What Is The Origin Of (266)?…
To turn
up one’s toes
There are
very few certainties in life. Christopher Bullock nailed it down in the Cobbler
of Preston, published in 1716, when he noted, “’tis impossible to be sure of
any thing but Death and Taxes”, predating Benjamin Franklin’s more famous
coining of the phrase by some seventy-three years. Some of us, though, are able
to evade even taxes and so we are left with one absolute certainty, death
itself. It is no wonder, therefore, that our wonderful language has myriad
phrases to describe this one absolute certainty of our mortal state. Wikipedia
lists 142 synonyms and I’m sure there must be more.
One such is
to turn up one’s toes which is an abbreviated form of the longer to turn up one’s
toes to the roots of the daisies, a reference to the dead person’s lying in a
grave and mingling with the soil and the flora of the cemetery. Other variants
around this rather picturesque theme include under the daisies and to push up
the daisies.
One of the
themes that comes through from these etymological searches is how often words
and phrases that appear to have their origin in Ireland migrate to the United
States. The Irish migrants may have brought with them little in the way of
worldly possessions but they did not forget their often charming turn of phrase
and inventive vocabulary.
English
newspapers in the 1830s, for some unaccountable reason, had a thing about printing
epitaphs from Irish graves. I suppose it filled up space on a slow news day.
The Courier, in its edition of August 28, 1830 under the heading of From a
Tombstone in Ballyporeen Churchyard, published the following lines of verse; “here
at length I repose-/ And my spirit at aise is-/ with the tips of my toes,/ and
the point of my nose,/ turn’d up to the roots of the daisies”. The same
verse, with variations in spelling and title, appeared in a number of other
journals over the following year or so. We can only conclude that its homely
platitudes gave some comfort, and perhaps amusement, to the papers’ readership.
The
Chartist movement later that decade gave the political stage to the working
class and it is no surprise that their idioms peppered their oratory. The
Manchester Guardian on May 4, 1839 included the following from an address given
by a Chartist in Bolton; “..whether they must go to the Abbey side, where
their ancestors lay, as the Irish say, with their toes turned up to the roots
of the daisies”. It would be dangerous to take this as proof-positive of
the phrase’s Irish origin but, at least, that seems to be what contemporaries
thought.
It was also
used adjectivally in a racy and slang-filled account of a lion hunt penned by
one Captain G. Grenville Malet in the New Sporting Magazine on August 18, 1841.
“We at length, by severe peppering, made him cut his lucky, and found him
toes up within a few yards”. Poor lion but at least it found some sort of
immortality.
When it had
crossed the pond to America it had been abbreviated to to turn one’s toes up,
appearing in this form in print in The Sun from Baltimore on August 12, 1852 in
an account of the massacre by so-called coolies of the crew of the American
ship, the Robert Browne. One coolie helped himself to the ship’s medicine chest
with disastrous consequences as the paper reported; “about three hours
afterwards he turned his toes up!”
Neither my
toes, nor more nose for that matter, will push up the daisies, other than in
granular form, as I have elected to be cremated, but if my body was laid to
rest, I would find some solace in knowing I would be enriching the soil.
