“Meet Yourself Coming Back” Has Meant Backtracking, Self-Contradiction, and Crooked Roads

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Julie and I’m calling from New York, New York.

What’s on your mind today, Julie?

Well, I used a phrase the other day with one of my friends that I heard from my father growing up.

And I thought that it was a common English phrase and she looked at me like I had three heads.

She had no idea what I was talking about, so I thought I’d use the phrase with you guys and see if you knew where it came from.

Okay, yeah, sure, shoot.

So she was going to run home after work, coming from Manhattan all the way back to Queens,

And she was going to come back to meet us for dinner.

So kind of like an errand she didn’t need to run.

And I said, well, why are you going to go home and change? You’re just going to meet yourself coming back.

Meaning by the time she went home, she was going to have to turn around and leave again.

So it was almost like she was going to run into herself coming back.

So it’s definitely a fun, jokey phrase.

And my father used it all the time, and I just thought it was common.

So I was wondering if there was any origin for it.

Yeah, isn’t it strange the way the language of our parents tends to show up in our own speech?

Definitely.

Origin stories for this kind of language are hard to come by.

I can tell you that you can find it back, say, 100 years or so ago.

It might be a little older than that.

It is the kind of thing that has taken different paths.

But as you say, I just want to reiterate here, it’s a joke.

You say it with humorous intent because you can’t really meet yourself coming back unless you have a time machine or a matter-transference machine.

Or a doppelganger.

Right. Or you’re very fast, almost impossibly fast. It’s just not possible.

One interesting aspect of this is that in the earlier uses of the term, meet yourself coming back,

They tend to use it to mean that somebody has presented evidence in such a way that they contradict themselves.

And you can actually find it in official testimony, either before Congress or legal testimony,

Where somebody is being interrogated or questioned by an attorney and they contradict themselves.

They say the opposite of what they meant to say, and somebody else will say, well, now you’ve just met yourself coming back.

Oh, interesting.

I’ve never heard that.

Yeah.

Huh.

And another way that you’ll find it, and I’ve seen numerous uses of this in a variety of literature over the last hundred years or so,

They use meet yourself coming back to indicate that a street or a path or something else is so curved or crooked or spiraling or so confusing

That you just don’t know where you’re going, that you become disoriented.

The street was so crooked, you’re likely to meet yourself coming back before you get to the end.

Gotcha.

Okay, great.

So it’s just a physically crazy, impossible thing,

Like trying to run twice as fast to stay in one place or something.

Right, right, exactly.

Well, that’s great.

I didn’t know that there were so many different usages of it.

Sure, sure.

Thanks for calling.

Yeah, thank you so much for answering my question.

Okay, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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