LONG ARM OF THE LAW
[Q] From Carroll Phillips: “I was in a deli recently when the girl behind the counter dropped something between the cabinets. There was an officer waiting on line and she said: ‘Do you think the long arm of the law can get this out for me?’ This has me wondering! Do you know the origin of the phrase?”
[A] These days it’s a cliché that can only be used in fun, as the young woman in the deli did. It has a long history, but I’m not entirely convinced that it was ever anything but a mildly humorous expression.
It seems to have appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century. An example is from a lesser-known work of 1888 by Wilkie Collins (better known for The Moonstone and The Woman in White) with the title The Legacy of Cain: “It is my belief that I could have felt no greater dismay, if the long arm of the Law had laid its hold on me while he was speaking”.
The phrase long arm for someone or something with a long reach is rather older: to make a long arm is an old way of describing extending your reach as far as possible. Other phrases use it figuratively, as in the long arm of coincidence.
There’s also strong arm of the law. That version is older, and I’ve been able to trace it back as far as The Pioneers, by James Fenimore Cooper, published in 1823: “You are not to credit the idle tales you hear of Natty; he has a kind of natural right to gain a livelihood in these mountains; and if the idlers in the village take it into their heads to annoy him, as they sometimes do reputed rogues, they shall find him protected by the strong arm of the law”.
Strong arm of the law was used very widely in the US in the nineteenth century, always with serious intent (at least in the numerous examples I’ve looked at). It, too, seems to have become a cliché. Could it be that long arm of the law was created as a punning alternative based on the near rhyme in its first word?
Both versions appear together in Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop of 1841: “The failure of a spirited enterprise in the way of their profession ... caused their career to receive a sudden check from the long and strong arm of the law”. Dickens is here seemingly making a joke by putting together the two forms of the phrase, so suggesting both were already widely known by this date. But I can’t find an earlier example of long arm of the law, so it’s just possible that Dickens invented it.
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