Practising today for my forthcoming role as radgie gadgie, I was having a little rant about modern youth: "they don't know they're born!"
This seems to me rather a strange phrase to describe someone who is, or appears to be, more fortunate than others feel is just or seemly; after all, everyone realises they were born at some point (one hopes). So does anyone know how this phrase came about? Searching the internets provides lots of examples of usage, but no hint of the origin, of this phrase.
Best Answer
As far as I can tell from Google Books, this is an exclusively British idiom. It is used of those (primarily the rich and the young) who enjoy freedom from want or responsibility and behave as if they are unconscious that they were merely born into this freedom and that others (the poor and adults) are not so fortunate.
The earliest appearance of the phrase in the Google Books corpus is in the works of Eden Phillpotts, who uses it in five different novels published between 1912 and 1919. In the earliest of these it seems already to be proverbial, in a sense very close to today's usage:
In later works Phillpotts extends the sense to broader deficiencies of consciousness:
But in 1919 he seems to revert to the narrower sense:
It appears to me that the phrase emerges around the beginning of the 20th century, with pretty much its current meaning. As to where it came from, I suspect evangelical Christianity's emphasis on mankind's being born into sin and misery—"Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward" Job 5:7—plays a large role, as in this hymn, from an 1806 collection reprinted throughout the 19th century:
The root meaning seems to be "They don't know what they're born to".