Pylimitics

The American slang phrase “throw the book at [someone]” means to apply the maximum legal punishment. The most common usage is something like this: “the judge really threw the book at Ralph; he won’t get out of prison for twenty years.”

But really, which book is that — the one getting thrown? The legal tomes lining the walls in lawyers’ offices are large, heavy, and would definitely hurt if thrown at you, and I had always thought that was the answer; it was a metaphorical book that gave you a massive wallop when thrown at you.

However, the apparent origin of the phrase suggests a different metaphor, and one that’s much cleverer. The earliest known appearance of “…throw the book at…” is in a novel from 1911: An Enemy to Society: A Romance of New York of Yesterday and To-Day (just hitting someone with that title might cause bruising). In that book, written by George Bronson-Howard, contains the phrase thusly:

“But as soon as they finds you’ve got no political pull, the judges and all git very moral; throw the book at you and tell you to add up the sentences in it.

If he ever took a dislike to a gink like me and had him up before the court the judge ‘ud about throw the book at me and tell me to add up the sentences in it.”

This is a play on how a book contains a lot of “sentences”, and another meaning of “sentence” is a jail term set by a judge. “Throwing the book” turns out to be a little more sophisticated than just getting bonked on the head by a heavy volume!