Phillip II: “If we head you off at the pass, Sparta will be destroyed!”
Spartan: “If.”
Right? I wish someone could show me a map about how this is supposed to work. Maybe using a telegraph or smoke signals to alert a posse already near the pass?
I’m glad to see that everyone has been thinking about this overnight.
I had been thinking that the phrase might have showed up in the copious western pop literature before the movies, or perhaps in silent movie intertitles. (I’m not the one to claim that the first appearance of the phrase was in 1930 – the IMDB page was). And only a decade earlier isn’t enough time for a phrase to become regarded as a cliche, as it was being called in 1939 or 1940.
But you can’t assert that it DID first appear in such places without a definite reference to examples, just as you can’t simply assert that Hopalong Cassidy said it without showing me a case.
And this I have not yet been able to find. I’ve searched through sites like Google Books for a pre-1930 source without luck. Google Ngram shows the phrase taking of about 1940, with few examples prior to this. I’ll grant that the penny dreadfuls and dime novels are grossly underrepresented in these sources, mainly because so few survived. But if this really was a widely-used cliche you’d expect it to show up in some surviving examples.
Western pulp magazines concurrent with silent films might be a fruitful hunting ground; many have been scanned and put online since they’re all now in the public domain. The writing is usually pretty horrible…and racist and sexist and gratuitously violent, so I don’t envy anyone the task.
https://cowboycollective.cc/pulp/
I think the idea is that those who are being pursued are going to use the well known pass. The locals know a harder and less known, but shorter way to get there. So by the time the quarry has navigated to and through the pass, the hunters have already gotten ahead and are waiting for them.
It would require specific conditions, as well as asymmetric geographic knowledge to pull off, but maybe it actually happened once somewhere.
Not exactly the same thing, but I observe that at Thermopylae (which I cited in the OP) the Greek traitor Ephialtes is supposed to have pointed out the “goat path” called the Anopaea Pass to the Persians, which they used to outflank the defending Spartans – sort of a case of taking a “long cut” instead of a “short cut”, but an alternate route, in any case.
(Aside – this is the guy who’s depicted in the movie 300 as being very deformed, who betrays the Greeks because they won’t let him fight, andthe Persians treat him like a soldier. I don’t believe there’s a Greek tradition of Ephialtes being deformed, but it’s a depiction within the Greek tradition of portraying traitors that way. In the Iliad the cowardly soldier Thersites is depicted as bow-legged and lame and sunken-chested, with a mangy head.)
There’s also the notion that the pass is kind of a restricted place- there’s no way around for their foes if they can head them off at the pass. A bottleneck in their path, so to speak.
I’m still having a hard time understanding the phrase.
Is a “pass” synonymous “trail”? If so, does it refer to the their trail, or my trail?
And what does “head them off” mean? Does it mean ambush & attack them? Or does it mean to chase them away?
A pass is a low spot where a mountain range can be crossed.
“Head them off” means “get there first”.
In cattle driving, you head off a stampeding herd by getting alongside the lead bull. Once you control the direction of the leader, the rest of the herd will follow.
No, typically a pass is a narrow passage through the mountains. There’s usually no way around it so people are required to go through that point. It channels the travelers to a restricted area which can be easily blocked.
So if I am pursuing them, they are taking the pass, and I am taking an alternate route?
The general idea of the cliche is, the pass is the only route out of the area, so you know where they’re headed and you have a predictable interception point. They take the road which leads to the pass, and you set out overland and attempt to get to the pass entrance before they do.
It’s not that you’re taking some kind of magic shortcut that lets you bypass the, uh, pass and meet them on the other side as they exit, it’s that you’re waiting for them when they get to it.
Which is why “head em off at the pass” makes no sense. If there’s no other way around, how are you going to get ahead of them?
I was watching an episode of Star Trek: TNG last night where a scientist has created some kind of wave that can carry a ship at warp speeds without the ship being warp capable. Naturally the test goes out of control and they need to get out in front of the rogue wave so they can blow stuff up in front of it to disperse it. And I told my wife “they need to head it off at the pass” but she didn’t get the joke.
I’ve always taken it to mean that there is no easy or well known way around, and so by traveling light and knowing the terrain, they can make it across the mountain in time to be waiting for them as the quarry emerges from the pass through the mountains.
In any case, the idiomatic meaning is clear, to take a shortcut to get ahead of something you are chasing.
Yea, regardless of anything else, you would think they they - the bad people I am pursuing - would take the shortest (or more precisely, fastest) path. Which means it wouldn’t be possible for me to intercept them.
The bad guys will take the fastest route that they know about, and that they are equipped to travel.
You might know of a shortcut that they don’t know.
Your horses might be able to go cross-country, while their wagons are restricted to an easier, but more winding road.
They might have a large group, and have to keep pace with their slowest member, while you can speed ahead, and set up a sniper nest at the entrance to the pass.
I see it less of a matter of, “They are getting away, what do we do?”
“I know, let’s head them off at the pass!”
“Wow, I never would have thought of that!”
And more a matter of, “They are getting away, what do we do?”
“Well, they are loaded down with the loot that they stole, along with the provisions they need to survive out here in the wilderness, and they are riding the horses they rode in on. We have fresh horses, and are only carrying a rifle and ammo. I know a shortcut through the mountains that we would be able to navigate, and that would let us head them off at the pass that they have to go through.”
If it ever actually happened, it was a particular situation to be taken advantage of, not a general tactic that would apply to all situations.
Here’s a Google books cite that puts the expression at least back to 1901…
Edited to add: belay that, it looks like google might have the date wrong. Back to the searches.
There is a cite to an 1856 work “Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland” that uses the phrase “cut off at the pass” which is pretty close:
and caused great slaughter and loss of men upon Mac Quillin and Robert ; and those that made their escape from the [ territory of ] Duibhthrian were almost all cut off at the Pass of Newcastle .
If I wanted to cut a gang off at a pass, I’d aim for the way out and establish a roadblock there. Then they’d be trapped in the pass and could be dealt with from two directions, front and back.
Just like that 40-mile-long column of vehicles this time last year.