What Is The Origin Of (268)?…
Like snuff at a wake
If burning a strip of tobacco in a paper casing seems a daft
idea, then taking a pinch of tobacco between your thumb and index finger and
snorting it up one nostril, ensuring the other is closed, and then repeating
the exercise with the other is even more ludicrous. Snuff taking is very much
out of fashion these days, but you can always tell when a pinch has been taken
because a loud, stentorian sneeze resounds around the room. But taking snuff
was once a fashionable way of getting your nicotine fix and has spawned several
phrases with which we pepper up our language. One such is like snuff at a wake which
is a simile for describing liberality or generosity.
It originates from Ireland, like many a colourful phrase,
and specifically relates to a custom at a wake. A bowl of snuff was placed on
the chest of the deceased. This custom served three purposes, one, as snuff was
a rare and desirable commodity, it brought mourners closer to the coffin, and,
once there would encourage them to say a prayer for the deceased’s immortal soul, two, to prevent the mourners
from falling asleep during the night vigil and , three, if it rose and fell, it
gave a pretty good clue that the incumbent in the box wasn’t dead. There is no
recorded instance of anyone being saved from an early internment because of a
moving snuff bowl but it was often the case that the bowl of snuff had to be
replaced. In parts of England this custom was observed, although the snuff was
replaced with bread and a bowl of salt.
Perhaps the first case of the phrase being used in a
figurative sense, with a meaning akin to from pillar to post, was in a humorous
piece, ostensibly a report of a court case, appearing in the Freeman’s Journal,
a Dublin magazine, on June 19, 1844, in which the unfortunate prisoner is
reported as saying, “is that any reason why I am to be robbed of my liberty,
strapped on a stretcher, and thrown about from policeman to policeman like
snuff at a wake”. This rather negative connotation with the phrase was echoed
by James Joyce in his account of O’Callaghan on his last legs in Chapter six of
Ulysses; “Terrible comedown, poor wretch! Kicked about like snuff at a wake”.
However, by the time Bloom uses the phrase again, in Chapter
13 during the Nausicaa section, it has a more positive connotation; “others
in vessels, bit of handkerchief sail, pitched about like snuff at a wake when
the stormy winds do blow”. It is with a more positive connotation that it
is used in earlier sources, this one, from the Emigrant Soldier’s Gazette of
February 19, 1859 almost exactly echoed by Joyce’s second usage; “the masts
bindin’ like switches an’ the sails in smithereens, an’ the life bouys flyin’
about like snuff at a wake”.
The sense of liberality or generosity appears in the phrase’s
usage in the Illustrated Dublin Journal of December 28. 1862; “new
buckskins, as my grandfather was a gentleman; new brogues, new coat, new
everything – the signs of money flying about him like snuff at a wake”. The
phrase crossed the Atlantic, presumably with the Irish migrants, appearing in
the United States Investor of May 14, 1898; “advice to take up Americans, pay
for them, and hold them, is “flung about like snuff at a wake”.
Whether used in a positive or negative sense, it is a wonderfully
evocative phrase and one that deserves to be used like snuff at a wake.
