Following one of those less than fulfilling conversations down the pub a few nights ago, I’ve been pondering the phrase: ‘couldn’t get a word in edgeways’ and came up with a theory that I was really quite pleased with:

Words have two kinds of existences: utterances, those disembodied things that fly about in verbal exchanges, and the written kind: assembled characters that exist on pieces of paper. Though these latter have physical substance, they add neither noticeable bulk nor thickness to the page they appear on. Words in this context seem entirely two-dimensional.

Based on this reasoning, I’d decided that ‘couldn’t get a word in edgeways’ must apply to mediaeval (and later) masonry and joinery practices whereby, master craftsmen would check to see if a join was good by trying to insert a piece of paper, parchment etc. edgeways into the crack between two abutting surfaces of whatever material. A really good join would be one where, even without the paper, you still couldn’t insert something as lacking in mass as a paperless written word, and therefore if you ‘couldn’t get a word in edgeways’ it meant the join was impervious to outside influence. I reasoned that the phrase as transferred to other situations must have originally been a sarcastic quip based on not being able to penetrate the conversation. Other linguistic metaphors such as ‘watertight alibi’ seemed to back up this idea.

Before publishing this theory I thought I’d better do a bit of online research to check, and immediately came up with the following:

‘A word in edgeways’, or as it is sometimes written ‘a word in edgewise’, is a 19th century expression that was coined in the UK. ‘Edgeways/edgewise’ just means ‘proceeding edge first’. The allusion in the phrase is to edging sideways through a crowd, seeking small gaps in which to proceed through the throng. The phrase ‘edging forward’ exactly describes this inch-by-inch progress. It was first used in the 17th century, typically in nautical contexts and referring to slow advance by means of repeated small tacking movements, as here in Captain John Smith’s The generall historie of Virginia, New-England and the Summer Isles 1624:

After many tempests and foule weather, about the foureteenth of March we were in thirteene degrees and an halfe of Northerly latitude, where we descried a ship at hull; it being but a faire gale of wind, we edged towards her to see what she was.

This practice of ‘edging’ was used with reference to the spoken word by David Abercromby, in Art of Converse, 1683:

“Without giving them so much time as to edge in a word”. (1)

Damn…

(1) http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/word-in-edgeways.html