Webster’s New World College Dictionary defines the idiomatic expression “pound the pavement” as:
- (US
Slang)
to walk the streets, as in looking for work.
and according to The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms , the expression echoes a similar expression “pound the beat” most often used referring to cops.
- Walk the streets, especially in search of employment. For example, He was fired last year and he's been pounding the pavement ever since. A similar usage is pound a beat, meaning "to walk a particular route over and over"; it is nearly always applied to a police officer. [Early 1900s]
while Green’s Dictionary of Slang mentions a possibly earlier usage which refers to “prostitution”:
pound the pavement (v.):
- [19C+] (US Und., also pound the blocks, walk the pavement, …pave, trudge the street) to work as a street prostitute; thus pavement-pounding adj., street-walking; thus pavement pounder under pavement n.
Questions:
-
Was the “prostitution” sense of the expression the original one from which all other variants derive?
-
Did the “looking for a job” sense develop from the “prostitution job” sense?
and most of all,
- What’s the main meaning of the expression nowadays? Given that the “prostitution” is not cited by other main dictionaries, does it mean that the expression is no longer used in that respect?
(As a side note, in Italian the literal equivalent expression “battere il marciapiede” is used to strictly refer to prostitutes.)
Best Answer
Pavement
Though so obvious as to be overlooked, in order for someone to pound the pavement, there first had to be a pavement to pound. In London, for instance, pedestrian walkways on both sides of a street were uncommon until various 18th c. paving laws went into effect, particularly the 1766 Paving & Lighting Act, which authorized their construction out of Purbeck stone, limestone blocks from a quarry on the island of Purbeck in Devon. Thus in the UK, a pedestrian walkway along a street is still called a pavement.
The earliest attestations in popular literature of the often hyperbolic and always alliterative expression are indeed British:
There is no reason to assume that these isolated occurrences had anything to do with one another except their authors’ clever turn of phrase, and they certainly didn’t start a trend in popular language. It was only in America that the expression became part of a common urban vocabulary still current today.
In the coastal cities of the mid-Atlantic states, pavement could also mean a pedestrian walkway:
Today, this a usage now limited — along with hoagies, soft pretzels, and a curious pronunciation of water — to the city of Philadelphia. Otherwise, what the British call a pavement, Americans call a sidewalk, most likely because in the same time period, most American sidewalks, if they existed at all, were not paved with brick or stone, but made of wood.
Burlington WI, 1880s. Source: burlingtonhistory.org
Police Pound the Pavement
In the closing decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the American expression appears in the daily press as a fairly common one, especially in reference to New York police — so often in fact that one could imagine the expression originated as police jargon and spread to more general usage:
A slightly slangier version shortens pavement to pave:
The proverbial Irish policeman did not, however, bring the expression across the Atlantic. Irish English has long preferred sidewalk to pavement:
An infrequent variant translates pavement to General American sidewalk, here in two Midwestern newspapers: the first gives new rules for Detroit reporters in police headquarters; in the second a Chicago police commissioner demotes an officer to a beat cop:
A beat as a regularly travelled route dates from 1713, so it’s no surprise that policemen would get around to pounding one. Journalists, however, didn’t cover beats until 1875.
Not Just the Police
Anyone whose employment, recreation, or other purpose required extensive walking could also pound the pavement — “sandwich men” (sandwich board advertising), newsboys, letter carriers, salespeople, union organizers, people canvassing for an election, clergy calling on parishioners, and —the most frequent usage today — people walking from business to business looking for work. The notion that the expression originated as a euphemism for prostitution and then spread to general use thus seems a bit far fetched.
And while public safety might require a distinction between walking on a sidewalk and a street or roadway, it makes no difference at all to how one understood the expression pound the pavement, since the activity itself is topical, not its specific location. Americans could use the expression whether they understood pavement as a sidewalk or a road surface.
Pavement Pounders
The agent noun version of pound the pavement can refer to anyone engaged in that activity.
A far more modern pavement pounder is a customized car, truck, or motorcycle, which inspired a whole line of Mattel Hot Wheels toys:
Other modern usages include a 5K race in North Carolina and a charity walk and run race in Syracuse NY as well as distance runners or joggers who might participate in such races. It is also the name of a Pilsner from a craft brewery in Lansing MI, which I assume references the muscle cars that inspired Mattel.
Note that in contrast to earlier usages, some modern pavement pounders are things and activities, not just people.
Prostitutes
Among earlier pavement pounders is a representative of the oldest profession:
I’m not sure if anyone followed this particular suggestion, but pavement pounder did make an appearance in slang dictionaries. Green’s Dictionary of Slang suggests a date in the 1920s for this usage. This echoes an earlier dictionary, which unfortunately does not date its entries:
Green also suggests that prostitutes pounded the pavement as early as the 19th c., but the earliest attestation I could find was from 1942:
A prostitute who only serviced regular clients writing in 2005 that she was never a pavement pounder suggests the expression is still current in some circles.
Since the online version of Green’s reveals attestations only to subscribers, I would assume that prostitutes pounded the pavement around the same time as those engaged in more savory pursuits. That some sex workers solicited their customers on public streets and sidewalks is hardly novel: streetwalker is attested since the 1590s.
As Jonathon Green notes in an earlier work, the French pavé, ‘pavement’ in the American sense, “made the usual acknowledgment of ‘naughty’ Paris.” The French also appears in the rather fanciful 19th c. nymph of the pavé as a euphemism for prostitute. And in case you’re wondering, a sidewalk, trottoir, figures in a number of 19th c. French expressions: une femme de trottior, ‘woman of the sidewalk’ could faire le trottoir, ‘do the sidewalk’ or simply aller au trottoir, ‘walk the pavement’ in the British sense. This connection even made into Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:
Conclusion
With a few isolated instances in British English, pound the pavement emerges in American English as a common expression near the turn of the 20th c. While its current meaning has not completely narrowed to denoting a job search, this is likely the usage with which most Americans are familiar.
Police officers can still pound a beat as they did in earlier times, though pavement-pounding jobseekers far outnumber the police in modern usage.
The alliteration in pound the pavement, certainly a factor in the expression’s longevity, proved irresistible to an 1888 Los Angeles headline writer:
Los Angeles Daily Herald, 30 August 1888.
In American newspapers and periodicals from the 1880s to the 1920s, it was police who most often pounded the pavement, such that one could suspect that the expression originated among beat cops or those describing them. Common to most earlier usages, and certainly to those in the 21st c., is a sense of purpose: today one pounds the pavement to find employment, increase sales contacts and customers, or to solve a crime, even if the telephone and internet are more involved than actual footwork.