Not on your tintype...

Posted by ESC on September 15, 1999

In Reply to: Not on your life! posted by joel on September 15, 1999

: When I hear the phrase "not on your life!" I understand it to mean: "not a shred of possibility!" or "don't waste a moment believing that!"

: But when I dissect the phrase, it doesn't make much literal sense. So where does the phrase originate, or how did that group of four words come out in that order and meaning what they do?

Could "not on your life" literally mean: "I wouldn't do that to save YOUR life." Or "I wouldn't do that if your life depended on it."

I haven't found the phrase yet in my reference books. I did find "not on your tintype," a phrase "in vogue around the nineteenth century," according to the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins. A tintype was "the 1890s equivalent of the Polaroid instant photo."

This was a variation of "not on your life," so the original phrase must have been around a long time.

The authors, William and Mary Morris, couldn't give a definitive answer on the exact meaning of "not on your tintype."

So we seem to be stuck with guessing on the literal meaning of both phrases.

• Not on your tintype... Bob 9/15/99