Like hell, like mad, like stink

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Q: What is the origin of the phrase “like stink” (as in “run like stink”)? I know what it means, but not why it means that.

A: “Like stink” has been used colloquially in British English since the early 20th century to mean furiously or intensely. It’s similar to “like hell,” “like mad,” and “like crazy,” intensifiers of a type that dates back to the early 16th century.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest “like stink” example, which we’ve expanded, is from a play set in the trenches of a British Army infantry company during World War I:

“If you see a Minnie coming—that’s a big trench mortar shell, you know—short for Minnywerfe—you see ’em come right out of the Boche trenches, right up in the air, then down, down, down; and you have to judge it and run like stink sometimes.”

(From Journey’s End, by the English playwright R. C. Sherriff. Laurence Olivier starred in the play when it first opened at the Apollo Theatre in London on Dec. 9, 1928.)

The word “like” is used similarly in American as well as British English in many other colloquial expressions that indicate doing something intensely: “run like blazes,” “fight like the dickens,” “write like a house on fire,” and so on.

As the OED explains, “like” is “now typically analysed as a preposition” when used “in proverbial similes,” specifically “in phrases describing an action carried out rapidly, with great vigour or energy, or without restraint or limitation.”

In these colloquial phrases, according to the dictionary, “the complement of like is taken as expressive of vigour, energy, etc., rather than being obviously similative.” You might say that they look like similes and act like adverbs.

The usage dates from at least the early 1500s, as in this OED example about somebody who devours food without restraint, leaving little for his companions to eat:

“One doth another tell / Se how he fedeth, lyke the deuyll of hell / Our parte he eteth nought good shall we tast” (from Egloges, a collection of eclogues, or short poems, written around 1530 by the Anglican priest and poet Alexander Barclay).

The dictionary has two older examples in which “as” is used instead of “like.” The oldest is from The Romance of William of Palerne (circa 1350), an anonymous Middle English translation of Guillaume de Palerme, a French tale written around 1200.

In the part of the tale cited, the Holy Roman Emperor wonders where his daughter is. When told that she isn’t in her chamber, he goes to see for himself and “driues in at þat dore as a deuel of helle” (“rushes in through the door as a devil of hell”).

Finally, we should mention that the energetic sense of “stink” may perhaps have been influenced by the use of the word in the early 19th century for a commotion or a fuss. The first Oxford example for the earlier sense is from a glossary of underworld slang:

“When any robbery of moment has been committed, which causes much alarm, or of which much is said in the daily papers, the family people will say, there is a great stink about it” (New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language, 1812, by James Hardy Vaux).