Every so often one comes across the idiom for domestic sexual abuse–“your father waiting for you in the toolshed”. Today I managed to turn it up twice–once on Frank Zappa’s Joe’s Garage, in “Fembot in a Wet T-Shirt” (Mary: “I gotta get home!”; Buddy Jones: “Yeh, I know, your father is waiting for you in the tool shed.”); and, of all places, in the Irish avantgarde poet Brian Coffey’s “Headrock” (1971), where it runs:
Was
yourMaagoodchapyourfatherwors
hippedwhenhechasedyourlittles
istertothetoolshed
Anyway, does anyone know how long this (rather disagreeably smirking) idiom has been around & where it originates? --N
Geez, I never heard that. Fathers and sheds to me has always meant being spanked with a switch from the pile in the old woodshed, the way punishements seem to have been traditionally done in the corporal punishment days.
I’d much prefer the beating to what you’re saying…
First of all, a tool shed is not the same thing as a woodshed. A tool shed is usually out back by the barn, or out in the back yard; a woodshed is usually attached to the house, making it more convenient to step out and get more wood in the middle of a blizzard.
I’ve never heard the phrase “Dad’s waiting for you in the woodshed” as referring to sexual abuse. I always understood it to refer to corporal punishment, the woodshed being a sheltered and private place in which to administer a leisurely beating (you couldn’t do it out in the barn because it would upset the animals–dairy cows in particular need peace and quiet).
But not too private–the victim’s cries would be clearly heard inside the house, to serve as an example to all.
And the idiom “to take something out to the woodshed” or “to woodshed this”, frequently found in the world of classical music, means “to work on it very hard”, “to work it over”, “to thrash it out”, not “to sexually abuse”.
Perhaps Frank Zappa and Brian Coffey, both being avant garde poets, were making a deliberate poetic point, in twisting the accepted use of the idiom into something to do with sex, by changing it to read “tool shed” and leering a bit? “Tool shed” is a more modern construction, in both senses of the word, and so is the issue of the sexual abuse of children. In the “woodshed” era, people didn’t talk about it, not even to refer to it obliquely. It was a non-issue.
My WAG would be that the phrase you’re talking about may have even originated with Frank Zappa. I’ve never heard it anywhere else, myself. What year did “Joe’s Garage” come out?