Here's Mud In Your Eye!

That's an odd toast, isn't it? I'll mention it on the Self Help Radio show tonight, which is happening at midnight on 88.1 WMUL FM here in Huntington (archived later on the previously linked web site) (oh, I linked it again), but did you know that no one's sure of the phrase's origin, even though it's barely ninety years old? It's true!

The Word Detective hasn't tackled it, alas, so I looked around sites like The Phrase Finder & I found four possible origins.

The most unlikely (in my mind) is the one you'll find in this sermon, which suggests it's connected to the Gospel of John, where literal "mud in the eye" is used to heal. "When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground, & made clay of the spittle, & he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay, & said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam. He went his way therefore, & washed, & came seeing" (John 9:6-7, King James Version - modern versions use "mud" instead of "clay"). I doubt this because drinkers, even a century ago, are probably not big Bible readers. But of course I'm not an etymologist, so what the hell do I know?

One person suggested that it comes from horse-racing, where the winning horse will kick mud into the losers behind it. As well, someone posited that it had to do with farmers raising their glasses to the "mud" to wish for fertility in the soil in the planting seasons.

A convoluted origin is that it relates to trench warfare in World War I, which, when a shell landed near you & all you got was mud in your eye, was a lucky thing indeed.

The one I like the best is the one that seems simplest: it may have something to do with the dregs or debris at the bottom of a wine glass - being a whiskey drinker, I wouldn't have thought of that - & if you drink it all down, as you do with a toast, you may get some of the "mud" in your eye.

It doesn't have to mean anything of course. In our time, people will say "here's shit in your eye," which sounds awful.

What won't sound awful is Self Help Radio tonight (well, I can't actually promise that...). Please listen!