Who let ‘Adam’s house cat’ creep into our lexicon?

You know the feeling…you’re out shopping with a friend and someone comes up to you and starts talking and asks: “How’s your momma ‘n’em?”

 

But you have absolutely no idea who this person is…asking about your family’s health. You’re pretty convinced you’ve never met him or her. And when your shopping partner asks, ‘Who was that?’ you just shrug and say, ‘I don’t know him/her from Adam’s house cat.’”

Every Southerner knows the translation: “I dunno who that is. Beats me.” But the reference to Adam’s house cat may be “a little perplexing’” to a “woodser” or someone from “Off.”

Michael Quinion of London, England, creator of the World Wide Words website, wonders: 

“Is Adam’s house cat a biblical reference? Is it something we missed as a child in Sunday school?”

 

Quinion cited research conducted by author Robert Hendrickson of Far Rockaway, N.Y., who has written dozens of books about “why we talk the way we do.”

Hendrickson says Southerners are famous for taking an oft-used phrase “and improving upon it.” That’s how “Adam’s off ox” became “Adam’s house cat.”

Editors at the Grammarist, a unit of Found First Marketing, a digital publisher based in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, try to explain it this way:

“An off ox is the draft animal in a team that is situated on the right, the farthest away from the driver. The driver places the most experienced draft animal closest to his guiding leads, hoping that the off ox will simply follow what the lead animal does. The off ox’ habits and idiosyncrasies would not be as well known to the driver, as it is harder for him to observe the off ox.”

 

“Though the idiom ‘don’t know someone from Adam’s off ox’ has been in use since at least the latter 1880s, it did not emerge into popular culture until U.S. President Bill Clinton used the term during a news conference in 1993.

 

Celeste Headlee of the NPR Network said that a reporter asked Clinton about an Air Force official who had criticized the president. “How could he say that about me?” Clinton responded. “He doesn’t know me from Adam’s off ox.”

 

Headlee said: “Most of the journalists at that news conference had no idea what Clinton was talking about. It turns out the president was using a regional expression that meant the official didn’t know him at all.”

Chrysti Smith, a columnist at the Bozeman (Mont.) Daily Chronicle, said the expression initially appeared just as “I don’t know him from Adam.”

 

She said author Charles Dickens of London, England, was the first to use the expression in print in his 1840 novel “The Old Curiosity Shop” when he has a character remark, “He called to see my Governor this morning…and beyond that, I don’t know him from Adam.”

 

Smith said other variations appear from time to time, including “Adam’s brother,” “Adam’s pet monkey,” “Adam’s Aunt Bessie,” “Adam’s grandmother” and “Adam’s left foot.”

It turns out that 1840 was a “very good year” for idioms in London, England.

Elsewhere in the city, the phrase “two shakes of a lamb’s tail” first appeared in “The Ingoldsby Legends,” written by the Rev. Richard Harris Barham, a cleric in the Church of England, who was assigned as a minor canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

 

Writing for Grammarist, Candace Osmond said: “Two shakes of a lamb’s tail means something will be done quickly or in a very short amount of time – ASAP.”

 

“It’s a whimsical and vivid way of expressing the concept of speed and promptness,” she said.