Origins and Babies: Here is a Brand, Spanking New One

I love babies.

We all do, here at the oft stodgy Marlinspike Hall, deep in the Tête de Hergé. Not that we are getting old, sentimental, or soft in the head. Still, La Belle Bianca Castafiore insists that there be no "répétitions" (rehearsals) of her ear-splitting, inimitable voice and her never-ending aria, l'air des bijoux, from Gounod's Faust, during any of the 2 afternoon hours of TLC's reality shows on birth, babes, and frazzled parents.

Fred is even a greater fan of A Baby Story, a documentary of the actual birth, and Bringing Home Baby, which chronicles the first 36 hours of the infant's triumphant arrival at the homestead.

He even manages to derive a little monetary benefit from his passetemps, overseeing betting opportunities -- such as whether, or when, the birthing woman will scream, "Get it out! Just get it out!"

The felines enjoy the shows, as well, lined up in front of the television screen -- mewling, purring, and swatting. Unfortunately, Marmy sometimes has a PTSD-induced flashback to her traumatic birth experience. At the tender age of 8 months, her huge belly almost dragged the ground, and had The Fredster not guilted me out, she would have likely died, along with her five unborn kittens -- just another ill-tempered stray. Ah, but look at her now! Her lush, long hair -- her tiny, well-muscled body, her fascist, unreasoned ways! See her charge the TV screen, hair blowing in the huff of a self-generated breeze! Bless her paranoid little bones!

My favorite show? Jon and Kate Plus Eight, hands down*. It's not just the cute factor, nor even the unavoidable awe that comes from contemplating eight young children who are well-behaved and happy. It's a little bit appreciation of the occasional parental bickering. It's a lot acknowledgement of the grace and love that kisses the pointy head of each and every Gosselin -- whether in any one of the dozen designated Time-Out corners of their home or sporting plastic purple halos.

Anyway...

"Anyway..."? I don't want Braden of 20 Out Of 10 fame to get a swollen head or anything, but the impetus for this Saturday morning confessional were the pictures of his two gorgeous daughters, the youngest being brand-spanking new**, just a day or so old and the spitting image of her sister***.

Welcome, little one!

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*Origin of hands down:

Jockeys need to keep a tight rein in order to encourage their horse to run. Anyone who is so far ahead that he can afford to slacken off and still win can drop his hands and loosen the reins - hence winning 'hands down'. This is recorded from the mid 19th century. For example, 'Pips' Lyrics & Lays, 1867:

"There were good horses in those days, as he can well recall, But Barker upon Elepoo, hands down, shot by them all."

It began to be used in a figurative sense, to denote an easy win in other contexts, from the early 20th century.

**Origin of brand spanking new:

A hot burned wooden stake has been called a brand since at least 950 AD. To brand means to 'make an indelible mark of ownership', especially with a hot stake or iron. This verb usage has been known since the Middle Ages and is clearly derived from the earlier name (we might say brand name - but we'll come to that later).

The earliest citation of 'brand new' is in John Foxe's Sermons, 1570:

"New bodies, new minds and all thinges new, brande-newe."

Terms that are old often come to us with a variety of spellings. In this case there are many variants, notable 'bran new', for example:

John Gay's, The What d'ye call it? - a farce, 1714: "Wear these Breeches Tom; they're quite bran-new."

The Times from 1788: "The liquor fpoiled a bran new pair of fattin breaches."

It is sometimes put about that 'brand new' comes from marketing jargon, where terms like 'brand loyalty' etc. are commonplace. That's about a thousand years too late as the origin, but again, it does have the same meaning as the early form. A brand in marketing terms comes from the meaning of the word as 'a particular class of goods, as indicated by a trade mark'.

So, that's 'brand new'; what about the double form 'brand spanking new'? Spanking is little more than an intensifier in this phrase. The word does have a distinct meaning; unrelated to 'slapping with the hand', i.e. 'exceptionally large or fine'. For example, Fanshawe's Love for Love's sake, 1666:

"What a spanking Labradora!"

Like the variety of spellings there are variants of the intensified form - 'brand span new', 'spick and span new', etc. These citations pre-date any known version of 'brand spanking new':

Henry Angelo's Reminiscences, 1830: "His feet were thrust into a bran-span new pair of fashionable pumps."

The Whitby Glossary, 1855: "Brandnew, Brandspandernew, fresh from the maker's hands, or 'spic and span new'."

It appears that whoever coined 'brand spanking new' did so by appropriating the imagery of 'spick and span', the rhyme of 'bran' and 'span' and the meaning of 'spanking'. That is, it is a pleasant-sounding phrase with some appropriate associations. Whatever the intent of the early users of the phrase, it is in Eric Partridge's meaning of the term, a catchphrase, i.e. it has caught on. It appears to have been coined around the turn of the 20th century and is still in common use. The earliest printed citation we can find is in an advertisement for a bicycle, in the Daily Review, Decatur, Illinois, May 1894:

"Here is a Brand, Spanking New one."

***Origin of spitting image:

One of the very first questions that was asked at the Phrasefinder bulletin board was about 'spitting image'. There have been numerous such queries there since and some ask if the term was originally 'splitting image', i.e. deriving from the two matching parts of a split plank of wood. That's a plausible idea. The mirror image matching of the grain of split wood has long been used in furniture and musical instruments for decorative effect. The technique is known as book-matching and the resulting pattern is called fiddleback - for obvious reasons. The theory has its adherents 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, spitten image, the dead spit of etc., appear not to derive from 'split' but from 'spit'.

Some commentators have suggested that 'spit' may be a corruption of 'spirit', but that appears to be fanciful and isn't backed up by any early examples of 'spirit and image'. The allusion is more likely to be to someone who is so similar to another as to appear to have been spat out of his mouth. That idea, if not the exact phrase, was in circulation by the end of the 17th century, when George Farquhar used it in his comic play Love and a bottle, 1689:

"Poor child! he's as like his own dadda as if he were spit out of his mouth."

No version of the phrase is especially old. The earliest reference 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. 'Spit' or 'dead spit', with the meaning of likeness, appears in print several times in the 19th century. Here 'dead' means precise or exact, as in dead ringer.

Other languages have their own versions of this phrase. For example, French - "C'est le portrait craché de son père" ("He's the spitting portrait of his father") and Norwegian - "som snytt ut av nesen paa" ("as blown out of the nose of"). These are difficult to date and may predate the English version or may derive from it.

Toward the end of the 19th century we find 'spit and image'. In 1895, an 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."

Finally, we get to the first known use of 'spitting image' - in A. H. Rice's Mrs. Wiggs, 1901:

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