A lot of stick shaking?

January 30, 2007 12:30 AM

Where does the phrase "more [whatever] than you can shake a stick at" originate?

...... and how much of [whatever] do you need before you can't shake a stick at it.

posted by informity to writing & language (12 comments total)

According to the OED, the earliest recorded use is in 1818 in the Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Journal, 5 August, 3/1: "We have in Lancaster as many Taverns as you can shake a stick at." Quite what the phrase itself derives from, though, nobody seems to know. Google has a few suggestions.
posted by greycap at 12:43 AM on January 30, 2007

This is all I've been able to come up with. It has a discussion of the early uses noted above, and then the following:

Shaking a stick at somebody, of course, is a threatening gesture, or at least one of defiance. So to say that you have shaken a stick at somebody is to suggest that person is an opponent, perhaps a worthy one. The sense in the second and third quotations above seem to fit this idea: “nothing worth shaking a stick at” means nothing of value; “equal to any man you could shake a stick at” means that the speaker is equal to any man of consequence.

[....]

Following publication of this piece in the World Wide Words newsletter, Suzan Hendren and Sherwin Cogan suggested that it might have come from the Native American practice of counting coup, in which merit was gained by touching a vanquished enemy in battle. In that case, “too many to shake a stick at” might indicate a surplus of fallen enemies, and “not worth shaking a stick at” would equate a person with “an enemy who is so cowardly or worthless that there is no merit to be gained from counting coup on him”, as Sherwin Cogan put it. An intriguing idea, but there’s no evidence that I know of.

Let me summarise: nobody knows for sure.
[Source]

Not very helpful, but it may have to do.
posted by The God Complex at 1:33 AM on January 30, 2007

From Rootsweb:

Definition from Steve Sabram: 1) a military phrase of guerrilla warfare where you do not have much in weapons and you fight with what you get from the land (i.e. sticks). If you have so many people to fight or animals to hunt, you cannot count let alone chase them all. 2) Another I heard of is it is an old shepherding term where you have so many animals to herd, you cannot shake you stick at every individual animal to herd them.

David Windmueller: I remember reading in a book that it came from the revolutionary war. There was some scene where Washington was waving a wooden ceremonial sword over the British forces that he had just been victorious over.

posted by No Mutant Enemy at 3:45 AM on January 30, 2007

I have absolutely no documentary support for this suggestion, but could the phrase somehow have to do with divining rods? This seems somehow logical in the tavern context that greycap mentions.
posted by sueinnyc at 4:27 AM on January 30, 2007

Well, say I saw a lot of enemy soldiers standing around, I wouldn't exactly want to shake a stick at them; they'd kill me.
Just speculation, but maybe it means "so many, you wouldn't want to provoke them!"
posted by Citizen Premier at 7:12 AM on January 30, 2007

This is exactly the kind of question where the lack of a solid answer, plus the human propensity to need answers, prompts the creation of myths that linguists have to go around stamping out. Try to accept the fact that it's just a phrase, pleasing enough to users and listeners that it's survived the winnowing effect of time, and that there is no hope of reconstructing how it actually arose, any more than there is of reconstructing the prior (pre-English) history of dog (and many other words). There are many things in this world that simply can't be known.
posted by languagehat at 7:17 AM on January 30, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

The herding explanation makes sense to me but then again I've been in that exact situation.
posted by fshgrl at 8:01 AM on January 30, 2007

I don't know if these answers are correct, but they're nothing to shake a stick at.
posted by the jam at 8:12 AM on January 30, 2007

Well, say I saw a lot of enemy soldiers standing around, I wouldn't exactly want to shake a stick at them; they'd kill me.
Just speculation, but maybe it means "so many, you wouldn't want to provoke them!"


The phrase is not 'more than you want to/should shake a stick at' it's 'more than you CAN shake a stick at' which implies ability, not desirability. Not that that helps answer the question.
posted by spicynuts at 11:09 AM on January 30, 2007

FWIW I've always presumed ...

(A) the phrase originates in reference to quantities of land (albeit now applied to other quantities) and

(B) "more than you can shake a stick at" is more land than you can actually see (and therefore point at with a stick).

... I'm happy to go with the herding explanation (as it's essentially the same idea) but the whole military thing is completely new to me.
posted by southof40 at 12:28 PM on January 30, 2007

I've always heard a variation on the shepherd story: Shepherds counted their sheep by touching each one with a stick (their crook?) as they passed through a gate. Thus, if there were an overabundance of sheep, there would be more than one could shake one's stick at.

No citations whatsever, however.
posted by turducken at 4:56 PM on January 30, 2007

true, spicynuts, but "can" might have replaced "should" because of verbal drift (kinda like genetic drift). "Can" is shorter and thus a bit more catchy, and phrases can endure changes that take away their intended meaning.
posted by Citizen Premier at 7:21 AM on February 1, 2007