Meaning
To be scandalized by events occurring after one's death - the deceased's final protest, registered by rotation. The phrase imagines the corpse as the one honest critic left above or below ground, and borrows that authority for the living. Rhetorical rather than superstitious in modern use - an appeal to the dead's known tastes; the spin and roll variants are intensifiers, not different phrases. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The English phrase is documented since 1801, and its possible ancestor is older and stranger: a rabbinic tradition in which Judah's bones rolled about in his coffin out of shame during the Exodus. Whatever the lineage, the metaphor has become the standard way to invoke the authority of the dead against the living - Beethoven turning at the rock arrangement, Newton at the new particle, the founder at the merger. The dictionaries date the expression to the mid-1800s in common use and define it exactly: a dead person would be angry or upset about something if they knew about it. Rodgers and Hart had fun with it in 1937 in a song about Verdi, and the modern intensifiers - rolling over, spinning, doing rotations - simply add RPM to the same indignation.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- roll in one's grave
- spin in one's grave
- turn over in one's grave
Usage Examples
- The town's founder would turn in his grave at the car park named after him, three streets from where his house stood.
- Spin in his grave? The old choirmaster generates enough torque to power the church hall at every evensong remix.
- Every heritage body warned that the architect herself would be turning in her grave; the architect had left written instructions saying otherwise.