[A humble request: If you can, please donate to help me carry on tracing word histories. Thank you.]
Of American-English origin, the colloquial phrase to sit on one’s hands means:
– (of an audience, an assembly, etc.): to withhold, or be sparing of, applause;
– to be inactive, to take no action.
These are, in chronological order, the earliest occurrences of the phrase to sit on one’s hands that I have found:
1-: From a letter to the Editor, entitled “Now: Cheer Me Again!”, by ‘Bric-A-Brac’, published in The Morristown Gazette (Morristown, Tennessee, USA) of Wednesday 19th June 1878 [page 1, column 6]:
I have been at another Commencement. (Did you ever observe how these blessed anniversaries elongate at the close of each term?) This last commencement was “Mountain View High School,” a concern located a bow-shot from Rose Hill Academy, and nestling under the wing of our Methodist brethren […].
[…]
Enclosed please find printed programme. […]
We will say forty feet of space, occupied by “the rostrum” (don’t say “stage,” that’s abominable). Divide that rostrum into three parts equally […]. Then, when you get that thing into your noddles, seat at the rear of the stage a half dozen bald-headed intellectuals, interspersed with a bakers’ dozen of students, sitting on their hands; and then, if you can’t get an idea of the surroundings of Mountain View, Radway’s Ready Relief won’t cure toothache.
2-: From The Cheyenne Daily Leader (Cheyenne, Wyoming, USA) of Thursday 14th June 1883 [page 4, column 3]:
SOUTHERN TOWNS.
The Ups and Downs of Prominent Places.
[…]George Alfred Townsend reports the following interview with a prominent southern railroad man:
[…]
Said I: “What is the state of Mobile?”
“Mobile has got the dry rot. There is no accounting for the decline of a city like that except upon the admission that the great body of the white people must for years past have been sitting on their hands waiting for something to turn up. That country which raised Mobile to her importance can still produce results, but there has been a decline of energy there upon the foolish hopes growing out of politics.”
3-: From The Cleveland Leader (Cleveland, Ohio, USA) of Monday 27th August 1894 [page 4, column 1]:
Of course President Cleveland could not sign the tariff bill so long as Congress was sitting on his hands. Congress will get off to-morrow, but the signature will not then be necessary. The bill will become a law without it, even though it is perfidious and dishonorable.
4-: From the Cleveland Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio, USA) of Sunday 11th January 1903 [Part Three: Sunday Magazine, page 8, column 5]—reprinted from the New York Sun:
Feelings of Singers Hurt.
Not Enough Applause at the Opera to Please Them—Attitude of the Audiences at the Metropolitan Opera House.The conduct of the audiences at the Metropolitan opera house furnishes a topic for interesting speculation every season. It is chiefly the extreme apathy of the persons seated in the orchestra stalls that arouses the astonishment of enthusiastic observers. These wonder why people who apparently take so little interest in the opera should spend their time and money on it.
[…]
[…] The coldness of the audience has its effect on the artists. It was only the other evening that one of the tenors was walking up and down the hallway by the entrance to the stage.
“Those people out there are as cold as pigs’ noses,” he said in disgust. “What is the matter with them? Are they deaf or sitting on their hands?”
5-: From the column Amusements, published in The Daily Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana, USA) of Tuesday 2nd February 1904 [page 3, column 5]:
The New Bill at the Orpheum.
[…]
[…] Alf Holt came on to do his mimic turn, and […] would have made a hit with his imitation of a trolley car in motion, only that he secured a conductor from the Orleans Line, who understood nothing but the Creole language. You are not going to sit on your hands through Holt’s act.
6-: From the column Amusements, published in The Daily Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana, USA) of Tuesday 1st March 1904 [page 4, column 6]:
The New Bill at the Orpheum.
If some of the dark-skinned patrons of the Orpheum have convulsions in the upper galleries this week, it will happen when the Nichols Sisters are doing their stunt. […] They darken up as two coal-black damsels, come on, sing a song or two, do a little conversation, and if you are sitting on your hands, this is where you get off and contribute to the applause.
7-: From the column Amusements, published in The Daily Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana, USA) of Tuesday 18th October 1904 [page 12, column 5]:
The New Bill at the Orpheum.
You are finding one of those good old hurry shows at the Orpheum this week—one of the kind that does not permit the jolters to sit on their hands, except for a few minutes. With the curtain up and the first turn, there came liberal hands, which increased as the numbers rolled along. As a rule, the Monday-nighters do not care to carry the numbers along, but last night several of the turns were good for come-back calls.
