THE CAT'S PAJAMAS LX

Tad Tuleja

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

BEND OVER BACKWARDS

In most cultures, the conventional gesture of submission is to bend over forwards toward one's superior - thus offering him the back of one's head, as a signal that his dominance is accepted. Only animals take the opposite tack, lying on their backs and offering their exposed bellies. Why say bend over backwards then? Because the phrase recalls a curious custom of northern India. Among the hill tribes of that former British protectorate, the posture known as the "arch" asana (it resembles the Western gymnast's backwards "bridge") is both a yoga exercise symbolizing submission to The One, and a more purely social stance of displaying obedience to secular authority. British soldiers who witnessed the posture in the 19th century coined the phrase bend over backwards, and brought it back to England as a description of excessive submissiveness. In England it acquired its current, more general connotation of "putting oneself out" for another.