I have it on good authority that it originates from 1978’s Debbie Does Dallas.
I was gonna say, from Rocky to Plutarch’s Life of Caesar – this is why I love the Straight Dope!
On the other hand, several accounts of the Battle of Gettysburg describe some of the Confederate troops who retreated after the failed Pickett’s Charge walking slowly and defiantly backwards, their faces to the Union lines, so that they wouldn’t be shot in the back (which would indicate cowardice to those who recovered their bodies).
Well, that’s one theory. However we shouldn’t discount the vanity motivation out of hand. Frankly, a glance at Civil War-era photographs suggests that, for a lot of these guys, the face was probably not the most attractive part of the body.
Faciem ne tetigite!
(lit. Don’t touch the face!)
Aw, shucks, guys…
[blushes furiously]
Or noli{te} faciem tangere. noli, “be unwilling”, and the infinitive is a common negative instruction in Latin, falling in peremptoriness of tone between the direct imperative as in Diomedes’s example and the milder iussive subjunctive. Impatiens noli-me-tangere is the touch-me-not plant.
I found a literary reference that dates to 1948. There is a Frank Yerby novel called the Golden Hawk where the hero is lusted after by a Moorish prince. During a battle the prince has his men isolate the hero and capture him, but with specific orders not to mess up his face. Throughout the battle (while the moors are trying not to kill him or mess up his face) the moor Lt. is shouting, “not the face, not the face” to his men).
For what it is worth, two things came out of the fight in the book. First the hero gained an incredible reputation as a fighter among his own people. His allies didn’t know about the order to not kill him so they see all these guys going after him and him killing all these moors and thus see him as this indistructable killing machine. The other thing was that his body was so marred by the little wonds inflicted by the moors that the Moorish prince was physically sickened by all the scars on his body when he saw him naked so the hero was never, well, deflowered.
To every cloud there is a silver lining.
I beat you by 2,000 years. Nyah, nyah!
There’s a great variation at the beginning of Saturday Night Fever, when Tony tells his Dad to “watch the hair”.
This is why the Dope is the best place on the internet.