Phrase Origins: In Stitches

While we were traveling back home to Lake Charles, LA from Beaumont, TX, my sister and I started discussing phrases and wondering why we say them. It is this type of thing that led me to start writing my phrase origin articles. We would often wonder why we say such things when they don't seem to make sense.

She had said something about a phrase and I told her that I wrote about that one. We moved on and it came to keeping somebody in stitches. I thought of the wrong meaning of the phrase, but my sister remembered and when I heard her say the meaning, I knew it was correct. So, why does to keep somebody in stitches mean to keep them laughing?

I've had stitches and while I was not awake for them to put them in (thankfully - they had removed a mole from my shoulder to make sure it wasn't cancerous), I was awake when they took them out of my shoulder. The removal of the stitches didn't hurt, but it didn't make me laugh. I certainly did not laugh about having the stitches while they were in my shoulder.

I cannot imagine why keeping somebody in stitches would be synonymous to laughing. After all, laughing usually feels good and stitches either don't feel like anything or feel bad.

It turns out that the phrase is from Shakespeare. He used it in 1602 when he wrote Twelfth Night. It says, "If you desire the spleen, and will laugh yourself into stitches, follow me. Yond gull Malvolio is turned heathen, a very renegado; for there is no Christian, that means to be saved by believing rightly, can ever believe such impossible passages of grossness. He's in yellow stockings."

The stitches does refer to pain. It refers to as if a needle or needles were poking you in the side. The saying means to keep somebody laughing for so long or so hard that their sides or stomach will hurt because of the laughter. This is supposedly supposed to be like the sharp poke of a needle, which, of course, was used to make stitches in sewing.

While Shakespeare used the phrase in 1602, the phrase did not come into common usage until 1914. It is found in the July 14, 1914 edition of The Lowell Sun which says, "There's a new face among the members in Ben Loring, a natural-born comedian, who seems to have no difficulty whatever in keeping his audience in stitches of laughter and glee."

Source:

Martin, Gary. "In stitches". The Phrase Finder. July 1, 2010 http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/199000.html>.