Out of whole cloth
Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2012 3:05 pm
Out of whole cloth [or from whole cloth]
1. Completely original; made or thought up as a whole; entire, seamless.
2. False, fictitious, without foundation.
Examples:
[Sense 1] Einstein's theory of relativity was made out of whole cloth; it was a completely new way of thinking about the universe.
[Sense 2] The story is a complete invention; the newspaper made it up out of whole cloth.
This is an idiom I am seeing more and more. It appears that sense 1 was the original one, often used with approval (an item literally made from a single piece of cloth, rather than a patchwork, used to be a luxury). In 19th-century America, however, it began to be used in sense 2, perhaps on the basis that a complete lie is entirely "original" and contains no "patches" of truth.
An alternative explanation given for the latter sense is that tailors often used to claim falsely that an item was made from a single cloth and hence more valuable. The phrase "out of whole cloth" therefore came to be used in implied quotes, denoting a mendacious claim of wholeness. If this is indeed how the usage originated, the sense seems to have become oddly transferred from that of "sham wholeness" to simply "sham".
The second sense, in which I normally see it used, still seems to be largely American. Is its use really becoming more frequent?
1. Completely original; made or thought up as a whole; entire, seamless.
2. False, fictitious, without foundation.
Examples:
[Sense 1] Einstein's theory of relativity was made out of whole cloth; it was a completely new way of thinking about the universe.
[Sense 2] The story is a complete invention; the newspaper made it up out of whole cloth.
This is an idiom I am seeing more and more. It appears that sense 1 was the original one, often used with approval (an item literally made from a single piece of cloth, rather than a patchwork, used to be a luxury). In 19th-century America, however, it began to be used in sense 2, perhaps on the basis that a complete lie is entirely "original" and contains no "patches" of truth.
An alternative explanation given for the latter sense is that tailors often used to claim falsely that an item was made from a single cloth and hence more valuable. The phrase "out of whole cloth" therefore came to be used in implied quotes, denoting a mendacious claim of wholeness. If this is indeed how the usage originated, the sense seems to have become oddly transferred from that of "sham wholeness" to simply "sham".
The second sense, in which I normally see it used, still seems to be largely American. Is its use really becoming more frequent?