2 Answers

country bumpkin

Karma: 1665030

Heads Up! The Origin of a Warning Phrase

An informal term for an advance warning, “heads-up” has become increasingly common in political and diplomatic terms. But its origins lie in military drills and baseball practices.

In “John Bumpkin Upon Drill,” a comic theatrical song that the Oxford English Dictionary dates to the 1780s, the title character says, “it were enough to make a cat laugh, to see sarjeant drilling me—‘Heads up! Higher! Still higher!’ ” At the time, “heads up” exhorted soldiers to straighten up and hold their heads high—or more metaphorically, to be courageous and vigilant.

For baseball players around the turn of the 20th century, “heads up” served a more specific purpose: the phrase helped keep the fielding team alert and ready for a ball to come in play. In a 1904 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Giants catcher Roger Bresnahan recounted that he told his fellow players, “Heads up, now!” before they turned a triple play.

As an adjective, “heads up” worked to describe an open-eyed style of play. After a July 1911 game, a sportswriter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer said of the city’s American League team, “As usual, the Naps played ‘heads up’ all the way.” (The Naps were named after their superstar second baseman Nap Lajoie; a few years later, they would change their name to the Indians.)

Aircraft pilots have their own reasons for keeping their heads up. “Heads-up displays,” developed for pilots in the 1960s, let them focus on their surroundings in the sky instead of having to look down at their controls.

By the 1970s, “heads-up” had turned into a stand-alone noun. In a 1977 hearing before a House appropriations subcommittee, Adm. Frederick H. Michaelis explained that the Navy’s work with shipbuilding contractors included ways “to make sure that we have a ‘heads-up’ that a problem is developing.”

“Heads-up” hit it big in business circles around 1996, when Gil Schwartz (using the pen name Stanley Bing) wrote in Fortune that the term had proliferated as a strategy to “deflect criticism, soften reaction and prepare executives for bad news.” Offering a “heads-up” can be a common professional courtesy, but it’s also useful for covering one’s posterior.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/heads-up-the-origins-of-a-warning-phrase-1425665852