I see the phrase “Up to [my, our, your, their, etc.] eyeballs in debt” used a lot on this message board and elsewhere on the innernets. As far as I can tell, the term originated in a Lending Tree commercial around 2005. It’s now the go-to expression when talking about personal debt and it seemingly originated with a fairly boring commercial. Does anyone remember the expression being used before the commercial came out? I don’t mean just “up to my eyeballs in ___”, I’m asking specifically about debt.
My WAG is it’s been used ever since people had both eyeballs and debt.
My WAG is the the expression “Up to ___ eyeballs in …” much precedes the existence of financial debt.
It’s definitely way older than that commercial. I personally remember it as far back as the 1970s.
Searching on google books I found a reference to it in a 1959 issue of Life magazine.
Life - Jan 15, 1959, page 120
I’ll see if I can find an earlier one than that.
I didn’t find any with “eyeballs” earlier than 1959, but there are plenty with “eyes”.
This is the oldest one I’ve been able to find.
Pizarro; a Spanish rolla-king Peruvian drama: a burlesque, in one act - Page 36
Charles James Collins - 1856
And if you are willing to allow a bit more variation:
Woman’s wit & man’s wisdom: or, Intrigue - Page 25
Henrietta Rouvière Mosse - 1827
I’ve always assumed it was a euphemism for “up to my ass in debt”.
Try searching again and leaving out ‘eye’.
NGram shows it started being using in the mid-1950s.
“Up to his ass in debt” wasn’t in print, at least, until after “up to his eyeballs in debt” had already appeared in print:
“Ears” in this expression seems to be far older. To be precise, the phrase was “over his head and ears in debt”:
The first one that I see in the Google Ngram list comes from 1673:
But that’s only half the debt. I think eyes/eye balls isn’t a euphemism for anything and that it is supposed to evoke the feeling of standing in water that very nearly over your head.
The OED has “up to the eyeballs” and variants as a colloquialism meaning “deeply, totally, to an extreme degree”, with citations dating back to 1912. That’s a reference to drunkenness(“saturated to the eye-balls”), and then there’s “poxed up to the eyeballs” from 1933. There’s no citation with a financial sense until 1986 (“borrowers who are wary of gearing themselves up to the eyeballs”).
Like Richard Pearse, I see no reason to understand this euphemistically.
There are uses going back to the eighteenth and even the seventeenth centuries of the phrase “to be over one’s head and ears in X,” where sometimes this was meant literally and sometimes figurately:
One use of this phrase was “over one’s head and ears in debt.” Apparently in the early twentieth century this mutated into “up to one’s eyeballs” and one use of it was “up to one’s eyeballs in debt.”
Thanks for all the replies. I’d heard the phrase “up to his eyeballs in __” and “up to his ass in ___” growing up, but never for debt. I guess the term has been around for decades at least, though.
Why the repetition? Where did the folks in the 17th century keep their ears?