"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 23/02/18 (being in stitches, to stitch someone up)

I havr to thank a Rowena Smith, who sent me a tweet saying, "Stitches normally refer to sewing, so why, when we're in fits of laughter, do we talk about being in stitches?" And it's a really good question. Obviously, stitshes are normally linked to sewing, but that's actually a pretty late development when you look back over the history of the word. So to go right back to the beginning, it's a Germanic origin, like so many words in English, thanks to our Germanic invaders. And its first meaning was a thrust or a stub, which makes sense when you realise that stitch is actually related to the English verb to stick. And so very first sense of stitch for our purposes today is a sudden, sharp pain back in those days caused, probably, by being stubbed or by being thrilled because, of course, the first meaning of thrill as well was to be a pierced. So this sense of stitch, in terms of the stabbing pain, is around 1 000 years old. And several meanings than derived from that idea of pain, if you like, one of which was conversely, if you think about it, a fit of laughter which has you in stitches, and that's because you were laughing so hard that you sides phisically hurt. Shakespeare, unsurprisingly, was one of the first to mention  a stitch brought on by laughing so, in Twelfth Night, Maria invites her fellow conspirators to observe Malvolio, and she says, "If you will laugh youselves into stitches, follow me". The stitch that we have when we run follows again this sense of a sharp pain in the side, so it goes back to that stabbing related to stick. The sewing use that we know today, the sort of loops, if you like, loops of thread, came along in the Middle Ages and, again, there is that idea there of puncturing a piece of cloth, if you like, with a needle and then sewing a piece of fabric that way. Not to have a stitch on follows from that idea of clothing, obviously. And there is one other idiom, if you like, in all of this which is to stitch someone up, to frame them or to betray them in some way. Stitching as in swindling has been around in criminal slang for quite a long time. you can find it in, I think, as far back as Victorian times. But to stich up, we only have a records of it from the 1970s. Lots of theories to this one. We talk about being stitched up like a kipper, which might mean the fish that was cut and gutted and then hung up to dry. Or it may be even refer to the kipper tie, in fact, which was very famous in the 1960s, looked a bit like a kipper. It may be an idea of being a sort of confined as if you've being sewn in to your kipper tie. But it's got a long, long trailing history, but wounding someone and puncturing their skin is at the heart of stitch and every single sense that's come after.