Fun With Phrases

There are two long-used and well-worn phrases that we've probably all used at one time or another: 1) What in Sam Hill is ...?, or 2) Where in Sam Hill is ...? 

Do you know the origins of either of those phrases? Well, if you don't know and you care to read on, you're going to learn about the many possible origins.  You see, nobody has ever agreed on the actual one, but the possibilities are certainly strange and funny.

There are six different legends about "Sam Hill."   Here they are in no particular order or veracity.

1. Sam Hill was a mercantile store owner in Prescott, Arizona in the late 1800s, and he carried a diverse assortment of items for sale.  People started using the term, "What in Sam Hill is that?" in reference to something unusual that might have been in the store.
2. Writer H. L. Mencken suggested that the term derived from the name Samiel, which was the name given the devil in the Carl Maria von Weber opera,  Der Freischütz.  Sam Hill was a polite way of referring to the devil, as in, "What the devil...?"
3. A lesser known origin was with a early Connecticut legislator with that name who served in the state legislature between 1725 and 1752.  He was there so long that it resulted in a popular adjuration, "give 'em Sam Hill."  (Hmm, not exactly the same phrase, but close)
4. A good candidate for the origin lies with the story of a Michigan surveyor of the 1800s, Samuel W. Hill, who used such foul language in his everyday speech that his very name became a euphemism for swear words.  he was known to tell tall tales of his adventures in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and when someone retold the story, they substituted the sinless synonym , Sam Hill, for the words that weren't polite in mixed company.
5. You may recall that I visited a town along the Columbia River in Washington State on one of my trips out west.  The town, Maryhill, was the namesake of the daughter of its founder, Samuel Hill, a millionaire businessman known as "the Father of Roads" in the Pacific Northwest.  Some have attributed the phrases above to him but, since he lived in the 1900s, he was too late to have earned the honor.
6. The final recipient for the beginnings of the phrases is (was) the adjutant general of the State of Kentucky, Samuel Ewing Hill, who traveled to the eastern border of the state where it abutted West Virginia to investigate the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. That battle had been raging for over ten years and had claimed over a dozen lives. of family members.  The feud made national news, and the country waited for word of, "what in the Sam Hill was going on up there?"

Of all the possibilities, I like the second one best, because of the close similarity of the names, "Samiel" and "Sam Hill" and their association with the devil, once considered a swear word.  It also fits the time line more accurately for the origin of the phrases in the early 1800s.  So now you maybe learned a new way to cuss without drawing criticism from the holy-rollers, and you can use it in so many ways, as well.

By the way, all of this is available online with Wikipedia, but you probably never would have thought to look it up independently.

I think I'll go look up some other interesting phrases and cuss words that aren't,  phrases like "consarn it," "yer durn tootin," "dadgumit," "dagnabit," and "where in tarnation." Now that swearing and cussing is becoming common in everyday life, even promoted on TV and in movies, some of these might disappear, and that would really be a shame.