the kids playing with at home. I found it. Anyway, he goes on. But the thing is, he’s talking about here animal crackers and not necessarily like saltines or any kind of just unsweet, savory cracker.

Yeah, that wouldn’t bother me so much. I think it’s the little salt crystals that are just so irritating. Cracker crumbs are the worst. And what’s funny is my wife and I were talking a few weeks ago, and we mentioned the phrase. And I thought, you know, I need to call in about that because I bet they know. And she said, by the way, I would kick you out of our bed for eating crackers. So I would probably, like our friends in Chicago years ago, I would probably have to get divorced, even though I’m Catholic.

Oh, dear. Eating crackers in bed. So I never have, and I now never, ever will eat crackers in bed.

All right. Well, that’s what we know. Thank you so much, David, for calling. We really appreciate it.

Thank you. I really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun and informative at the same time.

Take care. Bye-bye.

All right. Bye-bye.

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