To Clock Someone

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Elaine calling from Boulder, Colorado.

Hello, Elaine.

We have John Chaneski to thank for my question today. I was listening to the episode called Alverklempt, and in the quiz portion, John talked about accidentally getting hit by the bird in a cuckoo clock, and that got me wondering why we say clock someone to mean hit someone, and I doubt very much that it has to do with getting hit by the cuckoo in a cuckoo clock. So I was hoping you could shed some light on that phrase.

That’s right. Yeah. I don’t think there’s a high rate of injury for a cuckoo clock. The CDC does not report that, I think, on their list of injuries. I feel like I’ve seen that in a cartoon someplace. I saw an OSHA poster over here in the lobby.

Oh, really?

No, I’m kidding. Watch out for the cuckoo clocks. And you know what? It does relate to clocks, though. It absolutely does because what is on the front of a clock? The face of the clock. The face of the clock. So, yeah, so it’s just kind of a little wordplay where the name for the device that we also call a face becomes the name for our own face.

So there’s a variety of different uses. There’s the verb to clock someone, which means just to look at them. There’s the verb to clock someone, which means to punch them in the face. It doesn’t mean to punch them anywhere else. It’s just the face. And if we look back as early as the late 1800s, there’s the clock noun, meaning the face. And then by the 1920s, the verb shows up in the face. So and there’s another kind of verb clock, which is to clock somebody doing 60, you know, or clock somebody doing 120. It’s usually a high rate of speed means that you’re measuring them against the timing device. We’ve kind of extended that usage. So you can say, yeah, I clocked him walking across the lobby with the purses that he stole. You know, meaning I watched him with my own clock and I measured his rate and his progress.

Got it.

Yeah. Oh, I’m so happy to have an answer for that. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a longstanding slang in the U.S. and the U.K. It’s funny. It’s one of those, I like this kind of slang where it just kind of keeps lasting. It’s not particularly spectacular. And yet when you look into it, it seems interesting.

Right. Those things that we hear all the time and then we start using them and then we have no idea why.

Oh, well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Elaine, thanks for calling.

Thank you.

Thank you so much. Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You know, I recently found my digital clock that I haven’t used in years and years.

Does this explain your timing and your arrivals?

No, no, it doesn’t explain it at all.

You have a phone now.

Yeah, this is the one I plug into the wall. And so I decided to use that and put my phone in another room at night so I don’t have it near me when I’m sleeping. And it’s so weird. I mean, talk about, I forgot what it’s like to have those little numbers there beside the bed. You know, it’s a different kind of clock face, right? It’s not even a face.

That’s right. When we think about all the things that our phones have become, the bedside clock is one of them. I unplug clocks wherever I go in the hotels or Airbnbs or that sort of thing. The bedside clock, I can’t stand. It’s too obvious, a marker of time and progress. And I don’t like the lights.

I don’t either. And I’ve had them wake me up before, accidentally, like somebody left the alarm on from the previous—

Somebody maliciously said it at a terrible hour.

Oh, do you think it was malicious?

I didn’t even think about that. I think it’s like the people who unscrew the top of the salt shaker so that you put too much salt on your food.

Where are you going?

This doesn’t happen to me. I live an interesting life.

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