3 min
Odd Body Language
The concrete realities of our bodies provide a common touchstone for the way we talk about less tangible things. It’s easy to think of your supervisor as the “head” of your department, for example—making decisions and directing things from somewhere “at the top”. It’s much less clear, though, what kind of neck you’re supposed to imagine when talking about “your neck of the woods”. This Word Stories instalment explores the obscure side of body-related expressions.
apple of (someone’s) eye
In modern idiomatic English, the apple of your eye is someone or something that couldn’t be more precious to you. At first glance, it’s a vivid but puzzling phrase, evoking surrealist paintings or maybe objects of desire like a piece of fruit you’re getting ready to pounce on. In reality, the origins of the idiom seem to have been more physiological: the pupil of the eye was assumed by Old English speakers to be a spherical structure within the central part of the eyeball. King Alfred the Great is credited with translating Pope Gregory the First’s treatise Pastoral Care into the English of the 800s, and rendering the Latin phrase “pupil of the eye” (pupilla oculi) as “apple of the eye” (Old English æpl ðæs eagan). Because our eyes are so sensitive and irreplaceable, English speakers could also use the phrase in an extended sense to mean “someone or something treated as precious above all else” (as seen, for example, in the English version of De Consolatione Philosophiae by Boethius—a translation also attributed to King Alfred).
For a long time, both uses of the apple of one’s eye were passed down side by side. Centuries later, William Shakespeare used the phrase in its more physical sense as a way to refer to the pupil of a person’s eye (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1595), and the King James Version of the Bible (1611) continued the tradition of using the phrase more figuratively to describe someone or something very, very precious (Deuteronomy 32:10; Psalm 17:8). In more recent centuries, though, the original shape-based sense has faded away, and only the extended metaphorical sense survives in use today. In the modern English imagination, you treasure the apple of your eye in your heart, not in your eyeball.
by the skin of (one’s) teeth
When we talk about people escaping or succeeding by the skin of their teeth, the implication is that they just barely made it. It’s a visceral image, but a hard one to picture since teeth don’t have skin. The key to the mystery of the skin of one’s teeth—like the similarly odd but vivid apple of (someone’s) eye—is found in some quirky accidents of biblical tradition. In the Book of Job, the titular character is a good person who suddenly finds himself suffering horribly for no obvious reason. He loses more or less everything, in fact, including his family and his health. In the Hebrew poetry of the book, Job laments the state of his leprous “flesh” (ōr) and adds a complaint about escaping with only the “flesh” of his teeth (Job 19:20). Presumably, the idea is that Job has been left with only his gums, having lost his teeth along with everything else. For our purposes, though, the story takes its first twist here, since early English Bibles rendered the passage as “My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth” (King James Version, 1611). In idiomatic English, this odd phrase was picked up as a way to refer to any state of just barely surviving disaster and being left with nothing (E. Hyde, Contemplations and Reflections upon the Psalms, 1674).
Over the centuries, the story took a second turn, as people began talking about escaping disaster by the skin of their teeth instead of with the skin of their teeth (J. Marsden, The Narrative of a Mission to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the Somers Islands, 1816). It’s anybody’s guess as to why this shift happened, but it’s possible that English speakers were just trying to make some sense of the bizarre traditional image. If you cheat death by a narrow enough margin, after all, you might imagine that margin to be as wide as the skin on your teeth (i.e. not wide at all). However it came to be, the latter form proved popular enough to eclipse the old biblical phrase entirely, and in everyday modern English it’s normal to talk about getting through close shaves by the skin of our teeth without wondering why.
neck of the woods
When people ask you what you’re doing in this neck of the woods, they’re asking what brings you to a particular neighbourhood. Even if you know what they mean, though, it may not be immediately clear why anyone is talking about forests—let alone forests that somehow have necks. The explanation involves a long process of semantic drift. Our word neck is rooted in the Old English hnecca, which also meant “neck” in the sense of the body part. By the time hnecca had evolved into nekke in Middle English, though, people had begun to use the term metaphorically as well, to refer to narrow extensions of various kinds like the neck of a bottle (J. Trevisa, De Proprietatibus Rerum, 1398). English speakers still talk about the shapes of bottles this way, just as we have long referred to the necks of stringed instruments like guitars and violins (R. Cotgrave, A French–English Dictionary, 1611).
As time went on, the range of everyday metaphorical applications grew wider. People began using the word neck to refer to strips of land (The London Gazette, August 1707) or narrow bodies of water (D. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719). In this context, neck of wood arrived in English as a way to refer to a strip of forest land (A. Young, A Tour in Ireland, 1780), and in the 19th century people in forested areas of the United States began using this neck of the woods as a folksy way to say “this area” or “this neighbourhood” (The Spirit of the Times, June 15, 1839). The light-hearted expression took widespread root in modern English, and people seldom refer to a neck of the woods today in any other way.
