By Anatoly Liberman
Why indeed? But despite our financial woes, I am interested in the origin of the idiom, not in exorbitant prices. On the face of it (and the nose cannot be separated from the face), the idiom pay through the nose makes no sense. Current since the second half of the 17th century and probably transparent to the contemporaries, it later joined such puzzling phrases as kick the bucket and bees’ knees.
Idioms are harder to trace to their “roots” than words. Etymology, though not an exact science, is governed by certain regularities (sound correspondences, patterns of semantic change, and so forth), but a search for the origin of idioms rarely needs the expertise of historical linguists. They will offer good advice only when words have changed their meaning, as happened, for example, in curry favor (where curry means “brush, groom” and favor once referred to a donkey and later to a horse) or forlorn hope (from Dutch), in which hope meant “group, detachment of soldiers” (a cognate of Engl. heap) and forlorn had the sense of “lost” (a cognate of Engl. lorn and German verloren). It is possible that nose in pay through the nose did have a meaning different from the one we now ascribe to it, but, other than that, we cannot account for the odd phrase unless we succeed in reconstructing the circumstances in which it was coined. A product of popular culture? An obscene joke from a Restoration comedy? A borrowing from the language of thieves? In the 13th century, the famous Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson explained to his countrymen the meaning of numerous phrases that originated in ancient myths. By his time, more than two hundred years after the Christianization of Iceland, those myths had either fallen or were falling into oblivion. I wish we had someone like him who would be capable of solving our puzzles. But this is a forlorn hope. So to business.
The Internet supplies those who look for the history of pay through the nose with four or five explanations from books bearing the generic title Phrase Origins. All of them, regardless of their reliability, have a fatal flaw: they do not cite their sources. At best, they say it is usually believed or according to legend, but never add where they found the legend, who wrote what they repeat, or even approximately where the gossip originated. Only dictionaries of quotations try to discover the authors of famous lines, and their efforts have been crowned with great success.
This is what we can find. “If you were caught stealing in medieval times, they sliced a slit in your nose.” Anywhere (or only in England?) in the Middle Ages at any time? “In medieval times, when the Jews were being bled for money, any objection by them to paying was greeted with a slitting of their noses.” Again the Middle Ages (which, incidentally, lasted more than a thousand years), but now it is the Jews, rather than the Swedes. The allusion to bleeding noses will recur below. “Odin laid a tax of a penny a nose upon every Swede.” However, Odin (or Othinn) was the greatest god of the Scandinavian pantheon, and it is hard to understand what he could have done with such a tax, for he neither sold nor bought anything. Some time ago, I explained (in this blog) the origin of the idiom it rains cats and dogs. According to one of the nonsensical articles I had consulted, Odin was surrounded by cats and dogs, and they caused rain. This is a lie bordering on blasphemy. Odin stayed away from cats and dogs, and those ani