I posted this to Wordorigins, but I’m still unsatisfied, so I thought I’d see if the Hattery could provide enlightenment:
My wife asked me about the phrase “have it in for (someone),” and I realized it is in fact a very weird construction. The OED says:
P.1.e. colloquial. to have it in for: to intend revenge on; to be determined to harm or cause trouble for; to feel hostility or strong dislike towards. Cf. in for at in adv. Phrases P.2.
First citation:
1825 Didn’t I owe the Major an ould grudge..? I had it in for him.
Captain Rock in London 17 September 226/3
But their “Cf. in for” isn’t any help; that phrase is defined as “Involved in some coming event, etc., esp. one which cannot be avoided; finally committed to do something; (now esp.) destined to experience something,” which doesn’t seem to have much relevance — and in any case, how does the phrase “have it in for” work? Any thoughts? (I know idioms are not transparent, and maybe this one is inexplicable, but I thought I’d ask.)
Dave responded:
See have, v. IV.20
IV. To keep, hold, or maintain (with respect to a state or action), and related senses.
IV.20. transitive. With in (formerly also on) and an abstract noun referring to a state or activity. To hold or keep in a specified way or for a specified purpose.
Often forming a phrase which is a periphrastic equivalent of the verb cognate with the abstract noun, e.g. to have in possession is equivalent to to possess, to have in use is equivalent to to use (habitually), etc.
to have in estimation, to have in mind, to have in view, etc.: see the nouns.
Except in have it in for the antecedent of it is understood from the context.
I said “Thanks, that’s a help, although I’m still not quite clear on how it works,” and I’m still not; I’m hoping someone will be able to explain it in more detail. Or maybe it’s just inexplicable.
If you order a custom piece of furniture, say, from a store, they may call you up when it’s ready and tell you that they have the piece in for you, i.e. waiting to be delivered or picked up.
Maybe that’s the sense in the 1825 citation, in which the Major’s nemesis has fashioned his ‘ould grudge’ and is ready to send it to its target.
Now that I’ve written this down I’m not at all sure I buy it.
In this example from 1842, “grudge” explicitly stands for “it”. But then why couldn’t I find more than just one example?
“It” stands for retaliation (usually unfair), etc. “In” means have it in mind.
Therefore, “To have retaliation in mind for (i. e. , vis-a-vis) someone.”
Does this work?
I wonder if it has any relation to “I did for him”, meaning to have killed someone. I remember it came up in some book we were reading in a primary school class back some 60 years ago, and the teacher was incredulous that not a single child knew what it meant. In use about the time of Dickens, I think.
On the other hand, I think that “I’m done for” would be understood today, but perhaps I don’t spend enough time with young people. I primarily associate it with cowboy films.
I’m struck by the odd similarity with the Italian idiom “avercela con”. “Ce l’ho col mio vicino” – “I’m pissed at my neighbor”.
French has “en avoir après”.
There appears to be some Western European idea that “having”“it” combined with some direction related to an individual refers to anger. Possibly an old euphemism for a sexual act that has been forgotten over the centuries?
If I “have it in for” you, then you are “in for it”, although logically, *it* should be in for *you*.
I think it would be rare for this to be a first-person expression now: it’s surely always said about someone else. To say “he’s got it in for you / me” (emphasis on “in”) is to imply someone has an unfair and persistent animus towards you / me. The malevolence is what he has “in” him, directed towards you / me. “In for” (again, emphasis on “in”) is a slightly different idiom — “this is what we’re in for”, “I’m afraid you’re in for it”, etc. — which feels related to “signed up for”, “on the list for”, i.e. you’re about to get something unpleasant and unavoidable.
“I’ve had it with him”, “I’ve had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane”, except it’s in present tense.
Seems clear to me.
I don’t think it is an idiom. I think the idiom is “be in” + “for”.
In a risk-taking culture, the idiom ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’ may have been so familiar that ‘in for’ could be adopted for other uses to do with risky initiatives.
@maidhc: “I did for him” reminds me of
“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—
…Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest—
…Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”
(Robert Louis Stevenson, in Treasure Island.)
If he did him in, then, later, a question: did he have it coming?
Maybe relevant?
“Mr. Dana told me that he had had it in contemplation for some years to build a house for their minister….”
Universalist Watchman, Repository and Chronicle [proquest] Woodstock Vol. 3, Iss. 46, (Mar 10, 1832): 361
Many similar mid-19th-century texts also tell of long-time intent.
I think Dave J. has it right – first is the antecedent or reference of the anaphoric pronoun ‘it’, which to me seems something like ‘malevolent intent’, and ‘in’ means ‘in mind.’
That makes sense and helps me feel like the idiom isn’t completely opaque — thanks!
I have it in me for him?
The August 1906 issue of _The Homilectic Review_ contains an interesting piece by the Rev. Frederic Campbell, Sc.D., titled “A Modern Slang Expression in the Greek Testament,” which argues that the most literal AND idiomatic translation of the first part of Mark 6:19 should be “And Herodias had it in for him … ” and of the latter part of Luke 11:53 should be “the scribes and the Pharisees began to have it in for him …”
The lemma form of the Greek verb is https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%90%CE%BD%CE%AD%CF%87%CF%89, which is indeed an “in” prefix attached to a verb whose core meaning is “have, hold” etc.
“My aunt died of influenza, so they said. But it is my belief that they done the old woman in.” (Eliza Doolittle – spoken in a ‘posh’ voice, of course)
https://thepoetryhour.com/poems/fragment-of-an-agon/
The alteration of “another think coming” to “another thing coming” makes “thing” into a threat similar in its vagueness to the “it” of “in for it”.
Since Tom Lehrer has been coming up here recently:
(From “The Irish Ballad”.)
Latin interficere is pretty nearly “do in”, too.
The expression is in fact rooted in classical drama.
I can’t explain the syntax of “have it in for”, but what struck me about the OED’s list of citations is that not a single one of them is American, except maybe this one:
… and that’s a big maybe, because it’s by an American soldier about his service with the British Army: he took notice of language that was new to him, and recorded his share of British WWI slang, including the first known appearance of “cooties” (previously discussed here).
Yet I would have said it’s as American as any other idiom now, so it must have crossed over a long time ago. It must have had a slow start, though, since it wasn’t noticed by OED1 at all when they did have in 1898; they added the idiom in the 1976 Supplement. (The Google ngram indicates that it was rare before the 20th century, and also that it started rising in the US first, but has been about the same on both sides since about 1960.)
J.W. Brewer cited “A Modern Slang Expression in the Greek Testament” from 1906 (here) — what a great reference! The writer (in Brooklyn) observes that it’s “a common, perhaps it may be admitted, a slang, expression, with which all are familiar who mingle with men, though it is quite wanting in the literature of the day,” and also “does not remember that it has been in current English use more than a brief time”. That could well be true for American English as of 1906; however, it was already in spoken use in England some 45 years earlier even if not in Google-indexed books, according to this annotation on Herodotus from 1861, which draws exactly the same parallel to Mark 6:19:
By the Rev. T. Humphry Lindsay Leary, M.A. B.C.L. Late Scholar of Brazenose College, Oxford, and Head Master of the Derby Grammar School.
Makes me think that “brazen nose” is a slang term for a stuffy or posh person.
The “official” etymology is that Brasenose College takes its name from a 13th-century doorknocker in the form of some heraldic beast with a prominent brazen snout. But there may have been other factors that led to that being viewed as a cromulent name for the institution …
ETA: the college proudly displays exactly such a knocker, but the specific one they have was supposedly only acquired in 1890 (having previously been on the door of an old house in Lincolnshire), after the name had already been current for several centuries …
Nah. It’s from “brazen hose”, meaning a person so intrepid and courageous that even under the most extreme threats they would never lose control of their bowels.
(The correct spelling is Brasenose. Astonishingly, it actually does seem to derive from “brazen nose”, unless this is a bit of Oxonian folk etymology, subsequently reified.)
[Ninja’d by JWB.]
For a closely related expression, the OED gives
However, I see it back to 1864 in GB:
“That Sam Dobson is no better than a tout. Called me an old goat! Never mind, I’ve got it in for him. I’ll be one with him. We’ll square it.”
Anon., The Derby Day; or, Won by a Neck
And one in a Warwickshire dialect that uses second person familiar and formal with more than Shakespearean freedom:
“You rogue! You poor creature! I’ve got it in for thee. I’ve all along promised it to myself when the time came, and now your lies will na ‘ serve you any longer.”
“Anonyma”, “Left Her Home”; A Tale of Female Life and Adventure
(Looks as if “it” here is revenge.)
The first American one I see is from 1887 and comes with a peeve:
“The second [threatening letter] was from a man who could not, or did not, write decent English. It had the words ‘We have got it in for you.'”
“Labor Troubles in the South and West,” Reports of Committees of the House of Representatives for the Second Session of the Forty-Ninth Congress
“Brazenose College” is how it’s spelled on the title page of the book. Apparently the college didn’t totally standardize its spelling until sometime later.
The Rev. Mr. Leary’s edition of Herodotus comes with an impressively-old-fashioned Servile Dedication to “His Grace the Duke of Devonshire, K.G. D.C.L. F.R.S. &c. &c. &c.” You don’t see laudatory relative clauses like “who amidst the cares and distinctions [sic?] that wait on his rank has proved himself a successful cultivator of learning” very frequently anymore.
Jerry: good finds. If you want the OED to see them, your best bet is probably to post on ADS-L. I’d guess that “have got it in for” could develop wherever “have it in for” already existed, and it looks like the OED was mistaken in labeling it “Originally U.S.”
Searching on (Mark 6:19 “have it in for”) finds several later annotators making the same point.
distinctions [sic?]
The OED has several candidates:
It’s not clear which of these might be meant. (I include the last citation, even though it’s not plural, because I like it so much.)
Thanks, ktschwarz. For other antedatings I’ve used the OED’s contact form. Do you think ADS-L is better?
Incidentally I see other “have got” idioms in Green s.v. “get”, but not this one. Edit: I may be misunderstanding him.
I’ve used the OED’s contact form
That brings up a gripe. The OED, right from the beginning, has incorporated a great deal of readers’ contributions. I once, not long ago, provided them with a correction (I don’t remember for what), but I am not tempted to do so again. The only way to provide input is a few little text fields (about 2×5 cm on my computer screen), the sort you use for feedback on websites for small stores and such. There is no way to attach files, such as page images. You will not hear back if your contribution was received or read, or if it will or have been acted on: in fact there is no field in which to put your email. I don’t want to spend hours on getting a proper corrected etymology or even an antedating, and be told to drop it in the box and maybe someone would look at it. It’s a little insulting.
Apparently the college didn’t totally standardize its spelling until sometime later.
I’m just reading ‘Gaudy Night’, set mostly in Oxford mid-1930’s. “Brasenose” throughout.
Gaudy Night
Wonderful book.
SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER
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The bit where Harriet finally falls in love with Wimsey (or finally realises that she’s been in love with him for years, more like) is just perfect.
Oops. You’re not reading it for the first time, are you? Must insert spoiler warning … phew. Done.
Y: I submitted some (two?) updates to the OED 10+ years ago, by email, and got prompt responses from a very courteous woman, thanking me and explaining what would happen next. One was an antedate which I think she said would be held on file pending the next scheduled update of the entry, though she also pointed out kindly that with online archives they had a flood of antedates to process. Another was a completely missing sense, which I think she said would be brought to the attention of the relevant colleagues straight away, or at least soon (it was the “look through narrowed eyes” sense of squint, which I see was added in 2016.). She remembered me from one occasion to the other, or at least took the trouble to find our previous exchanges. It was all very agreeable and I felt I had done my bit.
More recently I’ve dropped a few updates into their new black hole and I agree that, well, it really isn’t the same, to put it mildly. I have no way of even figuring out what those recent updates were now, whereas, rightly or wrongly, I see sense 7 of squint as my own small contribution to the history of English.
A classic example of mindlessly preferring immediate profit/savings over long-term value. Who cares whether we alienate potential contributors when we can save a bit on salaries?
Are you sure it’s just a bit? And value to who? Yes, processing improvements makes the dictionary more valuable to some, not all, customers, but if they employed one or more people full-time to answer contributors, I can’t imagine that would raise the selling price.
I do wish they’d do that. And I wish they’d solve the other problem, which is that you don’t know whether someone else has already made your contribution. What they really need is a publicly visible database showing contributions and their status. But I’m sure that would cost even more.
Are you sure it’s just a bit?
No, and I don’t care. Not my problem.
And value to who?
To everyone who uses the dictionary! They’ve always depended on contributions from the public; do they no longer realize that? Or do they (like all corporations) just assume that people will keep doing their assigned tasks no matter how badly they’re treated?
Not my problem.
I thought you were looking at it in financial terms for the OUP. It’s central to their problem.
Or do they (like all corporations) just assume that people will keep doing their assigned tasks no matter how badly they’re treated?
I’ll bet they have some idea how many customers they’re losing because their updates are slow (because they have too few people working on them, or conceivably because they’ve alienated potential contributors like Carlos, though I suspect that they still get more good contributions than they can keep up with). And I’ll bet it’s not enough to make faster updates financially worth their while. I certainly haven’t suggested to my employer to stop subscribing.
I thought you were looking at it in financial terms for the OUP.
Good lord, no — that’s their job. I was just saying they should stop worrying so much about their bottom line and focus on doing right by the dictionary and its customers. I remind you that if that bottom-line attitude had dominated in the beginning, there never would have been an OED.
What they really need is a publicly visible database showing contributions and their status. But I’m sure that would cost even more.
I’m not so sure. That kind of database is very common and goes back decades, notably in bug tracking databases. There are many such databases which are open source, very solid, and are used by organizations with far more tickets and activity than the OED.
I tend to suspect that it’s more like a matter of psychology, and that the people in charge of the OUP feel the need to behave like beady-eyed customer haters, even if it costs them in income, or else it is not a truly serious business.
@SG (belatedly): pop!
I tend to suspect that it’s more like a matter of psychology, and that the people in charge of the OUP feel the need to behave like beady-eyed customer haters, even if it costs them in income, or else it is not a truly serious business.
Bingo.
Jerry: my bad, I *don’t* actually know the success rate of posting on ADS-L, I shouldn’t have said that it was “your best bet”. I was just going on impressions from Fred Shapiro’s confident statements like “ADS-L is far and away the most prolific source of antedatings” (2016), and “I have begun in a methodical way to forward other people’s ADS-L antedatings to the OED” (2022). Maybe you should do both; posting on ADS-L at least creates a public record, while using the contribution button may reach them directly but as Carlos said, it is like a black hole.
Shapiro also frankly acknowledges, in another message in the 2022 thread, that “the necessity for contributors to send in citations has been greatly reduced” since they mostly use machine-searchable databases now. But of course those databases are constantly updated, and almost anything can be antedated at least slightly. Personally, I don’t think antedating every single entry by a year or two is the best use of their limited resources. But in the case of “have got it in for”, your evidence suggests that it was *not* “Originally U.S.”, and that should be re-checked.
Y: the little box is a pain, yes. They don’t have a field for your email, but the form does say “Please include your email address if you are happy to be contacted”, and a couple of times I’ve actually heard back — once to say “stop sending bibliographic corrections for Ulysses, we’ve already got someone on that” (they’re now citing the first edition; OED2 cited a later reprint), and once with a generic sort of thanks. I have a list of what I’ve sent and check from time to time to see if I got any results.
“a publicly visible database showing contributions and their status” — that has been discussed on ADS-L as well. Jesse Sheidlower (2007, when he was still with the OED) thought it would be “confusing and useless”, adding “As someone who gets to see the kind of comments the OED gets from the general public, trust me when I say that encouraging more of this would involve an exceptional amount of editorial time and energy with very little positive result.” (But that was almost 20 years ago, when Google Books was much smaller and there weren’t so many newspaper databases accessible to the public. I don’t know if it would be fair to say today.)
The 2016 thread linked above also started with somebody asking “can we create a database?” (a lot of “antedatings” posted to ADS-L turn out to be repetitions of something that was posted before, often by the same person). Hugo eventually suggested “If you want to list them on a Wiktionary-like place, just use Wiktionary! It’s already moderated and administered.” (I’ve never tried that yet.)
ADS-L at least sometimes gets discussion on antedatings (e.g. is this source really correct, is this really the meaning you’re looking for?). And I’m guessing — don’t know if it’s really true — there’s a better chance the OED will actually look at something that comes through the trusted channel of Fred Shapiro than something that comes through the slush pile.
Thanks, kt. I figured you’d have the most experience with them here. That’s a little more encouraging, but still. If I have a scan of something not easily available, I’d like them to make it easier for me to provide it. I would like to have some guarantee that the computer got my submission, and that a person saw it long enough to click a button, and not just a couple of times (out of the umpteellion times I imagine you submitted to them).
Wonderful book
Self-and-other-promotion before I get back to this thread’s other non-Brasenose Oxford topic: Many annotations that might interest readers of Gaudy Night are at Bill Peschel’s notes and my supplement to them. No money or personal data will change hands.
(I should change my link to his page, if I can remember how.)
Wonderful book.
Yes indeed. And thank you for the alert. (So I’ve kept away from this thread ’til now.) Although I had read it before, and remembered the ‘what’ to which you advert, I hadn’t remembered the ‘how’ — the wonder is in the journey not the terminus.
Thank you @JF, wilco.
TBH (Non-spoiler alert) just as I wrote that message (about two-thirds of the way through the book), I was getting a little testy at the high incidence of unlikely coincidences. It was almost reaching Agatha Christie rabbit-out-of-the-hat proportions. If it were a stage play, I’d suspect the author had written in cameos for a repertory cast of character actors: the fop, the gorblimey sergeant, the disgraced ex-employee, …
And as we discussed a while back, perhaps Wimsey has too many skills at which he’s too perfect: punting expertly, playing the spinnet, driving racing cars on the public roads … Perhaps he could aspire merely to an adequate sufficiency in some departments (as my dear grandmother used to put it). Harriet falls in love with him not because of all those attractions that might suffice for other women, but despite them.
Thanks from me too, kt. I sent it to the OED through their contribution form (whose smallness made it easy for me to put a link in the wrong place, but I noticed in time). I’ll think about joining ADS-L, but I’m not sure I need a daily digest that might contain something interesting.
@AntC: Yes, I find Wimsey’s skill at everything a bit annoying, and two of my least favorite examples are in GN, one mentioned in his conversation with Harriet in a restaurant early in the book, and one when he’s interrupted while playing that very spinet.
On the other hand, an intelligent person with quick physical reactions and no need to work for a living could get good at a lot of things. Maybe not quite that many. It seems to me I may have read a nearly complete list at some point.
i take wimsey’s pan-competence as at least partly a satire on both sherlock holmes and castiglione’s Courtier, just as sayers’ plots are at least partly satires on the mystery genre as it stood in the 1920s. i suppose it’s possible to even go a step farther and argue that the wimsey vs. holmes pairing is for sayers some kind of commentary on the semi-bohemian aristocracy vs. the semi-bohemian middle class – with their respective elder brothers fulfilling the families’ feudal obligation to state service, which allows the younger sons to follow their whims, if not bliss (or perhaps a chestertonian version of service to a higher power in lieu of actually taking the cloth).
On the other hand, an intelligent person with quick physical reactions and no need to work for a living could get good at a lot of things.
Or endless time on his hands (I just rewatched Groundhog Day).
Carlos: “I see sense 7 of squint as my own small contribution to the history of English.”
Awesome! I envy you getting an actual human contact.
It’s odd that they didn’t already have the “look through narrowed eyes” sense, since it’s not new. The quotations indicate that it originated in American English in the late 19th century — and Merriam-Webster has had it since 1909 — so perhaps it hadn’t reached British English yet when the OED’s First Edition was doing the letter S. But the Second Edition should not have missed it, since it was already in the Concise Oxford Dictionary edition of 1982! (The Concise had been doing its own updates ahead of the historical OED for decades by then; I don’t know if they had some system for sharing updates, but if so this one fell through the cracks.)
Maybe they were waiting for the full revision, but you jolted them into realizing “oh, this is actually the most common usage of the word now, it looks silly that we still don’t have it, better hurry up”.
Thanks for that detective work, ktschwarz, and the links. The 1909 Merriam-Webster one is striking: I can’t imagine that a lexicographer today would regard “sighting a gun” as a sufficiently common experience to be the paradigm case of squinting.
Batman has trained to be the best at everything.
Forget Batman. Even dead, the late Chuck Norris is the man.