'Go to Jericho' Revisited: Privacy or Perdition?

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LETTERS by Hebert Clayton, J. Holden Michael, and W. I. R. V. in a Notes and Queries of 19 January 1901 (9th S. vii. 55) explain that prior definitions of the phrase ‘go to Jericho’, including the one offered in a note by F. Marcham in the previous Notes and Queries (405), fail to include its use as a mild expletive: the wish for a disliked person to dwell in an unusually warm location a little south of the Earth's core. When referring not to spiritual cosmography but the town located in Palestine, the phrase still wishes someone off to an unappealing, because dangerous, place. This sense may be attributed to the tale of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30), who helps a man just robbed of his belongings, including the clothes on his person, on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. These entries notwithstanding, the OED defines the slang use of ‘Jericho’ as ‘a place of retirement or concealment, or a place far distant and out of the way’, and traces the etymology of this usage to 2 Samuel 10:5, where David instructs his ambassadors, just humiliated by King Hamun of Ammon, to wait until their beards have grown (it does not cite 1 Chronicles 19:5). As the earlier Notes and Queries referred to above and an entry in the Advertiser Notes and Queries of 1 September 1883 (by ‘the Wizard’; 87–8) show, the attribution of Jericho as a private place also derives from stories of Henry VIII's liaisons with women at Jericho Priory, a country retreat at Blackmore in Essex.