A Trick with a Hole in It

Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Theora Ward, and I’m calling from Hinesburg, Vermont.

Well, welcome, Theora, to A Way with Words. What can we do for you?

Thank you. Well, I have this saying that my mother used to say, and I’ve been trying to find out for decades where it came from. No one that I’ve ever met has ever heard it before.

So she used to say, would you like me to show you a little trick with a hole in it? We used to make a lot of things together. We did a lot of sewing and knitting and baking together. And we would be sitting together, and she would notice something that I was doing and know a better, faster way to do it.

And she would look over, and she would kind of nudge, nudge with the elbow and kind of in a conspiratorial way, hey, would you like me to show you a little trick with a hole in it? I would love to know where that came from.

Did she ever show you a little trick with a hole in it? Well, any new thing, you know, anything that we were doing, and she would say, I’ll show you, you could do it this way. That would be the little trick with a hole in it.

Okay. A faster way, a better way. Yeah, either faster or better or different or in some way different from what I was doing. That conforms to what I know about the expression.

She’s not the only one that’s used it. It’s not really in much use these days. In the 1800s and early 1900s, you would have seen it much more often. And then it was more often used to mean something extraordinary or a devious trick. Often a trick that would turn the tables on someone else.

So you might, if someone was mean to you, you might then show them a trick with a hole in it by getting your revenge, especially in a political sense. But the earliest that I know this expression is from the 1850s, and I don’t really know for certain what it means, but it’s always about what you said.

Sometimes it’s conspiratorial. Often it’s a better idea or a better way to do something. Again, sometimes it’s a little bit of revenge or something extraordinary. Often it’s directed at kids, and this leads me to one particular use of it I found in a journal called The Photographic News in the 1890s.

And it’s by a guy named J.M. Brainerd. And he’s talking about taking photographs of kids. And he’s talking about all the little gimmicks that he uses to get kids to cooperate for photographs. And just as now, it’s hard to get kids to behave so that you get that one photograph that you can keep forever.

And so he talks about having a cupboard filled with toy cats, birds, dogs, dolls, bells, ribbon-belled sticks, horses in hoops, whole bunches of things. And he has what he calls, and he puts this in quotes, a trick with a hole in it. And he describes it as a 14 by 17 cardboard six-inch circular opening cut out of the center. It’s for peek-a-boo at short range.

And he says, this always hangs outside the cupboard. And it is the little joker that takes the most unpromising child with its most angelic expression. And so I don’t know that this is the start of A Trick with a Hole in it, that maybe photographers were using this idea as A Trick with a Hole in it from the very beginning.

It’s very curious to me that it checks so many of the boxes of what you describe. Sort of, but it also has, the first thing that you said was that it was, you know, a trick that had that something would go wrong with her it had a a devious reasoning behind it. Was it sounded a little bit more sinister? Yeah, and this was done with without that feeling to it. I never had that feeling for it.

Yeah, yeah, the main problem is of course that the first use I find is in 1854 and this photographer’s use of it is 1891 and that’s a huge gap. so So we don’t really know the origin of it.

We just know that again and again when it’s used, here’s an interesting tip for you. As a word researcher, I often look for expressions that are wrapped in quote marks. Because what do we do in English when a word is new to us or we consider it special? We set it off with quote marks or we put it in italics or some other way we indicate that it’s special.

So this photographer, all these 100 plus years later, is telling me as a language researcher, a word researcher, that he considers a trick with a hole in it to be special to his vocabulary. So that’s your trick with a hole in it as a slang lexicographer.

Yeah. Look for the quote marks. Yeah, I do. If I find a phrase with quote marks around it, like just a three or four word phrase, I often pay a little more attention to it to see if it’s something I need to record and try to do a little research on.

Yeah. Well, Theora, it remains a mystery, but we really appreciate your bringing this phrase to the show. I had never heard it, and I love it.

Thanks. Bye.

Bye-bye.

Thanks.

If you have a warm memory about something, oh, a brother or sister said or a favorite aunt or uncle or a teacher used to use all of the time, maybe a professor who really made an impact on you, give us a call, 877-929-9673.

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