Pleased as Punch

pleased as punch/proud as punch - openly or boastfully very pleased/proud or delighted (with oneself, or with an outcome that one finds pleasing) - the 'pleased as punch' and 'proud as punch' expressions are English in origin, from the early 1800's according to general etymological thinking (Chambers states 1813 as the first recorded use of 'please as punch'), and each expression is based on the pleasure which the puppet 'Punch' derives from murdering all the other characters in the traditional 'Punch and Judy Show'.

—From a website with the unfortunate name of businessballs.com

It's a strange phrase to have rattling around in one's head all day, but there you have it and I'm not sure why. Am I feeling pleased with myself? If so, it's pleasure on the edge of a knife.

A little history. Back in sixth grade, when I was a nerdy little kid bored to delirium in a "Language Arts" class whose curriculum consisted of regurgitating vocab words from one section of a standard reader to another, I successfully negotiated with the school powers-that-be to move up to eighth grade honors English, where they were reading actual books, like Lord of the Flies and A Tale of Two Cities. It doesn't sound like much now, but it was huge for me at the time—and loaded with pitfalls. I was new to the school, a country kid in suburbia. I had managed in my first two months there to go from being the new best friend of one of the most popular girls my own grade to being utterly rejected by her and her clique, and in consequence, by most of the rest of my classmates. I didn't know any eighth graders, but they were bigger than me. My new teacher had a reputation as a hard-ass. I was pleased, I was proud, and I was terrified.

So the weekend before this change took effect, I was visiting my father at the old farmhouse where I had spent most of my childhood. Home/not home. The divorce was less than a year old, but already there were acres of distance between my father and me, and those acres were filled with eggshells I (we?) didn't know how to walk over.

from Languagehat: "On the other hand, he [William Safire] finishes up with an interesting examination of the phrase 'walking on eggshells'; it turns out the earlier form is 'walking on eggs,' which makes sense:

'But the metaphoric meaning of the phrase is ''to walk with great care, lightly, tippy-toe, taking precaution not to offend.'' In 1866, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips derided Senator Henry Wilson as ''of that cautious class who could walk upon eggs without breaking them.'' In 1621, Robert Burton wrote in his ''Anatomy of Melancholy'' of a man ''going as if he trod on eggs.'' And around 1510, the Italian Ludovico Ariosto, in ''Orlando Furioso,'' used the phrase ''calcar . . . l'uova''—''to tread on eggs.'' Not shells, which are already broken, and you don't have to be careful about breaking them. (Though I admit you have to be careful lest you cut your bare feet.)'"

I suppose he asked me a question about school. In any case, there I was, telling him how I was about to skip two grades in English and maybe start to learn something. But I underplayed it, I guess, tried to make it sound like it wasn't a big deal to me.

"Oh come on," he said, and I can still hear him saying it. "Admit it. You're pleased as punch."

Maybe you had to have been there. Maybe it was his way of saying he was proud of me and that I really should be pleased. But that's not how I hear it. More than two decades later, this is what I still hear: You can't hide from me. I caught you red-handed. You murdered all those puppets, Punch, and you're bloody glad to have done it. Just say so.

Sorry for this god-awful self-indulgent post. I'll probably delete it in the morning. But I've just been thinking about why it is that success always has a double edge for me, why anything I accomplish seems liable to turn around and stab me. As childhood traumas go it's a small one, I know. Though when I look back on that year I do see a shellshocked little kid. She wanted to know about war that year: she read anything she could find about Vietnam, the Holocaust, poured for clues over the pages of All Quiet on the Western Front, concocted elaborate fantasies of how she could save the world from the monstrous evils that threatened to consume it.

Where is she now, I wonder? I hope she would be pleased with me.

Comments

[Amy]

Pride - Perhaps the sin you find the most deadly? And therefore the most horrified to find yourself accused of?

[hilllady]

Good point. But why cling to pride when there are so many other great sins out there to choose from? Plus the ones that never made into the western pantheon (because they're too close to the truth?), like fear and deceit. I'll have to post about all that one of these days.
-h