After Diana from Williamsburg, Virginia, scraped the front of her leg on a chair, she fretted to her grown daughters she had barked her shin. Neither daughter had ever heard the expression. This kind of bark refers not to what a dog does, but to removing, peeling back, or scraping, just like stripping bark from a tree. Ouch! The phrase goes back at least to the early 1810s. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Why Do We Say We “Barked” Our Shin?”
Hello.
You have A Way with Words.
My name is Diana Stafford, and I’m in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Oh, well, it’s nice to talk with you.
What’s what’s on your mind today?
Several weeks ago, I scraped my leg against a chair, and just the very front part of my leg.
And when my daughters asked me what had happened, I said, I barked my shin.
And these are two daughters who are well educated and well read, They both said, I’ve never heard that expression before.
So I thought maybe you people would help me figure out where that came from.
Oh, and how old are they that they didn’t know the expression?
They’re in…
They’re both in their fifties.
Fifties.
Wow.
I’m just kinda surprised.
Martha, is this an expression that you know if you’re walking around in the dark and you you bang an ankle on the Bark table.
Shin.
Yeah.
You know, I never used it growing up.
I only learned it when I started working with language much much later.
Yeah.
It’s got a…
It’s not quite archaic, I wouldn’t say, but it’s certainly a little fossilized.
‘ Cause what’s happening here is we don’t really use barked that way very often.
And this is the verb bark, meaning to remove or peel back or to scrape something like you might do with the actual bark of a tree, which is what it’s referring to.
So, barking something may mean taking the bark off of it and that’s kind of what you’re doing if you injure yourself enough to peel back the skin.
And then shin, of course, is just another name for a particular body part down there at the lower leg.
And together, they’re just…
It’s kind of a set expression, colloquialized and lexicalized and set.
It goes back at least to the early eighteen teens.
And one of my favorite early uses of it that I could find is from a story called…
A newspaper article called The Miseries of Brooklyn from 1825, and it…
It’s got all these things that are terrible about living in Brooklyn, New York.
And one of them is treading on the hoops and poles in front of a Cooper’s shop and thereby barking your shins.
Ouch.
And I just love the the hoops and poles for a Cooper shop.
It’s such a picture of another era.
Right?
Like, two hundred years ago, we just…
There aren’t many Cooper shops left Yeah.
To go barking your shins by.
Yeah.
I was confused the first time I ran across this expression because I thought of, you know, barking aloud in pain, but it’s a different kind of bark.
Yeah.
And it…
They’re not etymological connected.
The barking of a dog and the bark of a tree just…
It’s like so many other, you know, homonyms or homographs in English.
It’s just a coincidence that they’re the same.
So, yeah, it’s nothing to do with dogs.
So, Diana, a teachable moment with your dog.
Although, know we’re gonna get calls from people in emails going like, but what about…
What…
My dogs are hurting me.
Yeah.
That’s different, and it’s not related, but ok.
Right.
I know it’s feet, but it’s not related to this bark.
Well, Diana, thank you so much for calling with this question.
Alright.
Thank you.
Bye.
Enjoy your show.
Thank you.
Thanks.
