Who Struck John

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lisa calling from North Carolina.

Well, hello, Lisa. What can we do for you? And where are you in North Carolina?

I am in Wilmington on the coast.

Lovely. How can we help?

I am calling to ask about the phrase, who struck John? My grandmother, who was born in 1905 in Baltimore, used this phrase when I was a child. And I always thought it meant confusion, foolishness, or bad behavior. If my friends and I were cutting up in the house, she would say, we’re not going to have any who struck John in this house. And that meant be quiet and settle down. At least that’s what we thought.

I was wondering where the phrase came from, if you knew, and if it’s just a black community thing, because one of my friends who grew up in North Carolina, she said that she heard that phrase growing up as well.

Wow. There’s a lot here that I love. One is I love the expression cutting up to mean fooling around or cutting a diet or messing about. So traditionally, who struck John describes a situation where there’s a lot of blame to go around, but nobody can really come to an agreement as to who is at fault. You might find it in politics, for example. So who struck John is about an argument that goes nowhere or a debate that has no end.

So I think what your grandmother, was your grandmother?

Yes.

I think what she was saying was, I don’t care who started it. I don’t want to hear your arguments. It’s just stop it. It’s not necessarily a black community thing, although there’s no reason it couldn’t also be a part of that. It dates at least to the early 1900s.

But there’s a really two curious things about it. It had a resurgence in the 1950s after World War II when kind of modern American politics really got started and these big national debates that we’re still fighting now started to happen. And there was a newspaper columnist by the name of Jimmy Cannon who had a book published in 1956 that used the title who struck John? And he apparently was very fond of the term. So you’ll find, if you look at newspaper databases, you’ll just find who struck John everywhere, even when they don’t mention his particular book.

But earlier than that, the interesting thing is, before who struck John, people didn’t say who struck John. They said, who struck Billy Patterson? And we don’t know who John was, and we don’t know who Billy Patterson was. Though there’s been a lot of speculation that I won’t go into. But the Billy Patterson version of the saying, exactly the same meaning, like a lot of debate, a lot of argument that can never be resolved, dates to the 1840s.

And that, by the way, probably comes from a minstrel song that was sung on stage by black performers. I don’t have that song with me, but apparently in the song, somebody is trying to get to the bottom of who hit his brother. And so the whole thing is this never-ending, unanswerable question about who hit his brother. And it’s a comic piece, apparently. So anyway, so it goes back quite a ways.

Again, I don’t know why it switched to John in the early 1900s, but there’s a serious, like, definitely a bridge between these two expressions, who struck Billy Patterson and who struck John. They’re used in exactly the same way, just the name changed.

Lisa, what do you think of that?

I am surprised and shocked. Glad to know that there is a historic grounding in that phrase, which was just so common when I was growing up.

So you were cutting up a lot? Is that what you’re telling us?

No, not quite. I kind of thought it was a euphemism for a curse word, MFS. Since it flows kind of rhythmically, a lot of who struck John, a lot of MFS. So I was wondering if it was a curse word, but I’m glad it was not a euphemism.

No. I know that it has a historic basis.

Yeah, as far as we know, not a euphemism.

Okay. Thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it, Lisa.

Thank you. Y’all have a great day.

You too. Take care. Goodbye.

877-929-9673.