Eleventh Hour

The idiom ‘eleventh hour’ has been a potential blog post title twice before because it seems that I often sit to write at the last hour of the day which so happens to be 11.

It is often my attempt to eek out a post before the days-end.

I know I’ve used that phrase before because basically through my young-adult life, that is how I got stuff done…at the 11th hour.  I really never was curious about its origin until tonight.

I love that the internet can effortlessly give me a hint at what I am curious about.  I say hint because I still hold the belief that you can’t trust everything you read on the internet.

I love that I get this curiosity from my dad.  Who has an affinity for knowing a little bit about everything and a whole lot about some things (like flying).

My short journey on the Search Engine (toot toot) produced this information:

 “Late; shortly before an anticipated event. Matthew’s parable of the laborers in
the vineyard (20: 2-16) has the men hired at the eleventh hour being paid as
much as the ones hired early in the morning, even though the eleventh-hour
people only worked for an hour. From this sense of being barely in time to
receive some benefit comes the concept of time running out.” ” From “The
Dictionary of Cliches” by James Rogers (Ballantine Books, New York, 1985).

I am grateful that I am able to post this at the 11th hour, by the skin-of-my-teeth, post haste!

Endnotes:

Skin of my teeth

Geneva Bible, 1560, in Job 19:20

Teeth don’t have skin, of course, so the writer may have been alluding to the teeth’s surface or simply to a notional minute measure – something that might now be referred to, with less poetic imagery than the biblical version, as ‘as small as the hairs on a gnat’s bollock’.

Post haste:

1545, usually said to be from “post haste” instruction formerly written on letters (attested from 1538), from post (3) “system for sending mail” + haste. The verb post “to ride or travel with great speed” is recorded from 1558.

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