Homemade Sin

What is homemade sin?   Is it necessarily ugly?  From whence did the colorful phrase originate?

Personally, your compiler has never heard it used in any way but one:  “He (or she, they, or, your compiler supposes, it) is (or are) ugly as homemade sin.”  So at its first level, the phrase is a descriptor for “unattractive,” for “pug-ugly,”  for “that girl could stop a clock!”,  and for “that fella’s do dadgum ugly he’d scare a wild dog of a gut bucket!” 

Parsing it down to its components, we have “ugly,” which means something along the lines of “offensive to the sight, frightful, or hideous.”   We have “sin,” which basically means “doing evil,” and which puts your compiler  in mind of those little monkey figures  one sees occasionally which illustrate the maxim, “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”   (Your compiler has always thought “have no fun” should be added to the list, but on that heathenish note he digresses. 

Sin is displeasing to God, so therefore it is ugly in the behavioral sense, as in what your mama probably used to say:  “Keep on acting ugly like that, and I’ll pop you so hard your clothes will be out of style when you stop rolling!   And that’s not a threat, either, boy: it’s a promise.”

“Homemade” is good when it comes to jellies, jams, preserves, and a few other things, but its positive uses are rather limited.    It differs substantially from “handmade,” which implies craftsmanship, extraordinary care, and great worth.    If a person skilled in carpentry and joinery were to make a table, for example, it would be “handmade.”   If, on the other hand, your compiler were to make a table, it would be “homemade,” which is to say it would probably be slapped together with two-by-fours and plywood, and would serve to hold something up – to elevate it off the ground – but would satisfy absolutely no aesthetic benchmark in anyone’s book. In short, your compiler’s homemade table, although reasonably functional, would be ugly – as homemade sin, probably.

So homemade sin indeed seems ugly, which we gather from having parsed out its components above.  But we still have not answered the question about the phrase’s origin.   Your compiler wishes he knew.

Going online, your compiler found that one commentator believes the phrase arose at  a British university around the year 1900, while several others simply call it an old Southern U.S. expression.   Your compiler tends to believe the several over the one is this situation; he cannot imagine an Oxfordian saying anything so rusticated.   But that is just his guess.

So does anyone really know?   Has anyone heard it used differently?   Does anyone really care?

Homemade sin…maybe your compiler will go stir some up and see for himself!