God sent the spirit of division between them, so that the Sichemites began to despise him, and rebell against him, but they had the worst end of the staffe, and were overcome by him: who pursuing the victory, tooke their city by force, and put them all to the edge of the sword.
The Latin tag argumentum baculinum literally means “the argument of the cudgel”, in other words an appeal to force.įurther support comes from a widely recorded older version, to have the worst end of the staff: This florid opinion, directly contrary to matter of fact, is the wrong end of the stick - the argumentum baculinum, which you unfortunately got hold of. This suggestion is supported by the oldest example of the idiom that I’ve unearthed so far, though as the writer clearly expects readers to know the idiom, it must have been well established by then: The servant would naturally “get hold of the wrong end of the stick,” but it would not much avail him, it would soon be wrested from him, and the result would be more stick. The right end of the stick was that held in the master’s hand, whilst the other was the wrong end, or (as our American cousins would say) the “business end”. The pioneering philologist Walter Skeat suggested in 1895 that the source was a master beating his servant: Some writers have sought a classical justification by pointing to the Roman lavatory practice of cleaning their backsides with a stridulum, a sponge on a stick picking up the wrong end of a stick already used by somebody else would undoubtedly be unpleasant. end of the stick?”, which appeared in The Swell’s Night Guide in the 1840s. A ruder version, getting the shit end of the stick, makes the point more forcefully, as does “Which of us had hold of the crappy. The bottom end would often become coated with mud and other detritus so that to get hold of the stick by the wrong end would be a messy error. A common one is that it referred to a walking stick. It is certainly incorrect, not least because you had to be an extremely incompetent typesetter to hold the composing stick wrongly. This story has often been retold, with the explanation that if a compositor set type in the stick incorrectly he got the wrong end of the stick. The writer based his suggestion for the origin of getting the wrong end of the stick on the ancient sense of stick - an abbreviation of composing-stick - for the hand-held device a typesetter used for composing text from individual letters.
A related idiom with the second meaning is get the short end of the stick. An older version - not so much heard now, I think, and often with have instead of get - means to have the worst of a bargain or an argument. If somebody today gets the wrong end of the stick, he or she has misunderstood the facts in a case or misunderstood some story. Do you agree with it?Ī There are actually two idioms here. I’m unsure about the writer’s explanation of getting the wrong end of the stick as being linked to printing. Q From John Jefferies: An article in the Irish Times recently gave examples of words and phrases associated with the printing trade that have found their way into everyday English language usage.
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