Back Idioms

Several words have found themselves used in a number of phrases. We looked at 'hand' last time and this time it's 'back'.

Turning one’s back on someone (or something) appears in the early 14th century.

Nobody knew anything like the back of their hand is first recorded in the book Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson, pubnlished in 1893. In the late 19th century ‘the back of my hand to you’ is used in the context of ‘I will have nothing to do with you’.

Backdoors didn’t exist before the 1640s.

Back seat – you know that place where passengers sit when you’re driving – appears for the first time in 1923, but refers to those seated to the rear of a coach, while the term back-seat driver is first seen in print as early as 1923.

Back-formation, a term I use quite often when speaking on the origins of place names, refers to any word formed from an existing word and has been found since at least 1887.

Back beat is officially defined as ‘a strong beat regularly falling on a normally unaccented beat of a bar’ when it was first used in 1928 to describe jazz. Or, as John Lennon tweaked the words to Chuck Berry’s Rock and Roll Music ‘It’s got a back beat you can’t blues it.”

Back slang has rather fallen out of use in the modern era, but when first seen in 1860 it described words prounced backwards (or nearly so).

A ladder-back is a chair design seen from 1898.

Pullback is first seen in the mid-17th century when it described the action of pulling someone back, but from 1951 it was used to refer to an orderly military retreat.

Nobody offered their support by saying they would back them up before 1767, but the sense of back up used to describe such as a blockage in a pipe (or latterly traffic) is not seen until 1834.

Back down, as in withdraw a challenge or statement, is first seen in 1859.

Nobody suffered from back ache until the beginning of the 17th century.

Back-breaking is not used until 1849.

And nobody described a leatherback turtle as such until 1855.