Where did the saying "clean your clock" (referring to hitting someone) come from?

Answer 1

No one sure answer.

"Clock" is London slang for face.

Two (speculative) ideas: the threat to hit someone in the face, since clockfaces have long been associated with human faces. Second, threatening a blow so violent it would blow the dust off the gears and inner mechanism of a clock, a veiled reference to shaking up the brain enough to scramble your senses.

Answer 2

Comes now this citation from the sports page of The Trenton Evening Times of July 28, 1908, about a couple of local baseball teams: "It took the Thistles just one inning to clean the clocks of the Times boys." That means that this mechanical metaphor has been kicking around for at least nearly a century, most often in sports lingo, now more in combative political language.

Why does Old Slang stay with us long after the basis for the metaphor has staggered off into the mists of meaning? Perhaps alliteration helps give it linguistic longevity; clean your clock comes readily to the tongue though it has no semantic relation to "wash your face." In the same way, so does drop a dime, as in David Van Biema's recent review in Time magazine of a Coptic Egyptian translation of a supposed second-century manuscript irreverently titled "The Gospel of Judas." The reviewer writes about the title character famed for his betrayal, "Technically speaking, he did drop a dime on Jesus."

To drop a dime means "to insert a coin into a pay phone to dial the police and inform about a criminal conspiracy." Does anybody under 40 - who never uses a pay phone, which long ago lost its dial and stopped costing a dime - get the reference? I presume some people do, because there it is in last week's Time about a dime-dropper who got his clock cleaned by history.

Answer 3

I think it's a reference to the "face" of the clock, which metaphorically represents a person's face. In other words, if you threaten to "clean someone's clock", you're going to punch them in the face.

It might also have to do with the threat of impact or concussion. The internal mechanisms of old clocks (and some modern ones) wasn't "sealed" from dust. The gears, springs, etc. would get covered with gunk over time (it would adhere to the grease/lubricant). If someone (a jeweler, for example) was about to literally clean a clock, he might whack the clock first, to loosen a good portion of the dust inside it.

Hence, "I'm going to clean your clock" might refer to the general threat of hitting someone.

Post Script: I just ad-libbed an Answer that's almost an exact duplicate of an Answer thats copy-and-pasted above mine. Hilarious!

Answer 4

Clean Your Clock Origin

Answer 5

, "Clock" has been slang for the human face since the mid-nineteenth century, based on its supposed resemblance to the face of a clock. "Clock" as a verb has also been slang for "to punch in the face or strike violently" since the early 20th century, again based on the clock-face metaphor.

Elsewhere in the world of fisticuffs, according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, "clean" has been slang for "vanquish" since the early 19th century. The Random House dictionary also lists "fix someone's clock" as a slang term for "to finish someone," first attributed to the writer O. Henry in 1908. Curiously, the first citation for the whole phrase "clean someone's clock" comes only in 1959, but we can assume it had been around for awhile before that.

Even with all this evidence tying faces and punches together, I must say that there is another possible source for "clean someone's clock." In railroad slang, an engineer who applies the train's air brakes in an emergency is said to "clean the clock" or "wipe the gauge" as the speedometer needle drops to zero. It seems logical that such a graphic metaphor would be the perfect way to describe stopping an opponent in his tracks, and even if this is not the source of the phrase, it may have contributed to its popularization.

Answer 6

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Where did the saying "clean your clock" (referring to hitting someone) come from?