Meaning
The seeming ability to turn anything one deals with into success or money - the lucky or skillful knack that makes every venture flourish. The phrase is usually admiring, sometimes envious, and ironists add the reverse Midas touch for people whose every touch curdles. Almost always admiring of financiers and entrepreneurs; remember the myth is a warning, not an endorsement, since Midas nearly starves. Regional use: General English; classical origin.
Origin
Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book XI, tells it: when Dionysus offers King Midas any reward for returning his drunken foster father Silenus, Midas asks that whatever he touches be changed to gold - and immediately regrets it, as his food, his drink, and in later retellings his daughter harden into metal at his touch. Only washing in the river Pactolus, whose golden sands the myth explains, saves him; Aristotle's darker version has him starve. The ability, as Wikipedia notes, came to be called the golden touch or the Midas touch, and Wiktionary records the settled idiom - achieving financial reward or success easily and consistently - with its derived joke, the reverse Midas touch. Leszek Kolakowski used it in Main Currents of Marxism (1976) for acts that turn to gold when a new regime approves them.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- have the Midas touch
- reverse Midas touch
- the golden touch
Usage Examples
- Everything she backed paid off within two years; colleagues swore she had the Midas touch.
- His first three flotations made his name, but the Midas touch deserted him at the supermarket group.
- The reverse Midas touch governs that committee: whatever it approves, from stationery upward, fails.