The perils of getting stuck in the knitting

Common phrase in business dates back more than a century to the Spanish-American War

I’m not an expert on the origin of phrases or etymology — so rather than write about a particular controversy at Toronto City Hall revolving around the meaning of a seemingly sexist phrase, Deputy Mayor Denzil Minnan-Wong might tell me I should “stick to my knitting.”

Or maybe he’d put it differently, after the week he’s had.

Minnan-Wong was quoted last week saying he hoped that the next chief planner of the city would “stick to the knitting” rather than wading into public debates on social media.

The phrase typically means something similar to “mind your own business,” “tend your own garden” or “stay in your lane.”

Some people took exception to his choice of words — in particular, saying that it was a sexist phrase, given that knitting is traditionally considered a feminine activity. Among them was the obvious target of his criticism, outgoing chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat.

“He might as well have told me to go back to the kitchen,” Keesmaat said on Thursday morning in an interview on CBC radio. “I think it’s a deeply offensive comment.”

She wasn’t alone in that interpretation, with councillors Mary-Margaret McMahon, Mike Layton and Joe Cressy publicly joining her in hearing it as a variation of “stick to women’s stuff” — perhaps a folksier version of the internet-misogynist favourite “make me a sandwich.”

After the outcry that bubbled up, Mayor John Tory called the comment inappropriate.

Minnan-Wong said his words had been taken out of context. “However, I unreservedly apologize to Ms. Keesmaat or anyone else who may have taken offence.”

But his claim that he didn’t intend it as a gendered comment — he also used the phrase publicly in 2012 in regards to a man, then-chief medical officer of health Dr. David McKeown, for example — has plenty of defenders. The same defence is brought out every year or two when a similar controversy erupts here or elsewhere over the use and interpretation of the phrase, as a quick Google search shows.

They point out that the phrase is in fairly common use in the business and startup community, most often employed not as an insult to others but as a piece of advice or even a self-applied mantra. Executives and entrepreneurs tend to use the phrase as a warning to themselves not to be distracted or to overly diversify their businesses — in this context saying “we should stick to our knitting” as a synonym for “let’s keep our eyes on the prize.”

It was likely most popularized in that way because of the widely read 1982 management book In Search of Excellence, by Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr., which has an entire chapter entitled “Stick to the Knitting,” a principle the authors say is one of eight themes common to successful companies.

But the use of the phrase in this way seems to stretch back more than a century. In an online language and usage forum at the website StackExchange.com, a user named Sven Yargs cited published examples of the phrase and variations of it in books stretching back to the late 1800s.

For example, in 1898, he finds the book The Pharmaceutical Era, advising advertisers not to put the Spanish-American War into their ads: “As much as we admire the drum major, we should remember that there is the quartermaster somewhere in the rear, who in the din and glory of battle, must remain unrattled and calmly figure out problems of bean rations and army mules. He must attend strictly to business, and the advertiser must do the same. There is a homely old injunction, which originated in our homespun days, which the advertiser might recall. It is this: ‘Stick to your knitting.’ ”

Similar examples are found around the same time and in the decades that follow. Yargs cites another typical example from 1918’s proceedings of the National Safety Council: “My advice to all men is to stick to your knitting and take care of your committees.”

Interestingly, Yargs finds that a much earlier, similar phrase, “attend to your knitting,” has an unmistakably gendered meaning — offered as stunningly demeaning advice to wives tempted to offer advice to their husbands in an 1839 issue of Evangelical Magazine: “Your mind is too feeble, your discernment too contracted, your general ignorance vastly too great to become my adviser! — attend to your knitting and sewing, look after the cooking, take care of the children — for these are all the subjects which you have ability to comprehend!”

This meaning appears to be what Keesmaat and others understood MinnanWong to mean when he spoke recently. The other meaning, the one men in business often apply to themselves, is what Minnan-Wong claims to have intended.

I don’t see a reason to doubt him, necessarily. In my research and conversations about this, the world seems to be divided into people unfamiliar with the phrase who think it is obviously sexist upon hearing it and those who are very familiar with the phrase and are astonished to learn anyone would think it is sexist.

But that divide points to a good reason Minnan-Wong and others may want to retire it from their rhetorical arsenals — especially if they are using it as an insult.

An analogy or expression of speech is only useful if it helps you to make your point more clearly and elegantly. If half of your audience takes you to mean something different, and far more offensive, than you intend, then your turn of phrase is hurting rather than helping your cause.

And if you need to spend hours explaining the meaning and history of a term in your own defence, you have lost any semblance of elegance or clarity, and you have missed the chance to make your point.

You could say your yarn spins out of control. Or that you lose your needle in a haystack. Or that your stitches get twisted.

Or you could just stick to your . . . uh, area of expertise.