Quoth Kasey Hicks <gaufred@leland.Stanford.EDU>:

A debate cropped up on the newsgroup recently regarding the meaning of the phrase "whistling in the dark," part of which I reproduce here:

Francesca Lynn Parker wrote:

what my brain can't seem to kick into gear to figure out is whether this is a common phrase.

Someone else wrote:

It's an old expression for *don't have a clue*. You just don't get it so you're *whistling in the dark*.

Timothy Clark wrote:

I thought *whistling in the dark* was a phrase used when someone is trying to reassure themselves in an uncomfortable or potentially dangerous situation. How i pictured it was someone's walking down a dark street late at night whistling for reassurance, sort of looking nonchalant while going about a situation that's a bit unnerving...

Tom Beres wrote:

I have always heard it in the context of 'haven't got a clue'. I think the picture being painted is that the person has no clue, i.e., is figuratively in the dark and whistling, hoping the answer comes to him (rather than him finding the answer).

First of all, none of the participants in the debate had it quite right, and so I felt duty bound to set the record straight. Then, in the course of doing so, I started thinking about the way in which the song capitalizes on the different folds of meaning in the phrase. For anyone who is interested, my full response follows:

Actually, if you combine the senses of "haven't got a clue" and "trying to reassure yourself," you hit on it: something like "haven't got a clue that you haven't got a prayer." The idea is that someone who is whistling in the dark is in denial about the gravity of his or her situation, that they are comforting themselves without warrant or probable efficacy, e.g., Those who believe in an eventual scenario in which the righteous are rewarded for their virtues and consoled for the injustices visited upon them by the wicked are just whistling in the dark. Pollyannas whistle in the dark (though not everyone who whistles in the dark is necessarily a Pollyanna; one may be simply deluded or careless without being rabidly optimistic).

Thus, "A man came up to me and said, / 'I'd like to change your mind / By hitting it with a rock,' he said, / 'Though I am not unkind.' / We laughed at his little joke / And then I happily walked away / And hit my head on the wall of the jail / Where the two of us live today": the speaker does not treat his predicament with the dread it calls for, and promptly collides with reality (that he hits his head also implies that it is literally dark, lending vividness to the expression). Note that both the speaker and the man with the rock inhabit the same jail--in fact, the jail seems to end up being, or at least being analogous to, the rock with which the man proposes to change the speaker's mind in the first place, as it does hit him in the "mind," and it is undoubtedly made of rock. The suggestion seems to be that no amount of pop psychology ("...be you, / Be what you're like, / Be like yourself") can override the grim physical constraints of being a person, subject to failure, disappointment, and injury. After all, the inane affirmations are only something the speaker (and the woman who has them "written across her scalp") has "often been told"; they do not seem to accord with his actual experience.

But the situation is a little more complicated than that. If we retrace our steps a bit, to the beginning of the song, we are able to trace the steps that lead to a typical TMBG paradox loop. The woman wants to poison the speaker's mind "with wrong ideas that appeal" to him. Now, this can stand as a partial but accurate definition of the concept of "whistling in the dark": the ideas with which one soothes one's nerves when one is w.i.t.d. are appealing, and they are, by virtue of the expression's implications, wrong. So, if we equate these ideas with those recounted in the inscription on the woman's scalp (as the context certainly invites us to do), i.e., that it is just fine to know how to do only one thing well, as that is all anyone can do, and that one should therefore be satisified with one's limitations, everything fits together--so far. The twist comes with "And so I'm having a wonderful time / But I'd rather be whistling in the dark." If one is doing the things described up to this point, presumably one is w.i.t.d.; one is "having a wonderful time," so one must be deluding oneself, and yet one sets the concept of w.i.t.d. apart and posits it as an ideal alternative. What gives?

Searching for a logical explication would be perverse, of course, considering that the song's effect relies in large part on just the sense of dislocation and non sequitur in question. One reading is somewhat irresistible to me, however: the speaker knows how to do only one thing well, and that is w.i.t.d., therefore the speaker knows he is w.i.t.d., therefore w.i.t.d. is ineffectual for the speaker, and therefore the speaker can never really be like himself, as he is incapable of doing even the one thing he "knows how" to do. "Having a wonderful time" takes on an ironic tone in this reading, and suggests that the very prescriptions for successfully w.i.t.d. undermine that operation by the mere fact of acknowledging it. That the words are written across the woman's scalp, if read figuratively, implies that she too has hit her head on the wall of her inept philosophy, and bears the scars to prove it. Of course, being the words that would have induced her to that catastrophe in the first place, they initiate yet another loop of illogic.

Quoth Spencer K Rasko <x-modem@juno.com>:

I've been reading the TMBG interpretation archive and I've noticed the interpretation for WITD was a bit off. The truth is WITD was a political statment (I can't rember which campaign it was used in) but its used for polititans that really don't know where they stand on the issues or polititans that stand around doing nothing. Philibustering is a form of Whisteling in The Dark also.