Walking idioms

English is rife with idioms involving walking. Most have pretty shakily documented origins, but here are a few verifiable ones:

In the 1570s the idiom walking stick was born.

In 1769 the first written usage of walk the plank occurred.

In 1846 the idiom walking sickness was coined. Oddly, the term walking pneumonia has unclear beginnings, though the particular strain (mycoplasmal pneumonia) was named “atypical pneumonia” in 1938. 

In 1848 the idiom worship the ground s/he walks on entered the language.

A walk in the park was born in 1937, and sometime thereafter, the term no walk in the park was conceived.

And imagine my surprise. The term walking bass didn't start with stride piano and musicians like the inimitable Fats Waller. The walking bass was created over two centuries earlier by Johann Sebastian Bach & his baroque pals. My musical ignorance is showing.

In a similar vein, though most people of my generation might assume the idiom a walk on the wild side was conceived in 1972 by songwriter Lou Reed, the earliest usage of the phrase was actually Nelson Algren’s 1956 novel, A Walk on the Wild Side.

The idiom walk the green mile comes from the death row of an infamous Louisiana prison, in which the condemned took their final walk down a hallway of green linoleum.

World War I gave us many idioms, among them (sadly) the walking wounded.

The walk a mile in someone’s shoes idiom comes from the Cherokee. Interesting that the original walked-in shoes were moccasins. What do you bet nobody paid for the idiom?

Please add a comment, or a walking idiom I haven’t included. 


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My thanks go out to this week’s sources the OED, Wordnik, The Word Detective, & Etymonline,

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