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Reader question: Please explain “spitting image” in this headline (DailyMail.co.uk, March 28, 2017): Nicole Kidman’s young daughters Sunday Rose and Faith Margaret are the spitting image of their famous mother as the family stroll through Sydney Airport. My comments: This means Sunday Rose and Faith Margaret both take after their mother, Nicole Kidman the Australian actress. They both look like their mother, almost exactly. That’s what “spitting image” means. Here are two plausible and logical theories regarding the origin of “spitting image”, logical, that is, to the English native speaker, some of them at least. According to one theory, if someone looks exactly like their father or mother, people would say that they appear to have been spat out of their parents’ mouth directly. This, from Phrases.org.uk: That idea, if not the exact phrase, was in circulation by the end of the 17th century, when George Farquhar used it in his comic play Love and a bottle, 1689: “Poor child! He’s as like his own dadda as if he were spit out of his mouth.” Apparently, some parents in earlier times must have been explaining to their babies that they were born this way. Sounds impossibly illogical to the Chinese ear, I’m sure but that’s expected, isn’t it, when you study and learn about a foreign language? A second theory, on the other hand, has nothing to do with saliva. According to this theory, “spit” should be “spirit”. According to them, some day in the past somebody must have remarked “Well, this boy is the spirit and image of his father” or something like it but people didn’t hear it clearly and thought he said “spit image” instead. | 
