[dreambeliever128]

I put this post in someone elses thread because I am a fly by night today.

Don't know why but I am.

Where did the Phrase" spittin image" come from?

My Dr. asked me and I thought it was just a hillbilly phrase. Since I'm a hillbilly from Ky. that's where I had always heard it.

Isn't that a funny question for a Dr. to ask? He is always coming up with something funny to get me laughing. I asked him if he stayed up all night thinking about that?

Any ideals.

Ada

[Curious]

good question. here is what i found and the link:http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/spitting-image.html

Meaning
The exact likeness.
Origin
One of the very first questions at the Phrasefinder bulletin board (7 years and 50,000 postings ago) asked about 'spitting image'. There have been numerous queries since and the latest this week (Aug 2006) asked if the term was originally 'splitting image', i.e. deriving from the two matching parts of a split plant of wood. That's a plausible-sounding idea. The mirror-image matching grain of split wood has long been used in furniture and musical instruments for decorative effect. The technique is known as book-matching and resulting pattern is called fiddleback - for obvious reasons. The theory has had its adherents for some time and dates back to at least 1939, when Dorothy Hartley included it in her book Made in England:

"Evenness and symmetry are got by pairing the two split halves of the same tree, or branch. (Hence the country saying: he's the ‘splitting image’ - an exact likeness.)"

As so often though, plausibility isn't the end of the story. The numerous forms of the term 'spitting image' - spit and image, splitting image, spitten image, the dead spit of, spirit and image etc., appear not to derive from 'split' but from 'spit'. The allusion is to someone who is so similar to another as to appear to have been spat out by him.
The phrase in any form isn't especially old. The earliest reference that is known is in Andrew Knapp and W. Baldwin's The Newgate Calendar, 1824–26:

"A daughter, ... the very spit of the old captain."

This pre-dates any 'splitting image' citation by a good hundred years, which tends to rule out the latter as the source. That use of spit or 'dead spit' to mean likeness appears in print several times in the 19th century. Here dead means precise or exact, as it does in dead ringer.
Toward the end of the 19th century we get 'spit and image'. In 1895 and author called E. Castle published Lt. of Searthey, containing the line:

"She's like the poor lady that's dead and gone, the spit an' image she is."

The first appearance of 'spitting image' is in A. H. Rice's Mrs. Wiggs, 1901:

"He's jes' like his pa - the very spittin' image of him!"

,Arnold Bennett used 'spitten image' in Clayhanger in 1910:

"A nice-behaved young gentleman, and the spitten image of his poor mother."

The idea that spit may be a corruption of 'spirit' appears to be fanciful. There's certainly no evidence to support that.

[LisaM]

LOL! Okay....here ya go. You may want to email, or snail mail, this to your doctor so he can get his answer before you see him again. LOL!

www.word-detective.com/052598.html

Dear Word Detective: I'm in the midst of an argument with a friend over the expression "spittin' image," meaning look-alike. He insists that the expression is "splitting image." Which of us is correct? What is the origin of this expression? -- Linda, via the internet.

You are correct, although your friend's attempt to make "spittin' image" make more sense as "splitting image" (as if one person had split into two) merits an honorable mention. Your friend's version, incidentally, is a good example of a process known as "folk etymology," whereby an unfamiliar or seemingly nonsensical phrase, often very old, is altered slightly to make it more understandable in modern terms.

But the phrase is definitely "spitting image" or "spittin' image," meaning "exact likeness" and it's based on an earlier form, "spit and image," which first appeared around 1859 Just where the phrase came from and exactly what it means, however, is hotly debated in etymological circles.

Most authorities accept the "spit" element of the phrase at face value, and maintain that it is a remarkably inelegant metaphor for similarity: "just as if one person were spit out of another's mouth." A similar saying in French, "C'est son pere tout crache" ("He is his father's spit and image"), lends support to this theory, as do earlier English sayings with the same meaning, such as "the very spit of," which appeared around 1825.

The late poet and etymologist John Ciardi, however, maintained that "black magic" lay at the root of the phrase. Armed with a sample of someone's saliva ("spit") and a doll made to resemble the person ("image"), goes the theory, a sorcerer could cast all sorts of evil spells on the hapless victim.

Yet another theory regards "spit" as a shortened form of "spirit," but there is no real evidence for this, and it sounds to me like another "folk etymology" effort to make a very weird phrase slightly less weird.

[dreambeliever128]

That is just too funny. I never dreamed you would find it on the computer but then I should have known that if it's out there it's in here.

I ran off a copy of it and put it in an envelope and sent it down to him but Susan. He will crack up when he sees it.

Even fly by night was on there.

How funny.

Ada