Quip: If your husband were alive, your conduct would make him turn in his grave (1898)

[Jonathan Lighter]

But why "turn"?

I could understand "groan" or even "shudder," but why "turn"?  Just to be
face down?

"Spin," of course, is simply inflationary semantics.

JL

On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 8:05 PM, Garson O'Toole
<adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Garson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Quip: If your husband were alive, your conduct would make him
>              turn in his grave (1898)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Jonathan Lighter wrote
> > I just posted a message that featured the comment, "The Founders are
> > spinning."
> >
> > OED doesn't have it. OK, but neither does it have to "spin in one's
> grave."
> > Yet the cliche', to "turn over in one's grave" seems just as absent.
> >
> > I'm guessing I noticed "turn over..." by 1970; "spin..." ten or fifteen
> > years later; plain "spinning" only in the 21st Century.
>
> The "turn over in grave" figure of speech occurred before 1900 because
> it was the subject of a gag in 1898. (Also see OED cite further
> below.) I discovered this indirectly while tracing the following
> Goldwynism
>
> If Roosevelt were alive he'd turn in his grave.
>
> The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations 2nd Edition has this
> quotation and attributes the words to Samuel Goldwyn. Shakespeare,
> Tchaikovsky, Jules Verne and other figures have been resurrected and
> set spinning in variants of this quip which has been attributed to
> multiple individuals. Here is the joke in 1898:
>
> Cite: 1897-8, The Leisure Hour, Irish Wit and Humor As Shown in
> Proverbs and Bulls by Elsa D'Esterre-Keeling, Page 709, Column 2,
> Paternoster Row, London. (HathiTrust)
>
> It was an Irish moralist who rebuked a widow in the words, "If your
> husband were alive, your conduct would make him turn in his grave"; …
>
>
> The OED groups together several figurative and proverbial expressions
> under 1.d. for the noun grave. Here is the first using the word turn.
>
> 1888 J. Bryce Amer. Commonw. I. xii. 159   Jefferson might turn in his
> grave if he knew of such an attempt to introduce European distinctions
> of rank into his democracy.
>
> Garson
>
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