Some, such as James Rogers (The Dictionary of Cliches,1985) think that the expression can be traced all the way back to the Roman poet Catullus, who used the Latin expression “per caputque pedesque” (literally, over both head and feet) in a poem written around 60 BC; others, such as Robert Hendrickson (QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, 2004) claim that a direct line of descent from the Latin phrase to the English cannot be proven and is therefore best ignored. At any rate, it is certain that the phrase has been around for a very long time in English, and that for most of its lfe it was indeed in inverted order: “heels over head” rather than “head over heels.” That is how it appears, for instance, in its earliest documented appearance in English, in a mid-fourteenth-century alliterative poem, where it is used to describe someone turning a cartwheel or a somersault, and that is the form in which it appeared for the following four centuries. In the late eighteenth century, however, it began to appear in reverse order, for some unknown reason, and, again for some unknown reason, that is the form that has survived and is still used in our own day. It may have begun, indeed in all likelihood it did begin,as a silly mistake: the kind of mindless inversion that every writer sometimes makes when writing too quickly. But the inverted (and illogical) form caught on. The earliest recorded instance of it comes from 1771, when a poet named Herbert Lawrence wrote a work called The Contemplative Man, which contained the line “He gave [him] such a violent involuntary kick in the Face, as drove him Head over Heels.”

In that example, the phrase still means tumbled over, fallen backward,(physically) upset. This was the meaning that prevailed for the first five centuries of the phrase’s life: it was akin to such expressions as upside-down, bottoms up, topsy-turvy, ass over teakettle, etc. Nowadays, however, it is used almost exclusively in a figurative sense, and almost exclusively in the expression mentioned in the first paragraph of this article: head over heels in love. That refinement of application we owe to a rather unlikely source: the American frontiersman and hero of the Battle of the Alamo, Davy Crockett, who was a real person and who first used the expression in this way in his Narrative of the Life of David Crockett (1834): “I soon found myself head over heels in love with this girl.” English speakers around the world have been falling head over heels in love ever since.

It should be noted, however, that not all writers have been content to use an expression that makes no literal sense; a few purists have heroically tried to revive it in its original (and more logical) form. Michael Quinion (http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-hea3.htm) notes two of the most famous of these:

. . . as late as the beginning of the twentieth century L. Frank Baum consistently used the older form in his Oz books: “But suddenly he came flying from the nearest mountain and tumbled heels over head beside them.” And Lucy Maud Montgomery stayed with it in her Anne of Windy Poplars, published as late as 1936: “Gerald’s pole, which he had stuck rather deep in the mud, came away with unexpected ease at his third tug and Gerald promptly shot heels over head backward into the water.”

The enormous popularity of both of these writers has not proved enough, however, to reintroduce logic into everyday usage: if it was “heels over head” for four centuries, it has been “head over heels” for two and a half, and it seems likely that it will remain “head over heels.” Where is it written that language has to be logical?

If you have a suggestion for a future posting, please leave me a MySpace message or get it to me any other way you can think of!