I know what the idiom “hand to mouth” means but what does it LITERALLY mean? How did it originate?
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It goes back a long way but for the homeless it’s every day life. They don’t get to wake up with food to eat. They wake up and go to work, whatever that is, to get enough to eat eventually. When they finally do get something, somehow, they eat it all. No fridge after all.
Like most long-standing idioms, the origin isn’t definite, but it is most likely a reference to a period of famine in which people were so desperate for food that as soon as some was placed in their hand, it would be in their mouth.
This idiom is quite old and dates all the way back to the 1500s.
To understand this expression, it can be helpful to imagine the following scene. There is a very poor man who doesn’t have any money, or even any food, saved at all. He has only enough food for his immediate hunger. Every time that he needs to eat, he must go find food. This man is living a hand-to-mouth existence.
Some sources say that this idiom comes from a period of famine in Britain. At that time, there was so little food that whenever people found some form of sustenance, it went straight from their hands to their mouths. They didn’t dare save it for later.
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