THE CAT'S PAJAMAS LVII

Tad Tuleja 

 

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

 

GIVE A DAMN

 

The original phrasing of this expression was GIVE A DAM, or more precisely, GIVE A TINKER'S DAM, and it was not a curse. Tinkers were the traveling Mr. Fixits of England, Scotland, and Ireland and flourished before the advent of mass production. They typically made their own tools, or had them made to order by blacksmith friends. Each tinker had his own idiosyncratic designs, and the unfamiliarity of tinkers' tools among the general population gave rise to the slang terms thingamajig and whatchamacallit to describe any instrument of obscure function.

But virtually every tinker had his dams. These were small metal wedges or shims which the handymen used to pry, brace, or jimmy recalcitrant machinery, and which they carried with them, in various sizes, by the hundreds. So common were these tiny items on tinkers' workbenches that they became a by-word for insignificance, as in the 18th-century phrase "not worth a dam" and the 19th-century addition "give a dam."  Dam thus served the same metaphoric purpose as straw and fig did among farmers, and as farthing did with financiers.