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Spitting image

And it sure did work out – they’ve been together for over a year and have a baby together.

- Wait, what? Cheryl tried to BREAK UP with Liam Payne, LifeStyle.one, May 19, 2017.

3. If a child looks a lot like one of their parents, people will sometimes say they’re the “spitting image” of the parent. But others will say the child is the “spit and image” of their parent.

So which is right? That’s exactly what a listener from Kansas named Ken wanted to know.

“Growing up, I had always heard, or misheard, and repeated the phrase, ‘spitting image’ -- as in, he’s the spitting image of his father,” Ken writes.

Recently, Ken was reading a review for a camera when he saw the phrase “spit and image.” Now he wants to know which interpretation is correct.

When you think about it, neither really make much sense.

“Spitting image” is particularly hard to pick apart, because we don’t understand why an image would be spitting. However, “spit and image” makes sense if you know that spit can be a noun meaning image or likeness.

If that’s the case, then “spit and image” is redundant but emphatic. If someone is the spit and image of someone else, then they’re the image and the image.

But Yale linguist Larry Horn says that’s not where this phrase comes from. In an article in American Speech, he says the phrase actually began as “spitten image.”