Spit That Image Out

Quickly, now, without checking any dictionaries or usage guides: which of the following expressions is original, standard usage?

• Once and awhile
• Set and stone
• Try and get
• Spit and image
• All and all
• Hand and hand
• Tongue and cheek

I’ve run into all of these recently, mostly in student papers, but also in published work. So many of our habitual expressions have lost their connection to the original meaning that students—and sometimes professional writers—set them down as they sound without regard to whatever sense they might make. Given the aural similarity of and, in, and -ing, it’s no surprise that malapropisms like in this day in age crop up—for how often do we actually think about something being common in this day and also in this age, or era? And why would we?

If we think carefully or have background knowledge, of course, we can and do make some sense of these expressions. Once in a while means “at some point during a moderate length of time.” Substitute and for in and combine the last two words, and you get “at some point and for a short time,” which is not usually what the writer means. Tongue and cheek, referring to something said jokingly, makes no sense whatever; tongue in cheek does make sense, but only if we have the 18^th-century social context of signifying contempt by thrusting one’s tongue into one’s cheek (which, it might be noted, is hard to do while talking).

On the other hand, we could imagine set and stone to mean something that is both fixed and enduring, as opposed to something that has been engraved in stone and therefore not erasable. In a case like this, although the nonstandard use lacks the historical reference of set in stone, it’s neither meaningless nor inapropos.

The one that surprised me, as I started making a casual list focused on and, in,  and –ing confusions, was spit and image. Spitting image was what I had always known, and a Google Ngram shows me why—the year of my birth, that version of the expression began to outpace the original spit and image as well as its offshoot, spitten image, which has now fallen almost totally into disuse. The original, it seems, referred to an offspring’s being both made of the stuff of his parents (the spit) and looking much like them (the image). If that image is created from the spit—if the likeness, that is, is genetically based—it is a spitten image. But somewhere in the 20^th century, it seems we were hearing, not spitten, but spittin’, and so we corrected ourselves—and started saying spitting image. Another explanation is that we conflated the term spit and image with the less common colloqualism splittin’ image, meaning things that are as alike as the two halves of a split log. And so splittin’ + spit and = spitting.

Etymologically, this sort of stuff is interesting for us word addicts. But what’s more interesting to me is to note how, as and replaces in or –ing replaces –en, we see language evolving from the point where it conveys some literal meaning to the point where we simply understand the set of words without pausing to consider their exact reference. That is, She’s the spitting image of her mom is really a sort of nonsense—she’s not spitting, her image isn’t spitting. But it’s what we say now—it’s what I will doubtless continue to say, even now that I understand how the expression went astray from its original, and rather interesting, construction—and no one misunderstands.

Will the same happen to hand and hand? To all and all? Let’s try and see as the years roll on.