President Barack Obama literally has his tongue in his cheek as jokes about his birth certificate
18 January 2023
To speak with one’s tongue in cheek is to speak whimsically or with insincerity. It’s an idiom that makes no literal sense today, but it dates to the eighteenth century and a practice of making a bulge in one’s cheek with one’s tongue as a gesture of contempt, a 1700s equivalent of extending one’s middle finger.
The use of the gesture is recorded in a description of process serving in a 1735 Scottish legal case:
But Donaldson, to prevent that, proposed to the Declarant, to trust him with the Money, and he would deliver the Process, and the principal Decreet arbitral, and that, in the Space of half an Hour, he would call for the Declarant at the Laigh Coffee-House, and deliver him the Discharge and that he would shut his Tongue in his Cheek at James Wright, and tell him that the Money was in his Pocket, and obtain from him the Discharge.
Writer Tobias Smollett referred to the gesture in a number of his novels. He did so twice in his 1748 Adventures of Roderick Random:
I saluted each of them in order, and when I came to take Mr. Slyboot by the hand, I perceived him thrust his tongue in his cheek, to the no small entertainment of the company; but I did not think proper to take any notice of it, on this occasion.—Mr. Ranter too, (who I afterwards learned was a player) displayed his talents, by mimicking my air, features and voice, while he returned my compliment:—This I should not have been so sensible of, had I not seen him behave in the same manner, to my friend Wagtail, when he made up to them at first.—But for once I let him enjoy the fruits of his dexterity without question or control, resolved however, to chastise his insolence at a more convenient opportunity.
And the second time:
He fixed his eyes on me and asked if I had seen him tremble.—I answered without hesitation, “Yes.”—“Damme, Sir, (said he) d’ye doubt my courage?”—I replied, “Very much.”—This declaration quite disconcerted him.—He looked blank, and pronounced with a faultering voice, “O! ’tis very well—d—n my blood! I shall find a time.”—I signified my contempt of him, by thrusting my tongue in my cheek, which humbled him so much, that he scarce swore another oath during the whole journey.
By the nineteenth century, tongues were being thrust in cheeks to signal that what one was saying was not serious. We have this passage from actor Samuel Ryley’s 1809 memoirs:
Luckily, the officer of justice said nothing, but seem’d to enjoy this warfare of words, by putting his tongue in his cheek, and winking at me, at the same time saying, “Twig the old one.”
The phrase tongue-in-cheek was being used as an adjective denoting insincerity by 1838, as this from Ireland’s Waterford Chronicle of 24 November 1838 attests:
The Mail was not Protestant enough for such a Protestant out-and out [sic] affair—its reporters were excluded; and thus the tactics of the wily Peel, of the imbecile Shaw, and the trading tongue-in-cheek Mail, laughing at the whole pack of dupes, is sacrificed to a newspaper juggle.
And there is this from an 1893 British Labour Party pamphlet which has Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone speaking insincerely:
With its present slender majority the government could not move a step of its way, save at extreme peril, without their approbation and consent. This, of course, would be annoying to the government and we should no longer see the Grand Old Man unctuously spreading his hands towards them, and, tongue in cheek, commending them to an assembled world as exemplars of all that was wisest and best.
So, Obama was hardly the first politician to do so.
Sources:
An Exact Copy of the Process Presently Depending Before the Sheriffs of Edinburgh. Edinburgh: 1735, 26. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
“The Feud and the Factions.” Waterford Chronicle (Ireland), 24 November 1838, 4. British Newspaper Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. tongue-in-cheek, adj. and adv., tongue, n.
Ryley, Samuel William. The Itinerant; or, Memoirs of an Actor, vol.1 of 3. London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1809, 293. Nineteenth Century Collections Online.
Smollett, Tobias George. The Adventures of Roderick Random, vol. 2 of 2. London: J. Osborn, 1748, 100, 196. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Tréguer, Pascal. “Meaning and Origin of the Phrase ‘(With) Tongue in Cheek.’” Wordhistories.net, 21 May 2017.
Washington, Samuel (Elihu). The Case for the 4th Clause. Manchester: Independent Labor Party, 1893, 11. Nineteenth Century Collections Online.
Photo credit: Associated Press, 2011.