Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Six ways to Sunday

Six ways to Sunday.

I can recall the first time I gave serious thought to this particular phrase. In What Gold Buys, the fifth book in my Silver Rush mystery series, a character (who shall remain nameless, to avoid any spoilers), says, "Mrs. Stannert, since I’ve come back I’ve explained myself six ways to Sunday."

I wrote this bit of dialogue, stopped and stared at it, and thought that although it certainly sounded "period" (i.e., 19th century), I wasn't entirely positive when it first came into common use. And thus began the journey....
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According to The Free Dictionary (and other such compendiums) six ways to Sunday is defined as "thoroughly or completely; in every possible way; from every conceivable angle."

The Grammarist takes us on a little journey through the various iterations, starting with six ways from Sunday:

Six ways from Sunday seems to have its origins in the middle eighteenth century as the phrases both ways from Sunday and two ways from Sunday. These earlier phrases referred to the eye condition known as strabismus, where someone’s eyes do not focus in unison, giving the appearance of looking in two different directions. From there, the terms both ways from Sunday and two ways from Sunday gained the figurative meaning of looking at something askew. By the mid-1800s the terms two ways from Sunday and nine ways from Sunday appeared, and the meaning evolved to mean to be at a loss. The phrase evolved once again in the late 1800s in America to mean every way possible. One still finds many varieties of the phrase, the number in question might be six, seven, nine or a thousand, the preposition might be from, to or for, but the day referred to in the idiom is always Sunday and the idiom carries the same meaning...

World Wide Words weighs in on this phrase as well. When a poster wonders if the idiom might refer to patterns of activity during a week, from one Sunday to the next, WWW responds:

You’re not alone in feeling unsure of the origin; you are in the company of almost everybody who has looked at it. Others have made this suggestion for its origin. One specific and quite certainly false tale lists punishments that were once meted out on the six days following a Sunday to a person who failed to attend church....

As to its origin, WWW points to the definition of squint-a-pipes (now there's an intriguing bit of argot!), which appears in the 1785 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Captain Francis Grose:

SQUINT-A-PIPES. A squinting man or woman; said to be born in the middle of the week, and looking both ways for Sunday; or born in a hackney coach, and looking out of both windows; fit for a cook, one eye in the pot, and the other up the chimney; looking nine ways at once.

WWW adds that Sunday was presumably chosen because it would have been regarded as the most significant day of the week.

I would never have guessed that six ways to Sunday owed its beginnings to crossed eyes! I wonder if squint-a-pipes was still in use in the 1880s...

Which way to Sunday?
Image by 272447 from Pixabay