A San Diego, California, man says that when he got into trouble as a boy, his mother would say, “You lie like a rug and you hang like a cheap curtain.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Lie Like a Rug and Hang Like a Curtain”
Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Travis from San Diego. Hi, Travis. Welcome to the show. How can we help?
So my mom, when my brother and I would get in trouble, we were doing something egregious. She would say, you lie like a rug and you hang like a cheap curtain. And that always hit me. Like, I really need to not be doing that. Because I’m upsetting my mom. So I was just curious where where that comes from, if you’ve heard it before.
This would be something like bouncing a ball in the house?
No, this is something more like caught lying over something important. It’s like a big offense, not something as small as that. Caught lying like a rug. Exactly, yeah. Origins, we can help you a little bit on this. It’s interesting. This is a slang term that’s made of a bit of a transition here.
It’s clearly based on the pun, right? Because the verb to lie has a couple different, several different meanings, a bunch of different meanings. And so it’s a little joke on the fact that a rug can lie on the floor, but you can also tell a lie.
And the curtain part, I don’t think I’ve ever heard before. I wonder if that was her innovation. And I don’t know of any source that has that particular addition to it. There are other vague additions to it.
But the source of this is really interesting because it didn’t always mean that particular lie. There was, as of the 1920s and possibly earlier, phrase making the rounds where you would talk about punching somebody or hitting somebody so that they would fall down. And so you might say, I’ll lay you out like a wagon, or I will lay you out like a rug, meaning it will punch you so that you fall down on the ground like a rug.
What it looks like here is that that particular pun made the rounds and then the verb to lie kind of inserted itself in there and it became about the speech act rather than the physical act.
Yeah, the lie part, the lie like a rug part, I figured, you know, meant about lying like a rug. Rugs lie. But the hang like a cheap curtain part, that always made me think. Always curious about, you know, what exactly that means, like hanging for your crime or, you know, what could that mean?
Yeah, I don’t know. Good question. It’s possible it’s her own innovation or that she picked it up from a source that I’ve never heard of. I can’t even venture a guess here. I’m not entirely sure what she meant, but that always stuck with me.
And whenever she said it, it really made me feel bad about what I did wrong. You changed your ways, right? My ways. Yeah, of course. Absolutely.
Well, Travis, if anybody else had a parent who said that to them, we’re going to hear about it. So stay tuned when you’re going to the park in places, okay? Because we might have more for you.
Yes, ma’am, I will. Okay. Thanks so much. Thanks for calling. Thank you very much. All right. Bye-bye.
All right. Bye-bye. So the original origin of that actually had to do with knocking someone unconscious. You would lay them out, meaning punch them so that they would fall down on the ground, and they would be lying there.
And so that lie, lying there, combines with the other lie, and there’s a transference of meaning, and the joke kind of continues, but it has a new usage in American slang.
