“Pulling his leg” refers to a teasing jest or impish deceit, the act of stringing someone along, usually in a playful rather than malicious way, as in “I’m just pulling your leg, I didn’t really win the lottery.”

The birth of this curious phrase is shrouded in mystery. It was in common use by the late 1800s, even in song lyrics, but credible references earlier than 1883 are difficult to find.

Theories that Make You Go Hmmmm

Some grisly or fanciful origins have been proposed for “pulling your leg”. One is that gallows victims had their legs pulled to speed their death. This practice is mentioned in Adventures of a Young Rifleman in the French and English Armies, 1926, by Johann Christian, in which a Spanish executioner would ride the neck of the gallows victim to weigh him down, while his assistant “seized the legs of the criminal, and pulled with all his might…” to speed his passage into the afterlife.

Further mid-19th century references can be found in Scotland and England in which “pulling his legs” (in the plural) meant to help end a person’s suffering, but it has a different connotation from “pulling his leg” (in the singular), as in stringing a person along.

Another theory, mentioned in the Daily Mail, August 2013 (and often repeated on the Web), is that robbers tripped victims to more easily overcome them, but the theory doesn’t mesh well with current use of the phrase, and doesn’t embody the spirit of teasing or of a prank.

In English Language & Usage on StackExchange, many of the theories center around criminal acts that have more to do with evil intent/deception than deceiving someone in a teasing way and, while it’s possible that the sense of the phrase could have changed, this interpretation didn’t feel right in terms of contemporary usage.

Other Theories on the Origins

In May 2014, Emily Upton blogged that the aforementioned theories weren’t very plausible and I tend to agree. She points out that the phrase appears in the diary of James Gallatin of 1821 but that the diary itself is suspect. On looking it up, I learned that it wasn’t published until 1914 and that Gallatin’s grandson may have embellished the original writing or perhaps even made it up. So, while Gallatin is an interesting reference, I agree with Upton that it’s not very credible.

Upton also mentions that the phrase appeared in The Newark Daily Advocate, Ohio, in 1883. I verified publication of the quote in the Feb. 28th issue and saw a scan of the original article, so this looks like a good reference. In her summation, Upton also reminds us that the origins of the phrase may not have had anything to do with legs at all—a good thing to keep in mind when following Holmesian trails through linguistic backwoods.

In their June 2014 Grammarphobia blog, O’Conner and Kellerman mention a Wellsboro Agitator reference to the “earliest citation” from the Oxford English Dictionary, 1883:

“The Chinese giant once told me he had half a dozen wives at home, but I think he was pulling my leg.”

This is certainly the correct sense of the phrase, but more tantalizing is their mention of an earlier quote in a novel about the British Merchant Navy published in 1859. In this volume, titled Always Ready, or, Every One His Pride (anonymously attributed to “a P. & O.”) is written:

In reply to which both brothers commenced “pulling his leg” by criticising his rig, asking him “Who his hatter was?” and politely wishing those present to “twig his heels;”…

In browsing through Always Ready, I noticed the phrase again a hundred pages later:

“Not a bit of it,” said Ned, giving one of his hearty laughs. “I know you are pulling my leg,” continued he, “but I’ll tell you candidly what it is, Harry—we shall both miss you; shan’t we, Jane?” turning to his sister, in an enquiring tone.

Clearly, even in 1859, it was used in much the same way as it is now.

I felt a bit daunted by the admirable detective work of my fellow bloggers and was skeptical about whether I could find anything earlier, but I love a mystery, and like a trout snapping at perturbations on the water’s surface, dove into online archives to see if I could find references predating 1859.

At first, I located only a few sources, not yet mentioned, from the late 1800s, but I wanted something earlier and meatier. Finally, with some persistence, I found these tantalizing morsels that might push the origins back almost half a century and thousands of miles away from the Advocate quote that hinted at a New World origin.

Clues in Popular Literature

Fashions, phrases, and trends are often popularized by media, whether it be YouTube, television, or books in pre-AV days and this phrase might not be an exception.

My first good lead was a book called the Adventures of an Atom written in 1875 and published in 1880 by Hurst & Co., New York. It’s not as old as Always Ready, but it contains an incident that might shed light on the teasing aspect of the phrase.

The book’s opening is whimsical, life from the point of view of the tiniest particle in the metaphysical sense, and I don’t know whether any parts of the volume are genuine autobiography, for it rambles through many different subjects and the author calls himself only “Angelo”. He (or she) is purportedly also The Author of the Dancing Imps of the Wine. Adventures is available as an OCR reprint or paperback, but I was drawn to the original hardback, which has a deliciously ornate gilt-stamped cover in either green or maroon, depending on where you can unearth antique copies.

(One of the dangers (or perhaps one of the perks) of following etymological trails is getting caught up in reading the stories or delighting in a book with an interesting cover…)

But getting back to the subject, in a subsection titled, “A Humorous Man’s Experience,” the author describes a fellow who visits a 40-ish widow friend who is out of the house, so he settles into a comfortable chair to await her return. The widow’s hoard of undisciplined children set about teasing him with one prank after another each time he dozes off.

“…All of a sudden, as I dozed again, I was jerked to the floor, sprawling on all-fours, like an animal.
They had fastened a great hook, tied to the clothes-line, to one of my legs, and all were jerking me as if I were a fire-engine!…”

This little incident certainly qualifies as a leg-pulling prank and the story was disseminated widely in the U.S. through Hurst publishing, but is it sufficient to promote a new phrase like pulling my leg? The passage wasn’t fleshed out enough to satisfy me, so I put it on the back burner as I looked for references that were meatier or more to the point.

Dickensian Forerunners

My wanderings took me to a popular volume first published in London, in 1841, by Grattan and Gilbert. The author, Henry Cockton, is said to have influenced the classic work of Charles Dickens.

 In George St. George Julian, the Prince, Cockton describes a practical joke called “toe-lining” in which two men, lying in beds opposite each other in a barracks-like room are surreptitiously connected by a line tied to their toes. When one wakes, he jerks back his leg which, in turn, pulls the leg of the man opposite, who then wakes and pulls his leg back against the tug, thus jerking the leg of the man opposite, back and forth, while the rest of the room roars in laughter, “it being a thing which they really enjoyed.”

The jest is accompanied by an illustration:

It’s possible this prank became popular in real life through Cockton’s description because there is an incident mentioned in Tracts for the People, 1847, and repeated in New York Teacher: UFT bulletin, Vol. 2, 1854, as well as in Vol. 8 of the Wisconsin Journal of Education from 1864, in which a student named James Gosling is said to have tied the toes of the usher who slept in the boarding school to the toes of six of the boys in the dorm, thus toe-lining them so that movement by any one of them would have pulled the legs of others.

To punish him for his leg-pulling prank (and other indiscretions), Gosling was compelled to wear a two-foot-high fool’s cap adorned with the ears of a jackass. This attempt at discipline-by-humiliation apparently did little to reduce his propensity for practical jokes and was perhaps the reason for frequent reprints of the story in educational journals.

Did Gosling get his idea for pulling legs from a fertile imagination, from reading Cockton, or perhaps by word-of-mouth from other Cockton readers? This we will probably never know, nor do we know if the term “pulling your leg” as a general term for pranks originated from real-life incidents such as toe-lining or from something else, but it probably deserves consideration as a more plausible origin than clinging to the legs of a criminal as he drops from the gallows.

A Last Word

This would be a sensible place to end, since forays through history are often too long for one blog post, but I couldn’t resist one last reference, from 1926, that might suggest an earlier origin and a bridge from one theory to another. This reference is difficult to interpret, because it is in the form of verse, so it’s debatable whether it belongs to the etymological “body of evidence” for “pulling my leg” as we use it now.

In Whims and Oddities, a compendium that includes “The Last Man,” Thomas Hood describes a fellow in a state of melancholy after plague has wiped out much of humanity, including (apparently) his entire family. He feels alone and unloved (“If the veriest cur would lick my hand, I could love it like a child!”) despite offers of fellowship from a travelling beggar. At the end, the subject of the poem bemoans that there is no one left to pull his legs.

…
I sigh when I pass the gallows’ foot,
And look at the rope and ladder!

For hanging looks sweet,—but, alas! in vain,
My desperate fancy begs,—
I must turn my cup of sorrows quite up,
And drink it to the dregs,—
For there is not another man alive
In the world, to pull my legs!

Here the gallows theory takes on some credence or… the reference to pulling the legs of a gallows victim could be a metaphor for not having a friend in the world to ease his sorrow, someone to pull his leg and cheer his mood with jest and banter. If it is strictly a literal reference to the gallows practice of speeding a hanged man’s death by adding extra weight, then the similarity to the phrase as we use it now is coincidental. But, could it be both? for this is poetry, where allusion and double entendre are common devices. I think the idea of a metaphor is a bit of a stretch, but I’ll leave it to the reader to decide.

 

Posted November 2, 2015 by J.K. Petersen