What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Absent-minded professor’?
The archetype of the absent-minded professor actually wasn’t a professor at all but a Greek philosopher. Plato recorded an incident involving the philosopher Thales in Theaetetus, circa 369BC. The story (and it probably is just a story) is that Thales absent-mindedly fell into a pit while walking along gazing at the stars.
The genial and, as it happens, far from absent-minded
British professor Heinz Wolff is the image most
people have of an absent-minded professor.
The great English scientist and bone-fide genius Sir Isaac Newton also had a reputation of being so engrossed in his work as to forget the niceties of life, even to the point of forgetting to eat for days at a time. The obsessiveness of Newton’s approach to his work, and other recorded behaviour, suggests that he had Asperger’s Syndrome. While post-mortem diagnosis is a dangerous game, Newton’s behaviour throughout his life fits strongly with the known symptoms of Asperger’s. Perhaps ‘Asperger’s-minded’ would be a reasonable alternative name for this type of absent-minded behaviour.
More recently, Albert Einstein has become the poster boy for the absent-minded professor type. This is probably more to do with his unruly hairstyle than anything about his personality, which was anything but unworldly.
Despite having examples of ‘absent-minded professor’ types over the millennia the term itself is quite modern.
There is a reference to an absent-minded professor in a medical textbook published by Freeman Bumstead in 1859 but this appears to be a literal reference to a professor who had forgotten something rather than the meaning we now give to the phrase.
The first use that I know of ‘absent-minded professor’ being used in the way we now use it is from a feeble joke published in the US newspaper the Argus and Patriot, October 1861:
An absent minded professor, in going out of the gateway of his college, ran against a cow; in the confusion of the moment he raised his hat and exclaimed: “I beg your pardon, madame.” Soon after he stumbled against a lady in the street; in sudden recollecting his former mishap, he called out: “Is that you again you brute?”
The joke may be less than hilarious but it was reprinted in numerous American newspapers in 1861 and it seems highly likely that a new phrase in the language was coined there and then.