Where did the expression "saved my butt" come from

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Where did the expression "saved my butt" come from?

People say things like "Dad just saved my butt" why do they say this? Why not dad saved me leg? or Dad saved my arm?

Android

I could never figure that one out.

probably the same place "skin of your teeth" came from.

Probably developed by the same guy who places so much value on his right nut over his left one where he's so willing to give up the left one in order to do or get something cool (eg, I'd give my left nut to...)

long ago in some war an enemy soldier shot an arrow at someones butt, then another soldier blocked it with his shield, then the guy said "thanks you saved my butt".

so thats where it came from. yep

it's a version of 'saved my a**'...
Probably military, they have a preoccupation with things like that..

Other expressions like

"Get your butt to Mars,"

"Kicking butt and taking names,"

indicate how the human posterior, figurately speaking,is linguistic and cultural shorthand for oneself, the entirety of oneself. If I'm talking about my skinny white butt, I'm referring to me as a skinny white male human. Oh, isn't language wonderful?

My favourite comes from Samuel L. Jackson in Jurassic Park:

(smoking a cigarette) "Hold onto your butts."

[quote="digger1"]probably the same place "skin of your teeth" came from.[quote]

Technically, the skin of your teeth is the enamel on them.

I was thinking that some guy was smoking and the he threw a cigarette butt on the ground, but then another guy came by and picked it up and put it in his pocket, so the first guy said "You saved my butt".

At the 1992 Olympics, Kris Akabussi of Great Britain said of Kevin Young of the United States following the Americans 400 hurdles victory, "Kevin dropped it in my butt," equivalent, I suppose, to "He kicked my butt."

"The second circuit, the emotional-territorial networks of the brain, is concerned entirely with power politics. This "patriotic" circuit is built into all vertebrates and is perhaps 500 million to 1000 million years old. In the modern human it seems to be centralized in the thalamus—the "back brain" or "old brain" and is linked with the voluntary nervous system and the muscles.
...
Another primate wrote that every primate infant goes through a stage of being chiefly concerned with bio-survival, i.e., food. He called this the Oral Stage. He said the infant next went on to a stage of learning mammalian politics, i.e., recognizing the Father (alpha-male) and his Authority and territorial demands. He called this, with an insight that few primates shared, the Anal Stage. This primate was named Freud. He had taken his own nervous system apart and examined its component circuits by periodically altering its structure with neurochemicals.
...
Persons (extreme cases) who take the heaviest imprint on this territorial-emotional circuit tend to be musculotonic. That is, they hold most of their attention and energy, in the muscular attack-defense systems and grow up medium weight—heavy enough to be hard to knock down, light enough to be quick and sinewy. Often, they become body-builders, weight-lifters etc. and have an extraordinary absorption in demonstrating their strength. (Even shaking hands with them, you get the message that they are not exchanging amity but demonstrating power.) Most societies shunt these types into the military where their propensities are put to proper ethological use, defending the tribal turf. The anal orientation of this circuit explains the oddity of military speech first noted by Norman Mailer: "ass" means one's whole self and "s**t" means all surrounding circumstance."
- Robert Anton Wilson, _Prometheus Rising_, chapter 4 - The Anal Emotional Territorial Circuit

i don't know, but it is funny! kinda like "i lost my ass in Las Vegas." or "she ditched his ass at the theater back there.". I picture a butt laying on the ground with no body attached....

Solipsism-tastic!