When people find themselves ‘at loggerheads’

When I hear the phrase at loggerheads, I imagine two huge sea turtles nose to nose, each refusing to move. 

At sixes and sevens reminds me of an old math joke: Why did six run away from seven? Because seven ate nine! 

These two idioms, meaning “in the midst of a strong disagreement,” actually have nothing to do with either sea turtles or math jokes, though that would be fun. Linguists aren’t exactly sure how they originated but have some interesting theories.      

Loggerhead was originally an insult, “a thick-headed or stupid person,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It was coined in the 16th century, around the same time and along the same lines as blockhead. 

It’s easy to interpret blockhead – it’s a person who is, metaphorically, “thick as a block of wood” – but what is a loggerhead? The OED explains that logger conveys “the notion of something heavy and clumsy,” such as a “block of wood fastened to the leg of a horse to prevent it straying.” A loggerhead is thus as “thick as a logger” – a more confusing than hurtful epithet today.  

A loggerhead was also a kind of long iron spoon with a large heavy bowl, used by sailors to melt tar to seal boats. 

It’s unclear how we got from loggerhead as either insult or spoon to our current sense of at loggerheads. Early examples have people “coming” or “falling” to loggerheads, as if blows are being exchanged. Perhaps, the OED speculates, people actually fought using the heavy spoons as weapons, and thus at loggerheads came to describe a state of intractable disagreement.  

At sixes and sevens probably comes from medieval games of dice. According to the OED, a person who “set at cinque and sice” (the numbers 5 and 6 in French, in ye olde English spelling) was wagering money or property on rolls of the dice. When English number names were used, it became “set on six and seven.” It seems that the particular numbers didn’t matter – it was the wagering that was the issue. Renaissance texts recount instances of people who bet all they had and lost a house, their clothing, and so on.  

Perhaps due to the disastrous consequences of betting in this way, at sixes and sevens came to mean “in great disorder,” as in “the toddlers left the living room at sixes and sevens.” More recently, it has morphed, like at loggerheads, into another way to say “at odds, in disagreement.” That is how it’s used in the song from the musical “Evita” that’s been running through my head: “dressed up to the nines / At sixes and sevens with you. ... Don’t cry for me, Argentina.”