Tag: Writing

Q: In the class-conscious Sussex, England, of the 1950s, my mother would label certain people at the village Women’s Institute “not quite quite.” What is the history of this usage? And does “not quite quite” suggest even less gentility than “not quite”?

A: As far as we can tell, the use of “not quite” to mean socially unacceptable first appeared in the mid-19th century, and the longer term, “not quite quite,” a decade later.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes “not quite” as a colloquial adjective meaning “not wholly socially acceptable or respectable.”

The earliest OED citation is from The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), by Anthony Trollope. In this passage, Mr. Walker is speaking of Mr. Toogood, a fellow attorney:

“still he wasn’t quite,—not quite, you know—‘not quite so much of a gentleman as I am,’—Mr Walker would have said, had he spoken out freely that which he insinuated. But he contented himself with the emphasis he put upon the ‘not quite,’ which expressed his meaning fully.”

The OED, an etymological dictionary, notes that “quite” here can be modified by another “quite,” but it doesn’t comment on whether the addition alters the meaning.

We’d describe “not quite quite” as an intensified “not quite,” as does Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (8th ed., 1984, edited by Paul Beale):

“quite quite (Usu. in neg.) An intensification of quite, adj., as ‘He’s really not quite quite, is he, do you think?’: middle-class coll. [colloquial].”

The earliest example we’ve found for the expanded “not quite quite” is from Heaps of Money (1877), a novel by the English writer William Edward Norris. In this exchange, Mainwaring discusses his friend Ada with another friend, Linda:

“She is one of the most popular girls I know.”

“I daresay,” said Linda; “but is she quite—quite —?’’

“Quite a lady? Well, yes, I think she is.”

The next example we’ve seen is from A Bubble (1895), a novel by the Scottish writer Lucy Bethia Walford.

In this passage, two young women discuss a party to which medical students from the University of Edinburgh will be invited. One woman, Clara, is from London society, and the other is a professor’s wife who feels she should warn Clara about the company she will meet:

“You understand, dear Clara, that these young men—a great many of them—are not quite—quite—?”

“Half the people one knows are not ‘quite—quite,’ ” said Clara, frankly.

[The professor’s wife replies:] “Of course society is dreadfully mixed now-a-days.”

The OED’s first “not quite quite” example, which we’ve expanded, is from The Whispering Gallery: Leaves From a Diplomat’s Diary (1926), a fictional diary written anonymously by Hesketh Pearson, an English actor, theater director, and writer:

“On arrival at one of these affairs my hostess bustled up to me and said: ‘Oh, you must know H. G. Wells! He’s coming to-night. Do tell me what you think of him. He’s not “quite quite,” you know, but he’s so clever.’ ”

We’ve also expanded the dictionary’s most recent citation, which is from “And Now, Pragmatisim,” a column by Anna Quindlen in The New York Times (April 8, 1992):

“But over and over you hear about folks who are uncomfortable with him, who think he’s too slick or too polished or just not quite quite. And then they meet him. And their opinion changes. Bill Clinton is a guy who does better up close and personal.”

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Q: In the phrase “spick and span,” the word “spick” seems to be bound to “span.” It doesn’t stand on its own. Is there a concept for words that are bound to a phrase and meaningless alone?

A: We wrote a post in 2010 (recently updated) about words that are predictably paired with another. For example, “ulterior” is often paired with “motive.” Similar pairs are “bitter + end,” “heated + argument,” “slippery + slope,” and many more.

Sometimes the predictable pairs are joined by a conjunction, as with “flotsam and jetsam,” “rhyme or reason,” “rack and ruin,” “sackcloth and ashes,” “odds and ends,” and so on.

Sir Ernest Gowers, who edited the second edition of Fowlers Modern English Usage (1965), has a term for this latter category—“Siamese twins.” These are words, he says, that “convey a single meaning” when linked by “and” or “or.”

Some twins, Gowers writes, can make sense when separated (like “leaps and bounds”). But some can’t, often because the separate words have become obsolete or dialectal in their original meanings, so they’ve disappeared from common usage. Among the “indivisible” twins, he mentions our old friend “spick and span.”

So the answer to your question is yes: There is a concept for words that are bound in a phrase but meaningless alone. And “spick and span” is a good example. The original meanings of the words have died out but they survive in the phrase. Here’s the story.

The expression “spick and span” (often hyphenated or spelled “spic-and-span”) dates from the early 1600s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But the tale began centuries before that, most likely with early Scandinavian words for a nail (spik) and a chip of wood (spánn).

In Old Norse, as the OED says, spánnýr meant brand new. It combined the noun spánn (chip of wood) with nýr (new), so literally it meant new as a fresh chip or shaving of wood.

In the late 13th or early 14th century, the Old Norse spánnýr entered English as “span-new,” meaning “quite or perfectly new,” the OED says. It especially referred to new clothes, as in the dictionary’s earliest citation:

“Þe cok bigan of him to rewe, and bouthe him cloþes, al spannewe” (“The cook began to pity him, and bought him clothes, all span-new”). From an anonymous Middle English romance, The Lay of Havelok the Dane, dated from the 1280s to circa 1300.

The noun “spick” came into the expression a few centuries later in the 1500s, Oxford says, when the earlier “span-new” underwent an “emphatic extension” and became “spick and span new.”

In the OED definition, “spick and span new” has a slightly different set of meanings from “span-new.” The notion of cleanliness slips in, and “spick and span new” refers to something “absolutely or perfectly new; brand-new; perfectly fresh or unworn.”

This is the dictionary’s earliest example: “They were all in goodly gilt armours, and braue purple cassocks apon them, spicke, and spanne newe.” From Thomas North’s 1579 translation of a French version of Plutarch’s Lives, written in second-century Greek.

As for the etymology of “spick,” Oxford says it was a noun, a variant of “spike,” which had been around since the mid-1300s when it meant a sharp piece of metal or wood used for fastening. Thus early on it could mean a nail or an especially large nail (the modern sense of “spike”).

Etymologists suggest that “spick” came into Middle English from either the Swedish and Norwegian spik (nail) or from other Germanic sources. But ultimately it came from a prehistoric root that’s been reconstructed as spei– (sharp point), according to The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. 

Interestingly, “spick and span new,” as Oxford notes, is similar in form and meaning to the Flemish and Dutch compound spiksplinternieuw (“spick-splinter-new”). And John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins suggests that the “spick” element in the English expression was added in imitation of the Dutch. The image is roughly “new as a newly forged nail or a fresh splinter of wood.”

Over time, it appears that the “new” element was taken for granted, and by the early 17th century the shortened expression “spick and span” was being used, though the definition did not change. Like “spick and span new,” it first meant “absolutely or perfectly new; brand-new; perfectly fresh or unworn.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from the playwright Thomas Tomkis’s comedy Albumazar, first performed in 1614 and published in 1615: “Of a starke Clowne I shall appeare speck and span Gentleman.”

And here’s a later OED example, which we’ve expanded for context, from The Diary of Samuel Pepys (Nov. 15, 1665):

“it was horrible foule weather; and my Lady Batten walking through the dirty lane with new spicke and span white shoes, she dropped one of her galoshes in the dirt, where it stuck, and she forced to go home without one, at which she was horribly vexed.”

Finally, the idea of newness became weaker in the expression, and “spick and span” in the sense we use it today appeared in the mid-19th century. The definition, the OED says, became “particularly neat, trim, or smart; suggestive of something quite new or unaffected by wear.” Here we’ve expanded the dictionary’s earliest example:

“and in front you behold young Benvenuto, spick and span in his very best clothes and silk stockings, looking—as Benvenuto never did in his life.” From comments about a portrait of Benvenuto Cellini in “A Pictorial Rhapsody,” William Makepeace Thackeray’s review of an exhibition at the Royal Academy (Fraser’s Magazine, July 1840).

A late 19th-century example shows just how much notions of neatness and tidiness had replaced newness in the expression. The OED citation is from the Irish novelist Charlotte Ridell’s Daisies and Buttercups (1882): “this spick and span old house.”

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Q: Your recent post about “repair” refers to guests who “repaired to the drawing room.” That made me wonder about the origin of “drawing room.” I doubt it was ever a room set aside for sketching portraits.

A: The term “drawing room” began life as a shortening of “withdrawing-room,” a room for people to withdraw or retire to.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “drawing room” originally referred to “any private room or chamber to which people may withdraw, usually attached to a more public room.”

The dictionary’s earliest “drawing room” citation, which we’ve expanded, is an entry made April 30, 1635, in an account of expenses for work at Althorp House in Northamptonshire, England:

“To Leeson 1 day cutting bragetts [brackets] for the drawinge room.” From The Washingtons: A Tale of a Country Parish in the 17th Century, Based on Authentic Documents (1860), by John Nassau Simpkinson.

Later, the OED says, “drawing room” came to mean a room “reserved for the reception and entertainment of guests.”

“From the late 18th to the early 20th century,” the OED explains, “it was conventional in polite society for ladies at a dinner party to withdraw to the drawing room following dinner, while the gentlemen remained for a period at the dining room table before joining them.”

The dictionary cites an early example of that usage in James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791). Here Boswell describes a dinner at the home of Sir Joshua Reynolds on April 25, 1778: “We went to the drawing-room, where was a considerable increase of company.”

The first Oxford citation for the original term, “withdrawing-room,” is from Ram-Alley; or, Merrie-Trickes (1611), a comedy by by Lording Barry: “IIe waite in the with-drawing roome, Vntill you call.”

(The dictionary describes Barry as a playwright and a pirate. We’ll add theater owner, privateer, and ship owner. He also sailed with Sir Walter Raleigh on a 1517 expedition to Guyana in search of the mythical city of El Dorado.)

The OED notes that an even earlier term, “withdrawing chamber,” appeared in the late 14th century. The earliest citation combines the Middle English “withdrawyng chambre” with Anglo-Norman French in this passage from the official records of the English Parliament:

“Triours des Petitions … tendront lour place en la Chapelle de la Withdrawyng Chambre” (“The examiners of the petitions … shall have their meeting in the chapel of the withdrawing chamber” (from the Rolls of Parliament, 1392-3).

Getting back to “drawing room,” here’s an example we’ve found in Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, featuring one of our favorite fictional battle-axes, Lady Catherine de Bourgh:

“When the ladies returned to the drawing-room, there was little to be done but to hear Lady Catherine talk, which she did without any intermission till coffee came in, delivering her opinion on every subject in so decisive a manner as proved that she was not used to have her judgment controverted.”

Drawing rooms began falling out of favor in the early 20th century, as did sitting rooms, morning rooms, etc., according to an OED citation from Discovery magazine, July 1933:

“The sitting-rooms, parlour, drawing-room, morning room, study, library, ballroom and so on have all been kaleidoscoped into the living room.”

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Q: This kind of construction always puzzles me: “He built his home on the banks of the Ohio River.” Can the plural “banks” refer to the land on just one side of a river?

A: Both the singular “bank” and the plural “banks” have been used for hundreds of years to mean the entire raised area of land along a river, lake, sea, or other water body. The singular, often modified by an adjective like “left” or “west,” is also used for a specific side or part of the raised area.

When the word “bank” first appeared in English in the 12th century, it meant “a raised shelf or ridge of ground; a long, high mound with steeply sloping sides; one side or slope of such a ridge or mound,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The dictionary’s first citation, which we’ve expanded here, is from a Middle English homily that compares straightening a crooked life to leveling the banks (“bannkess”) and filling the hollows (“græfess”) of uneven land:

“Whær se iss all unnsmeþe ȝet. Þurrh bannkess. & þurrh græfess … Þær shulenn beon ridinngess nu” (“Wherever it is all unsmooth yet, through banks and through hollows … there shall be clearings now”). From the Ormulum (circa 1175), a collection of early Middle English homilies.

In the early 14th century, the noun “bank” came to mean “the sloping, vertical, or overhanging edge of a river or other watercourse; (also more broadly) the land running immediately alongside a river or other watercourse,” the OED says.

The first Oxford example is from the Latin episcopal register of Richard de Kellawe, Bishop of Durham, England. In this passage, which refers to the apportionment of water, the Middle English word “bank” (sometimes spelled with a final “e” or an apostrophe to show its omission) is mixed in with the Latin:

“Et eadem aqua mensurari debet a le mainflod, quando eadem aqua ita fluit ut sit plena de bank’ en bank’ ” (“And the same water should be measured at high water, when the same water flows in such a way that it is full from bank to bank”). From Registrum Palatinum Dunelmense: The Register of Richard de Kellawe, Lord Palatine and Bishop of Durham, 1311–1316, edited by Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy in 1875.

Around the same time, the noun “bank” came to mean “the sea coast or shore,” the OED says, and was used “also in plural in same sense.” We suspect that this use of the plural “banks” for a seacoast may have led to the usage you’re asking about.

The noun “bank” is singular in the dictionary’s earliest coastal citation: “Sur la ripe est vn ceroyne, On the bank is a meremayde.” From a Middle English guide to French conversation (c. 1350), cited in “Nominale Sive Verbale,” edited by Walter William Skeat, published in Transactions of the Philological Society, November 1906.

The noun is plural in the next Oxford citation: “They had a syght of the bankys of Normandy.” From Morte Darthur, Thomas Mallory’s Middle English prose version of the legendary tales of King Arthur, written sometime before 1470.

And here’s an example we’ve found for the plural “banks” used in referring to a cottage on the River Great Ouse in Buckinghamshire. This passage is from the English poet William Cowper’s “A Poetical Epistle to Lady Austen” (1781):

And you, though you must needs prefer
The fairer scenes of sweet Sancerre,

Are come from distant Loire, to choose
A cottage on the banks of Ouse.

Finally, a stanza from “Banks of the Ohio,” an anonymous 19th-century folk song about a woman slain on a riverbank, as sung by Pete Seeger:

Then only say, that you’ll be mine,
In no other arms you’ll find!
Down beside where the waters flow
On the banks of the Ohio.

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Q: Where does the expression “talking head” originate from? And why has it become so pejorative?

A: When the term first appeared in the mid-19th century, it referred to mythical robotic talking heads purportedly created by medieval scientists.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the original sense of the term as “a legendary automaton resembling a human head, supposed to have been able to speak and answer questions put to it.”

The dictionary’s earliest “talking head” citation, which we’ve expanded, refers to a brass head supposedly created by the polymath, philosopher, scientist, and Franciscan friar Roger Bacon in the 13th century:

“Roger Bacon, having succeeded in making a talking head, was so wearied, says the chronicler, with its perpetual tittle-tattle that he dashed it to pieces” (from The Examiner, a London literary weekly, Sept. 16, 1848).

In The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay (1594), a play by Robert Greene, Bacon describes his supposed plan to create an artificial talking head with the help of infernal forces:

“What art can work, the frolic friar knows; / And therefore will I turn my magic books, / And strain out necromancy to the deep. / I have contrived and framed a head of brass (I made [the demon] Belcephon hammer out the stuff).”

However, Bacon falls asleep before the head begins to speak, and his helper, the poor scholar Miles, belatedly awakes him: “Master, master, up! Hell’s broken loose; your Head speaks; and there’s such a thunder and lightning, that I warrant all Oxford is up in arms.”

By the time Bacon gets up, the head has fallen to the floor and broken, and he laments his loss: “My life, my fame, my glory, all are past.”

As it turns out, the idea of a talking head dates back to ancient Greece, where it was a popular theme in mythology. The most famous example is the legend of Orpheus, a Thracian bard whose severed head continued to sing mournful songs after his death.

Getting back to reality, the modern sense of “talking head” as “a speaker on television who addresses the camera and is viewed in close-up,” appeared in the mid-20th century, according to citations in the OED.

The literal “talking head” here is the televised head and shoulders of the person talking. The dictionary’s first example is from an Ohio newspaper:

“It’s easy to come up with just ‘talking heads’ on the TV screen. We have to fight this all the time” (The Middletown Journal, June 5, 1964).

Why, as you’ve noticed, is the term “talking head” often used in a derogatory way, as in the citation above?

Oxford Reference, an Oxford University Press website, suggests that “talking head” is “often used in a pejorative sense because the use of such commentators in a visual medium suggests an over-reliance on ‘telling’ rather than ‘showing.’ ”

We’d add that the TV talking heads may be viewed negatively as people reading scripts, often written by others, rather than expressing thoughts of their own.

Incidentally, as we’ve noted elsewhere, a TV talking head is sometimes called a “gob on a stick” in British English.

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Q: Where does the expression “off the cuff” come from?

A: The use of “off the cuff” to mean without preparation apparently comes from notes jotted on one’s shirt cuffs.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the colloquial usage originated in the US and means “extempore, on the spur of the moment, unrehearsed.”

As the dictionary explains, the phrase “off the cuff” signifies “as if from notes made on the shirt-cuff.”

The earliest examples we’ve seen come from the days of silent film, with the first one tracked down by Fred Shapiro, editor of one of our favorite references, The New Yale Book of Quotations:

“Horkheimer’s pictures were the kind that were ‘shot off the cuff’ ” (San Francisco Examiner, Nov. 4, 1922).

The passage refers to E. D. Horkheimer. He and his brother, H. M. Horkheimer, founded the Balboa Amusement Producing Co. in Long Beach, CA, turning out silent films from 1913 to 1918.

The language researcher Pascal Tréguer found the next published example in an article by the screenwriter Alfred A. Cohn (The Film Daily, New York, Oct. 7, 1928):

“With the coming of the ‘talkie’ script,” Cohn writes, the director “no longer ‘shoots ’em off the cuff.’ ”

Cohn wrote the screenplay for The Jazz Singer (1927), the first feature-length film with some synchronized singing and speech.

On his website word histories, Tréguer also cites an incident in which Jack Cohn, a film producer and co-founder of Columbia Pictures, is said to have dashed off an idea for a movie title on one of his shirt cuffs during a golf tournament:

“Somebody said Jack Cohn had ‘stymied’ and Jack wrote it on his cuff as a good title for a future Columbia release” (The Film Daily, March 25, 1928). In golf, “stymied” refers to an obsolete rule about one ball blocking another on a green.

When the noun “cuff” first showed up in the 14th century, it referred to a mitten or a glove, a usage that the OED says is now obsolete.

The dictionary’s earliest citation, with “cuffs” spelled “coffus,” is from William Langland’s allegorical poem Piers Plowman (circa 1378):

“He caste on his cloþes, i-clouted and i-hole, His cokeres and his coffus, for colde of his nayles” (“He threw on his clothes, full of patches and holes, his socks and his mittens, for the cold of his nails”).

In the 16th century, Oxford says, “cuff” took on its modern sense of “an ornamental part at the bottom of a sleeve, consisting of a fold of the sleeve itself turned back, a band of linen, lace, etc. sewed on, or the like.”

The dictionary’s first citation, which we’ve expanded here, is from a 1522 will in Testamenta Eboracensia [Testaments of York], a collection of wills registered in York:

“I gif to Laurence Foster  my velvett  jacket, to make his childer [children] patlettes [collars] and cuyfifes [cuffs].” (A “patlet” is an old term for a collar, ruff, neckerchief, or other neckwear.)

In the 20th century, “cuff” took on an additional meaning, “the turn-up on a trouser leg,” a usage the OED describes as “chiefly U.S.”

The dictionary’s first example is from a 1911 catalogue of T. Eaton Company Ltd., a now-defunct chain of Canadian department stores: “Trousers have belt loops, cuff bottoms and full width.”

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Q: My wife asked me about the expression “happy as a clam,” and I had to admit I knew nothing about it. But I am sure you do.

A: English speakers have been using the “as happy as” formula for nearly four centuries to express exceptional happiness by comparing it to the feelings of various people and creatures perceived to be very happy.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes these expressions as “similative phrases, indicating a high level of happiness,” and has examples dating back to the early 17th century.

The OED’s examples include similes comparing happiness to that of a “king” (1633), a “god” (before 1766), a “lark” (1770), a “prince” (1776), a “pig in muck” (1828), a “clam” (1834), a “cherub” (1868), and a “bee” (1959).

One can understand the thinking behind nearly all of these expressions. The one exception is “as happy as a clam,” which the dictionary describes as “U.S. colloquial.”

The OED doesn’t discuss the history of the expression, but language sleuths have spent quite a bit of time trying to track down the origin of the usage.

The two most common theories are that “as happy as a clam” refers to the clam supposedly feeling safe when underwater during high tide or secure because of the protection of its snug shell.

John Russell Bartlett, in the first edition of his Dictionary of Americanisms (1848), includes only a longer version of the expression: “ ‘As happy as a clam at high water,’ is a very common expression in those parts of the coast of New England where clams are found.”

However, Bartlett suggests in his second edition (1859) that the shorter version may have come first: “Happy as a Clam is a common simile in New England, sometimes enlarged as ‘happy as a clam at high water.’ ’’

As far as we can tell, the shorter version did indeed appear first in writing, though a longer one may have existed earlier in speech.

The earliest example we’ve seen is from this description of a colonial planter in Harpe’s Head, a Legend of Kentucky (1833), a novel by the American writer James Hall:

“He was as happy as a clam. His horses thrived, and his corn yielded famously; and when his neighbors indignantly repeated their long catalogue of grievances, he quietly responded that King George had never done him any harm.”

The OED’s earliest citation, which we’ve expanded, appeared in the December 1834 issue of the short-lived undergraduate literary journal Harvardiana: “He could not even enjoy that peculiar degree of satisfaction, usually denoted by the phrase ‘as happy as a clam.’ ”

The “high water” version first showed up in “The Oakwood Letters,” a humor series published in several different newspapers in 1836. The earliest example we’ve seen is from the Boston Courier (Jan. 7, 1836):

“Dear Mrs. Butternut, I must leave off, for I can’t say any more, only that if I was once more safe at home, I should be happy as a clam at high water, as the sailors say.” (We’ve seen no indication that the expression was a nautical usage.)

The idea that the expression comes from a belief that the clam is happy because it feels secure in its shell appeared in the March 1838 issue of The Knickerbocker, a literary monthly in New York:

“ ‘Happy as a clam,’ is an old adage. It is not without meaning. Your clam enjoys the true otium cum dignitate [leisure with dignity]. Ensconced in his mail of proof [chain mail armor]—for defence purely, his disposition being no ways bellicose—he snugly nestleth in his mucid bed, revels in quiescent luxury, in the unctuous loam that surroundeth him.”

We’ll end with a sonnet by the 19th-century American poet John Godrey Saxe, who writes that a clam’s life is as hard as its shell:

“A Sonnet to a Clam”

Dum tacent clamant [Though silent they shout]
Inglorious friend! most confident I am
Thy life is one of very little ease;
Albeit men mock thee with their similes
And prate of being “happy as a clam!”
What though thy shell protects thy fragile head
From the sharp bailiffs of the briny sea?
Thy valves are, sure, no safety-valves to thee,
While rakes are free to desecrate thy bed,
And bear thee off,—as foemen take their spoil,—
Far from thy friends and family to roam;
Forced, like a Hessian, from thy native home,
To meet destruction in a foreign broil!
Though thou art tender, yet thy humble bard
Declares, O clam! thy case is shocking hard!

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Q: Where did the expression “claw back” (referring to money) come from? It seems to be a fairly recent usage.

A: The phrasal verb “claw back” is heard a lot now, especially as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency tries to get back money given out, but the usage isn’t quite as new as you think.

The term “claw back” has been used since the 1950s in the sense of to take back money, and the verb “claw” has been used by itself in a similar way since the mid-19th century.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines this meaning as “to regain gradually or with great effort; to take back (an allowance by additional taxation, etc.).”

The earliest citation in the OED for “claw back” used in the financial sense is from the Feb. 21, 1953, issue of the Economist. Here’s an expanded version:

“The Government would also make sure that, as in the case of Building Society dividends and interest payments, such tax relief was clawed back from surtax payers.”

The noun “clawback” (the retrieval of money already paid out) soon appeared. The first Oxford citation, which we’ve expanded, is from The Daily Telegraph (London), April 16, 1969:

“It is, however, necessary to adjust the claw-back for 1969–70 so as to reflect the fact that the 3s. extra on family allowances, which was paid for only half a year in 1968–69, will be paid for a full year in 1969–70.”

The first OED citation for “claw” used in reference to money is from Denis Duval, the unfinished last novel of William Makepeace Thackeray, published a few months after he died at the end of 1863.

Here’s an expanded version of the passage cited: “His hands were forever stretched out to claw other folks’ money towards himself” (originally published in The Cornhill Magazine, March-June, 1864).

When the verb “claw” first showed up in Old English in the late 10th century, it meant “to scratch or tear with claws,” according to the OED.

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from Aelfric’s Grammar, an introduction to Latin, written around 995 by the Benedictine abbot Ælfric of Eynsham: “Scalpo, ic clawe” (scalpo is Latin and ic clawe is Old English for “I scratch”).

In the mid-16th century, the OED says, the verb took on the sense of “to seize, grip, clutch, or pull with claws.”

The earliest citation is from “The Aged Louer Renounceth Loue,” an anonymous poem in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), which is described in the Cambridge History of English Literature as the first printed anthology of English poetry:

“For age with stelyng [steely or implacable] steppes, Hath clawed [clutched] me with his cowche [crook].” The anthology, collected by the English publisher Richard Tottel, is also known as Songes and Sonettes Written by the Ryght Honorable Lord Henry Howard, late Earle of Surrey, Thomas Wyatt the Elder and Others.

The OED says the seize, grip, clutch, or pull sense of “claw” later came to be used figuratively—both by itself and in the phrase “claw back”—to mean regain funds slowly or with much effort, the sense you’re asking about.

We’ll end with a recent example of the phrase used figuratively in reference to Musk’s campaign to take back funds:

“From the start of the second Trump administration, Mr. Musk’s team has pushed agencies to claw back government funds for everything from teacher-training grants to H.I.V. prevention overseas” (The New York Times, April 5, 2025).

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