- Nov 2021
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bbhosted.cuny.edu bbhosted.cuny.edu
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They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I can only imagine the conversation between Eve and Skywoman: “Sister, you got the short end of the stick . . .”
It's a bit funny and ironic to think that the communal/peaceful Skywoman would use such a Western-centric phrase like "short end of the stick", which as I understand it has an economic underpinning of a receipt by which the debtor and the lender used marked sticks that were broken apart with one somewhat shorter than the other. When put back together the marks on the stick matched each other, but the debtor got the shorter end. (Reference: Behavioral Economics When Psychology and Economics Collide by Scott A. Huettel; what was his source?)
Compare with etymologies expanded upon here:
The Long Story of The Short End of the Stick by Charles Clay Doyle. American Speech, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 96-101 (6 pages), Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/455954
Which doesn't include the economic reference at all.
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er the years, writers (and speakers) have experimented with numer- ous images in expressions with the same general structure and probable meaning as worse end of the staff and short end of the stick
Not mentioned here is the idea of the "fuzzy end of the lollipop" as heard (twice?) by the character Sugar Kane Kowalczyk played by Marylin Monroe in Some Like it Hot (United Artists, 1959).
It's the story of my life: I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chJbqwCTURI
The urban dictionary has an unsourced reference for Abraham Lincoln as the source, but I'm loathe to believe it without more direct sourcing.
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