Witness Post: Hell or High Water
The derivation of this phrase, “Hell or High Water,” isn’t well known and sometime is caught in obscurity. Was there a major flood at a time in history? Say Noah of Katrina? Was there an ominous time in some part of the world? Does it allude to any time or place in particular? Say Moses and the Red Sea? It doesn’t appear so. It seems that the impressive alliteration refers to some difficult times (hell on Earth), when a person has to dig down deep to overcome adversity (avoiding death from high water).
One of the earliest American references to Hell or High Water appears in the Iowa newspaper, The Burlington Weekly Hawk Eye, from 1882. And the quotation below is from The Little Rock Gazette in the same era. It is a piece that comedian and playwright, Mel Brooks, might call ‘authentic frontier gibberish’: “We’ve had un-revised hell and high water – and ‘a mighty heap of high-water, I tell yer.”
Today the expression is often preceded by the word Come, as in Come Hell or High Water. A street smart kid might emphasize: “Nothin’! Not nobody, not no obstacle, nothing is gonna stop me. Come hell or high water, I’ll be there.”
With the number of books, movies, songs, and expressions that use the term, it will be around for a long time to come. See these examples, and a few jokes with the expression, hell or high water are below:
According to Wikipedia, since 1985, the following arrived on the scene:
- Hell or High Water (film), a 2016 film
- “Hell or High Water” (Prison Break), an episode of Prison Break
- “Hell or High Water”, a song by AC/DC from their 1985 album Fly on the Wall
- “Hell or High Water”, a song by Kiss from their 1987 album Crazy Nights
- “Hell or High Water”, a song by Quiet Riot from their 1995 album Down to the Bone
- “Hell, or High Water”, a song by Woe, Is Me from their 2010 album Number[s]
- “Hell or High Water”, a song by Marc Martel and The Young Canadians which became an unofficial anthem of the 2013 Alberta floods
- Hell or High Water (As Cities Burn album), 2009
- Hell or High Water (Tinsley Ellis album), 2002
- The Hell or High Water EP, a 2010 EP by The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
- Hell or high water clause, a contract that binds the purchaser or lessee to the terms of the contract until the contract’s expiration, even if the terms cause hardship or are impossible
- Hell or Highwater, the side-project of Atreyu’s drummer, Brandon Saller
- Hell or Highwater (album), a 2015 album by David Duchovny
Henry E. Hooper 