How did the expression "hands down" come to mean "without a doubt?"
Best Answer
The phrase hands down comes from horse racing, as explained by The Phrase Finder:
Jockeys need to keep a tight rein in order to encourage their horse to run. Anyone who is so far ahead that he can afford to slacken off and still win he can drop his hands and loosen the reins - hence winning 'hands down'.
"Let's not worry about that until further down the road," and "Let's cross that bridge when we get to it" are two ways to idiomatically express "Let's defer that until later, and stay focused on the topic at hand right now."
The phrasing you gave sounds like a combination of those two idiomatic expressions - be it inadvertent or deliberate (much like when someone says "ginormous")
In A Dictionary of Hiberno-English: The Irish Use of English by Terence Patrick Dolan there is the entry: arm. Here we can read: "He came home with one arm as long as the other (i.e., without any kind of present ...)".
One arm as long as the other Basically turning up somewhere with nothing to give when something is expected. i.e coming to a party
empty handed. Irish in origin
Jim: "Dave arrived in late to the wedding yesterday, the clown" John: "Typical. Did he bring a pressie" Jim: "Not at all, arrived in with one arm as long as the other [emphasis added]"
So, Spanish expression "llegar con las manos colgando" seems perfectly equivalent to English "one arm as long as the other".
Best Answer
The phrase hands down comes from horse racing, as explained by The Phrase Finder:
And confirmed by Etymonline:
I found this antedating of the phrase from The New Sporting Magazine, 1855:
And I found examples of the phrase being used figuratively in other contests by the early 1880s.