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Lead-pipe cinch

Q From Irving S Schloss: What is the origin of lead-pipe cinch, which, in American slang, means a dead certainty?

A Nobody seems quite sure. We’ve a lot of information about its early days but it doesn’t quite add up to a complete story. Facts first, then the speculation.

The figurative sense of cinch is recorded from the 1870s, at first as a verb meaning to get the better of somebody or to defeat them. This is an early example:

The Grocers have us again. The annual “Combination Season” is on in full force, and from the start already made, the “Rings” of last winter, who took in $15,000 or more on Sugar, and correspondingly neat and convenient sums on other commodities, are liable to “cinch ’em, bless ’em, cinch ’em” to a greater extent this winter.

The New North-West (Deer Lodge City, Montana), 28 Oct. 1871.

This came from the saddle-girth meaning of the word, which itself had been borrowed from Spanish cincha in the 1860s. A saddle that had been tightly cinched was secure or had a firm grip. The noun came along a little later to refer to something that was a safe or sure thing, an idea which developed into the slang sense of something that was a certainty, or at least supposed to be one. In this example, the assuredness was on the part of the gamblers running a crooked game:

These “cinch” games are getting entirely too frequent, and all law-abiding citizens demand that the sharpers be severely punished.

Weekly Nevada State Journal (Reno), 23 June, 1877.

Lead-pipe cinch starts to appear in print in the 1880s; at first it’s associated with the race track:

In his third race, when intrusted with thousands of dollars by his stable and the public and looked upon as a “lead pipe cinch” of the best manufacture, tested and warranted in every manner, his dicky leg gives way and the faithful are left to mourn.

New-York Daily Tribune, 4 Oct 1888.

It’s obvious enough that a lead-pipe cinch is one up on the common or garden variety of cinch, so that lead-pipe here is what grammarians call an intensifier. But why should it be so? Even contemporaries didn’t seem to know:

The Western phrase, “cinching up,” means simply tightening the girth. And it is significant that, on the race-track, you hear the expression “an air-tight.” The most emphatic form is a “lead pipe cinch,” but how that intensifies the certainty I am unable to say.

Sacramento Daily Record-Union, 1 Oct 1890.

Unlike many modern urban folk, in the 1890s pretty much everybody knew what a cinch was in its literal sense. So lead-pipe cinch had to resonate somehow with that. Jonathon Lighter, in the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, points out that there was a brief flowering of another sense, that of having an especially firm grip on something. The idea was presumably that if a leather cinch was effective, one made of lead would be even more so.

Some ingenious individual at the time took the idea of a cinch made of lead pipe and cooked up a story to explain where the expression came from. I urge you to take it with a particularly substantial pinch of salt:

The “lead pipe cinch” referred to the plumber who, while traveling on East River ferry, fell overboard with a coil of lead pipe around his body. This “lead pipe cinch” was too much for him, and he never came up again.

Pittsburg Dispatch, 27 Apr. 1890.

And there we must leave matters. The truth still eludes us.

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Page created 05 Jun 2004; Last updated 15 Mar 2014