Throw Your Hat Into the Room

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, Grant and Martha. My name is Robin, and I bring greetings from Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi, Robin.

We accept your greetings from Madison, Wisconsin.

Thank you very much.

From all of Madison?

That is the most formal introduction.

From the entire city.

Oh, nice! I want the golden key.

We’d like to get over there soon.

What’s up, Robin? How can we help?

Well, I am calling because I would like to know the genesis of the expression to throw your hat in the room ahead of you. I believe I grew up knowing this expression. I don’t remember my parents ever using it. It’s just something that I must have just known from popular culture. I grew up in southern Ohio, and so that is my question.

And how would you use that?

Yeah, what does it mean?

Well, the reason that I began thinking about this is that I have a small habit of buying things or making small home renovation projects and surprising my husband with them. And on an occasion recently, I had a new oven and cooktop put in the kitchen. And the day that it was installed, I was out. And when I came home, my husband was home ahead of me. So I came in the house, and I took a hat, and I threw it in the room where he was sitting. And he asked me why I was throwing things at him. And so I proceeded to try and explain the expression throwing your hat in the room ahead of you. And he just looked at me very blankly and said, oh, well, it must be another one of those Appalachian things since that is the area where I grew up.

So you threw the hat into the room. Why exactly?

Well, I understood the expression to throw your hat in the room ahead of you was to see if anyone shot at it. So it was just trying to be certain that there wasn’t an imminent attack about to happen.

Is it safe to enter, basically?

I don’t know why, but that’s how I’ve always associated it in my head, was to throw a hat in to see if it was shot at.

Okay. Well, as far as I can tell, it’s not regional. But if you were reading the newspapers in 1983, you might have heard Ronald Reagan say it to Margaret Thatcher or something like it. Actually, it didn’t come to light until many years later. It turns out that there was a period when, if you remember, the United States invaded Grenada. And he wasn’t sure, Ronald Reagan wasn’t sure how the U.K. would handle it. And so he is quoted in some transcripts that came to light later. I’m reading something from the BBC here. It says, the president phoned Lady Thatcher to explain the action he’d take it. And he says, if I were there, Margaret, I’d throw my hat in the door before I came in. And she says, there’s no need for that. And he meant he wasn’t sure what she would think about the U.S. invading this country without telling the U.K. first.

But it’s not the earliest use I know of. I actually found one in a biography of Harry Houdini from 1931. The author is J.C. Connell. And this biography was a huge hit at the time, widely republished. Even now, sometimes it’s reprinted. And in there, it said that Mr. and Mrs. Houdini fought so much that, well, one of the things it says is that when they were with company, he would raise his right eyebrow three times as a signal for his wife to stop talking. And the other thing that it says, if she became angry, he would leave the house, walk around for a while, and then when he returned, he would throw his hat into the room. If it were thrown back out, he would take another short walk and repeat the hat throwing when he came back.

And so I don’t know that…

Well, we may become known as Mr. and Mrs. Houdini then.

Yeah, I don’t know that that’s the origin, but certainly it was a bestseller for the time. It’s really difficult to search for this. But if you do, you will find this hat throwing described in a number of biographies, amateur biographies that people have written about their grandparents or their great-grandparents, most of them dating to the early 1900s. And in their family lore, apparently, their grandparents or great-grandparents went through this same ritual of one of the husband testing whether the wife was angry at him by tossing his hat into the room. So there’s some precedence for this. But it’s not particularly Appalachian at all.

Oh, good. Good. Well, that’s very interesting. I thought maybe you were going to say that it was in one of Ronald Reagan’s movies.

Oh, you know, it could have been. I wouldn’t be surprised.

Yeah, he did so many old Western flicks. Maybe we’ll have to have a movie fest and see.

And I’m assuming that metaphorically your husband didn’t throw the hat back out.

I mean, a new oven and hay.

Well, you know, actually it took him over 24 hours to even notice it, so…

It turns out he hadn’t even seen it and he didn’t know what was going on.

You should keep upping your game and, like, build another story onto the house and see if he notices.

New car in the driveway.

Exactly.

Robin, thank you very much.

You are so welcome.

I look forward to listening to your program every week.

Nice.

Thank you so much for bringing it to the air.

Our pleasure.

Thank you, Robin.

Cheers now.

Take care.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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