Astronauts and identical twins Mark and Scott Kelly, 2015
14 October 2024
The phrase spitting image, used to describe someone who looks very much like another person, particularly a close family member, is a relatively recent coinage based on a much older idea. That original idea has disappeared from our collective consciousness, making the phrase a dead metaphor, one that is no longer productive or understood. As a result many variations—folk etymologies—of it and etymythologies about spitting image’s origin have arisen.
That original idea is that of spitting out an exact likeness of oneself. (And that, in turn, may be a euphemistic metaphor for male ejaculation during sex.) We see this idea expressed at the beginning of the seventeenth century. From Nicholas Breton’s 1602 Wonders Worth the Hearing, in which he provides an unflattering description of the participants in a country wedding:
and after the rowte of such a fight of Rascals, as one would rake hell for such a rabblement, followes the Groome my young Colt of a Cart bréed, led betwixt twoo girles for the purpose, the one as like an Owle, the other as like an Urchin, as if they had béene spitte out of the mouthes of them.
John Dryden expresses it in his 1668 play Sir Martin Mar-all, when he has a character say:
My dear Father, I know it is you by instinct; for methinks I am as like you as if I were spit out of your mouth.
By the nineteenth century, the underlying metaphor becomes more hidden, and we see the noun spit, in the phrase the very spit of, being used to express the idea. From Charles Dibdin’s 1897 novel Henry Hooka:.
She had low ideas, was the very spit of her mother, no elegant notions of gentility, a perfect stranger to the delicate feelings with which great minds were sensitively and susceptibly touched.
And by mid century we get the phrase spit and fetch, with fetch being an Irish dialectal term for one’s doppelganger or likeness. From George Augustus Sala’s 1859 Gaslight and Daylight, in a passage describing ship’s figureheads:
They all seem to have been chiselled from the same models, designed in the same train of thought. Caucus, now, with the addition of a cocked hat and epaulettes, and minus an eye or an arm, would be twin-brother to Admiral Nelson, bound to Singapore, close by; with a complete coat of gold-leaf, a fiercely-curled wig and a spiky crown, he would do excellently well for “King Odin.” screw-steamer for Odessa; with an extra leer notched into his face, his whiskers shaved off, and in his hand a cornucopia resembling a horse's nosebag, twisted and filled with turnips, he would pass muster for Peace or Plenty; while with a black face, a golden crown and bust, and a trebly-gilt kitchen-poker or sceptre, he would be the very spit and fetch of Queen Cleopatra. Distressingly alike are they, these figure-heads.
The phrase spitten picter is recorded in William Dickinson’s 1878 glossary of the Cumberland dialect. In his entry we see that a commenter with the initials W.W.S. is unfamiliar with the metaphor of spitting out a copy of oneself and thus suggests a false etymology:
Spitten picter, c. a strong likeness. “Yon barn ’s his varra spitten picter.” (I suspect spitten means pricked. One way of getting a an exact copy of a drawing is to prick out the outline with a pin.—W.W.S.)
Finally, by the end of the nineteenth century, the phrase spitting image, as we know it today, is recorded. From a story “Alone in the Smuggler’s Lair” that appeared in the 9 May 1891 issue of The Boy’s Standard:
And so by that means I got to Truro, and from there I tramped to Penzance, about thirty miles, and having found my uncle, who kept a large ship-chandlery store, I rather startled him. He had never seen me before.
“By Jove!” said he, “you are the very spit and image of your poor dead brother. I only hope you will turn out as good and bright a man.”
We’ve seen how the original idea behind the phrase has been lost. The metaphor is dead, and the phrase spitting image is a linguistic fossil. Such fossils often give rise to wrong ideas about their origins as people try to make sense of them. We’ve also seen one false etymology, that of spitten meaning pricked, but it’s not the last. The folk etymology (that is an alteration of an idiom in an attempt to make sense of it) splitting image appears by 1894. We see it in a poem, Kitty Kirkie’s Kersmassing, written in the Westmorland dialect:
We’re nowt bet human natur, barn,
Soa t’ Kersmas up i' t’ fells
El just be t’ splitten image
Ov a Kersmas ’mang yersells.
(We’re nothing but human nature, child [born?], so the Christmas up at the fells will just be the splitting image of a Christmas among yourselves.)
Another folk etymology/false etymology has it that spitting image is a variation on spirit and image. A nice idea, but wrong.
Sources:
“Alone in the Smugglers’ Lair.” The Boy’s Standard, 9 May 1891, 28/1. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century Collections Online.
Breton, Nicholas. Wonders Worth the Hearing. London: E. Allde for John Tappe, 1602, sig. B4r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.
Dibdin, Charles. Henry Hooka: A Novel, vol. 1 of 3. London: C. Chapple, 1807, 188. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century Collections Online.
Dickinson, William. A Glossary of Words and Phrases Pertaining to Dialect of Cumberland. English Dialect Society, Series C, 8. London: Trübner, 1878, 92/2. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Dryden, John. S[i]r Martin Mar-all, or the Feigned Innocence. London: H. Herringman, 1668, 5.1, 60. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.
Horn, Lawrence R. “Spitten Image: Etymythology and Fluid Dynamics.” American Speech, 79.1, Spring 2004, 33–38. Project Muse.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, spit, n.2, spitten, adj., spitting image, n., splitting, n.
Sala, George Augustus. Gaslight and Daylight. London: Chapman and Hall, 1859, 334. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Wilson, William. “Kitty Kirkie’s Kersmassing.” In Thomas Clarke and William Wilson. Specimens of the Dialects of Westmorland, part second. Kendal: Atkinson and Pollitt, 1894, 36. HathiTrust Digital Archive. (The OED, in an entry dated 1914, gives this citation an 1880 date, but I can only find an 1894 edition that contains this poem. It’s also unclear whether Wilson is the author of the poem or merely the one who contributed it to the book.)
Wright, Joseph. The English Dialect Dictionary, vol. 5 of 6. Oxford: Henry Frowde, 1905, s.v. spit, 669–70. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Photo credit: NASA/Robert Markowitz, 2015. Wikimedia Commons. Flickr.com. Public domain image.