THE CAT'S PAJAMAS LI

Tad Tuleja

A collection of the (mostly) true origins of familiar phrases

 

CARRY A TORCH

 

To carry a torch for someone is to love that person in spite of rejection. The phrase, and an accompanying custom, originated in Greece, where spurned lovers would stand beneath their beloveds' balconies and plead for their favors by the light of torches. The modern expression torch singer, for a specialist in plaintive nightclub tunes, actually goes back to the ancient world; the Homeric phrase (applied to Penelope's suitors) is dada psallos, literally, "singer with a torch."

  

A modern aside: Note that the English torch is Greek dada. Art historians commonly suggest that the Dadaist movement of the 1910s took its name from the French term dada, for "hobby horse." This idea was a Dadaist red herring. It is no accident that Marcel Duchamp, father of the Dadaists, began his career as a classics professor. His memoirs have made perfectly clear that the origin of the term was the Greek for torch. And this makes far more sense than the "hobby horse" explanation. For the Dadaists were nothing if not incendiary: They wanted to "torch" artistic tradition.