Semper Ubi Sub Ubi
31 comments on this post.
Search us!
Ask a Question!
Puzzled by Posh?
Confounded by Cattycorner?
Baffled by Balderdash?
Flummoxed by Flabbergast?
Perplexed by Pandemonium?
Nonplussed by... Nonplussed?
Annoyed by Alliteration?
Don't be shy!
Send in your question!
marc bratt:
September 15th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Good research! You can find numerous examples of the phrase “…like sixty” in The Great Brain Series written by John D. Fitzgerald.
Ex. “Tom’s great brain was working like sixty.”
Charles Wheaton:
September 17th, 2009 at 10:49 am
On the “like forty” tack could the origin be linked to the fort in fortitude, fortify (or even fort!) implying strength and force? Sixty could still be inflation caused by conversion to a number.
Charles Wheaton, London
Vaddy:
April 14th, 2010 at 3:21 pm
“Forty forties” was used in old Russian to express a very big number.
Ju:
March 22nd, 2011 at 6:58 am
Richard Feynman uses the phrase several times in “Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman”:
“We were playing along, going like sixty, as our band started to pass in front of the hotel.”
“So I’m slicing beans one after the other – chig, chig, chig, chig, chig – and everybody’s
giving me the beans, and I’m going like sixty when the boss comes by and says, “What are you
doing?””
Bob:
July 7th, 2011 at 11:31 am
Some older NY Yankee fans might remember the 1961 season when Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were chasing Babe Ruth’s single season record of 60 home runs. Toward the end of the season, The New York Daily News sports section published a statistical table every day showing how their HR totals compared through the same number of games played. That table was titled “Goin’ Like 60″. It was the first thing I looked at in the paper every morning that summer.
Great memories.
P.S. Mantle got injured toward the end of the year, Maris hit 61*. You could look it up.
admin:
July 7th, 2011 at 1:33 pm
I was 11, and I was a big Mickey Mantle fan. (It had to be partly because of his alliterative name.) For some reason I never cared for Roger Maris, maybe because, next to Mantle, he seemed a bit weedy.
I still wear a Yankees cap almost every day out here in rural Ohio. It helps ward off the bad mojo of the OSU Buckeyes fans, who find it very annoying for some reason.
Martin_G:
June 3rd, 2012 at 9:28 pm
I’m not sure the exact origin of the expression, but I know that in 1939 Betty Boop sang:
People look smart and nifty,
When wearing a rubber heel,
People can go like fifty,
So does an automobile!
Caleb_B:
July 9th, 2012 at 1:01 am
In the 1925 Clara Bow film “The Plastic Age,” the phrase is used. While at a dance, a young man says to Bow’s date that he better go home if he wants to win the race next week. He responds: “I’ll win that race like sixty!”
Paul S:
September 30th, 2013 at 11:52 am
I am 62 years old and spent a lot of time on my Grandparent’s farm in east central Illinois. I heard the expressions “runnin’ like sixty” and “goin’ like sixty” many times from their mouths and others’. The context was always one which either referred to speed –e.g., a truck rumbling down a country road or an animal running or flying (e.g., rabbit running, quail flying) — or dealing with “busyness” (i.e., multi-tasking, working fast to complete something, etc.). I perceived from the nature of peoples’ comments and thus always assumed it alluded to “60 mph” as a relatively fast speed.
Teacher:
November 13th, 2013 at 11:58 am
The phrase “like sixty” appears in Chapter One of James T. Farrell’s Young Lonigan (the first book of the trilogy). “Spike Kennedy, Lord have mercy on his soul, he was bit by a mad dog and died, would get up on one of the cars and throw coal down like sixty, and they’d scramble for it.”
C Hernan:
February 12th, 2014 at 3:35 pm
“If she shoots twice, don’t try to fetch anything, but run like sixty.” Walter D. Edmonds, Drums Along the Mohawk, Chapter III, Part 5, Proclamation. Don’t know what it means.
Going Like Sixty:
March 12th, 2014 at 4:32 pm
Yep, midwest saying for sure … in the boondocks.
Ralph E. Shaffer:
July 19th, 2014 at 1:26 pm
Years ago I did a word search in teh NY Times for “going like sixty.” The earliest use there is one that is clearly in connection with speed. Aug. 24, 1896: Four boys rescued after being trapped in a railroad freight car when the train started up. It was “going like sixty.”
jj:
December 20th, 2014 at 10:48 pm
Heard several times on Ozzie and Harriet reruns. “It’s snowing like 60″, etc. Seems used like the phrase “gangbusters”. (with great initial excitement, speedily, or with immediate success.)
Tina:
August 18th, 2015 at 1:03 pm
Here’s two place I’ve found the phrase.
Penrod and Sam 1916 Booth Tarkington – Chapter 21
“…I’m goin’ to get me a real horn some day before long, and then you’ll see me goin’ up and down here playin’ it like sixty!”
Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy show Nov 2, 1947
Mortimor: They made me bend over and imitate a canoe. Only trouble was they did the paddling.
Bergan: Did it sting?
Mortimor: Oh, it stang like sixty!
This one was the first time I heard it, and I always thought it meant “a whole lot” or “very much”.
H.G. Finley:
October 21st, 2015 at 4:06 am
From the 1904 short story, Holding Up A Train by O. Henry:
What it was there for, I don’t know. I felt a little mad because he had fooled me so. I stuck the harp up against his mouth.
“If you can’t pay – play,” I says.
“I can’t play,” says he.
“Then learn right off quick,” says I, letting him smell the end of my gun-barrel.
He caught hold of the harp, turned red as a beet, and commenced to blow. He blew a dinky little tune I remembered hearing when I was a kid:
Prettiest little gal in the country – oh!
Mammy and Daddy told me so.
I made him keep on playing it all the time we were in the car. Now and then he’d get weak and off the key, and I’d turn my gun on him and ask what was the matter with that little gal, and whether he had any intention of going back on her, which would make him start
up again like sixty.
Cstep:
February 23rd, 2016 at 12:29 am
I just did a search for the history of the phrase “hurt like sixty” and came upon this site. When I was young my piano teacher used that phrase often. For example, once I arrived at my lesson with a very stuffed up nose. Her recommended remedy? “You take a bulb syringe, fill it with salt water, then shoot it up your nose. It’ll hurt like sixty, but it’ll cure you.” I figured “hurt like sixty” was pretty intense. I didn’t try her remedy.
Bill Hawkins:
March 26th, 2016 at 9:06 pm
I believe the use “runs like 60″ or “goes like 60″ is an idiom..a figure of speech which is understood by
the common man to be a way of saying “very fast”
in a more interesting way than the literal words “very fast”. The choice of 60 in the 20th century probably is
a result of the upper limit of the auto on bad roads or the old railroad trains. I remember hearing the expression “a mile a minute” in connection with 60 miles per hour said as a wonder! “Runs like 60″ is sort of like saying it was “raining cats and dogs” instead of saying “it really rained a lot”.
For an incredible insight into figures of speech I would recommend E. W. Bullinger’s book Figures of Speech used in the Bible. It was published originally in 1898 and recently in 1994…available from Amazon and other vendors.
Regards,
Bill Hawkins
Carl Eichenlaub:
May 25th, 2016 at 1:35 pm
I always assumed it was related to this gentleman’s exploit. The dates would fit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Minthorn_Murphy
Ken:
July 8th, 2016 at 9:24 am
I just saw the phrase “It’s raining like 60″ on a 1912 postcard mailed from Davenport, IA. Interesting thread.
Felderburg:
May 21st, 2017 at 4:35 pm
My dad mentioned that “go like 60″ was a big part if his childhood growing up in Pittsburgh, after the Pirates win the 1960 World Series. I’d never heard the phrase before, and this is one of the first google results.
M Miller:
January 14th, 2018 at 8:22 am
My father used to say, “Hurts like sixty”.
Lorraine:
May 17th, 2018 at 3:39 am
My mom was from Iowa and used to say, “That hurt like 60” meaning a lot. I never hear it here in Los Angeles though.
Jaime LeBlond:
April 12th, 2019 at 9:03 pm
My mom was from Iowa also. Her parents were one generation from Ireland. I never have heard anyone but my mom say “i’m hurtin’ like 60!”
Stephen:
December 21st, 2019 at 5:06 am
I came here after hearing the phrase in one of the Ozzie and Harriet Christmas episodes, where Ricky and David play Ozzie and his brother in a flashback and they wake up to snow and say “It’s snowing like sixty” – I’m still not sure I’m entirely satisfied with the explanationa given in all of these examples, but I do appreciate the effort. Seems there would be a concrete answer for such a (relatively, if older) common phrase.
Stephen:
December 21st, 2019 at 5:13 am
P.S. – to further explain my comment re: Ozzie and Harriet, that episode was 1953 iirc (they may have done it earlier on the radio version, but I believe they were still doing the tv scripts on radio simultaneously in the early 50s,so it was probably a fresh one) and the phrase was said in a flashback that probably would have been taking place sometime in the late 20’s, for further clarification. So it was assumed a young boy in not only the 20s would say such a phrase, but a radio/television audience of middle class Americans would understand it as well, if that helps at all.
Stephen:
December 21st, 2019 at 5:25 am
I found this as well:
IDIOMS FOR SIXTY
like sixty, Informal. with great speed, ease, energy, or zest:
Everyone was working like sixty to finish up before the holidays.
ORIGIN OF SIXTY
before 900; Middle English (adj. and noun), Old English sixtig (adj.); cognate with Dutch zestig, German sechzig, Old Norse sextigir. See six, -ty1
Bill:
February 7th, 2020 at 8:43 am
My mother was from Iowa, and my grandmother lived there all her life. If there were strong winds, my grandmother & my mother would say “It’s blowing like Sam Sixty.” Not sure who Sam was :)
Roger:
March 28th, 2020 at 12:54 pm
In the mid to late 1950’s visit my cousins who lived on a farm on a gravel road I heard it said, ‘so and so went by last night going like sixty’. Only place I had ever heard the term. Being a city boy sixty wasn’t a big deal. I guess it would’ve been on a gravel road.
Mattie:
July 25th, 2020 at 7:27 pm
‘Hate like sixty’ appears in a Zane Grey western novel, “The Hash Knife Outfit” (1933). The sentence in chapter 7 reads “I’d hate like sixty to fail my sister”, implying he strongly doesn’t want to let his sister down.
Christina:
October 7th, 2020 at 1:18 pm
I googled “like 60″ today when it sprang out of my mouth when our 7 month old cat tore through the house and my 13 year old gave me a strange look. My grandma who was born in 1911 in Michigan used to say it all the time. Interesting to think of what phrases were common at different times.