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A section for all you budding etymologists where each week the origin of a word or phrase is investigated.
This week it is.....A turn up for the books
An unexpected piece of good fortune.
Since the 1820s or so, the term ‘turn-up’ has been used
to mean ‘a surprise; an example of good fortune’. The
reference was to cards or dice, which are ‘turned up’ by
chance. Specifically, the ‘turn up’ was referred to in the
game of cribbage. ‘Turn up’ was defined by John Camden
Hotten in 1859, in A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant
and Vulgar Words: Turn up: An unexpected slice of luck.
That’s straightforward enough, but why would a turn up
be ‘for the books’? Books can be cooked, one can go by
them and you can be in someone’s bad books, but why
would you turn up for them?
The phrase was originally ‘a turn up for the book’. At
18th and 19th century English race meetings when bets
were placed the punter’s name and wager were written
down in a notebook. Not unreasonably, this process was
called ‘making a book’. If a race was won by a horse
that the ‘bookmaker’ had no record of in his book, he
had a ‘turn up’ and kept all the wagered money. Camden
Hotten was good enough to come to our aid again with
his extended definition of ‘turn up’: Among sporting
men bookmakers are said to have a turn up when an
unbacked horse wins.
So, ‘a turn up for the book’ translates as a stroke of good
luck for the bookmakers. The earliest example found
of the expression in print is from a report, in the Leeds
Intelligencer newspaper, of the success of a horse called
Blackdown at the Doncaster races in August 1863: A
rare turn-up for the book-makers, the majority of
whom had never written Blackdown’s name in their
books.
A bonus related origin this week is Come up trumps
To complete something well or successfully, especially
in circumstances in which it isn’t expected.
‘Come up trumps’ is a variant of the older phrase ‘turn
up trumps’, which has been in use since the early 17th
century. The word trump in this context is a corruption of
triumph, which was the name of a card game, similar to
whist, that was played in the 17th century. The preacher
Hugh Latimer referred to it in his 1st Sermon on the
Card, 1529: “The game that wee wyll playe at, shall bee
called the triumphe... Lette therefore euery Christian
manne and woman playe at these cardes.”
Encouraging card playing is hardly Christian orthodoxy
these days, nor was it in 1529, but then Latimer was far
from orthodox in his religious views - which resulted in
him being burned at the stake.
Shakespeare used card playing imagery when alluding
to the game in Anthony and Cleopatra, 1606. He says
that “the queen, [Cleopatra] whose heart I thought I
had” ... “now lost, she has pack’d cards with Caesar
and false-play’d my glory unto an enemy’s triumph.”
In triumph, as in whist, the trump suit was selected
at random by the ‘cutting’ of the deck. Trump cards
temporarily outranked other cards. Selecting the right
suit to match one’s hand was an advantage in the game
and so turning up trumps became synonymous with
success. It was, and still is, bad form to cut the deck
without first shuffling the cards. Robert Burton, in his
The anatomy of melancholy, 1621, was outraged that:
“They turned up trumpe, before the Cards were
shuffled.”
By the 18th century turn up trumps had begun to be used
in its figurative sense, that is, with no direct reference to
card playing. It is recorded that way in Grose’s Dictionary
of the Vulgar Tongue, 1785:
“Something may turn up trumps, something lucky
may happen.”
Incidentally, Shakespeare was also the first to refer to
a pack of cards as a deck - in Henry VI, Part III, 1592:
“But whiles he thought to steale the single Ten, The
King was slyly finger’d from the Deck.”
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