Get A Handle On

I was trying to update a financial spreadsheet yesterday but ended up losing those magical formulae that total it all up for you. Fortunately I’m married to Mr Tech, who was able to restore them for me. I really need to do some spreadsheet training to help me “get a handle” on how to set them up properly. Never mind that though. How about we take a look and see if we can get a handle on when “get a handle” came into our language?

It seems that where the phrase actually came from is a subject of debate, with one possible idea being from sports. However, it did appear in US English first, initially only with the meaning of “to gain control or influence over”. The OED has a 1901 citation for this.

Most of us use the idiom, though, to mean that we’re trying to understand something, and it would appear that this usage began to take off, certainly in print, in the late 1950s, according to Google Books Ngrams. So, if you’re writing a historical piece set before that time, your characters would be unlikely to say that they’re trying to get a handle on something. Maybe they just tried to understand things back in those days. And, lucky them, they didn’t have to worry about understanding spreadsheets.