I’m struck this week by how many idioms in the English language seem to contain the word ‘throw’. Earlier I was using the phrase ‘throw the book at him’; something you generally only hear used in overdone crime dramas. The expression means to punish someone to the greatest possible extent. The ‘book’ in question is a set of all possible crimes and their corresponding punishments within the law (as far as I know this book is imaginary — I doubt there’s a single volume anywhere with all of this information).
When you throw the book at someone, you charge them with every possible crime (major or minor) that they might have committed, and make sure that they’re punished for each. So if someone breaks into your house and steals things, they can be charged not only with the theft itself, but with all the illegal things they had to do (breaking and entering, vandalism) in order to commit the theft.
‘Throw down the gauntlet’ is another ‘throw’ idiom that sounds mystifying without context. A gauntlet is a sort of glove. Gauntlets were an important part of armour when hand-to-hand fighting was popular. In the medieval period, it was common for a knight to issue a challenge by taking off his gauntlet and throwing it on the ground to be picked up by his opponent. A number of cod-medieval movies have characters slapping each other with their gloves, but I don’t know whether this was historically done or is merely the sort of thing filmmakers think
audiences enjoy watching.
To ‘throw your hat into the ring’ means almost the same thing, and has similar origins. In the 19th century, if you wanted to challenge a boxer, you would throw your hat into the boxing ring. Today the expression refers to a willingness to compete in a contest, particularly a political one.
‘Throw in the towel’ has almost the opposite meaning from ‘throw down the gauntlet’ — to surrender. This
expression also comes from the world of boxing, and refers to the towels used to clean the sweat (and blood) off combatants during the fight. When a combatant feels that he can no longer fight and wants to quit, he (or his manager) signifies this by throwing in the towel. There is an older form of this expression — ‘to throw up the sponge’, which means exactly the same thing.
Then there’s ‘throw out the baby with the bathwater’, which is such a cliché of Indian newspapers that it should no longer need any explanation. ‘Throw a monkey wrench into the works’ is another colourful ‘throw’ expression.
A monkey wrench is a spanner, and obviously if you throw one into a working machine it will lead to mechanical failure. The expression therefore means to do something that causes trouble for someone else’s plans.
Yet, however hard I try, I’m unable to come up with an origin that makes sense for the phrase ‘to throw one’s cap over the windmill’. It seems to be used to mean a defiance of social convention, but to originate from a completely different episode in Don Quixote. It has really thrown me for a loop.
— bluelullaby@gmail.com