Wordwatch: Double Down

A phrase that’s new to me has been giving me pause over the last few months. Here are a few examples of the phrase “Double Down”:

“So much for the recent hints from Saudi Arabia that it might show clemency to jailed women’s rights activists … Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman seems instead to be “doubling down on his persecution of them” (The Week, December 2020, quoting The Washington Post).

“After being widely trashed as a “transphobe”, the comedian isn’t choosing to give such incendiary material a judicious wide berth, but on the new routine double down.” (The Spectator, October 2021)

“The many problems facing Xi’s China – debt, inequality, corruption – can only be intensified by the political system, not resolved by it, according to [renowned China expert Roger] Garside … “And Xi has doubled down on the system” – The Week, 18 December 2021.

The phrase “to double down” has emerged in journalistic prose only recently but, as these quotations indicate, it has suddenly become common, though with a strong whiff of the United States about it. It seems familiar enough, because we’re used to saying “double up” in several different contexts.

“Double up” has a long history and seems arithmetically more logical: to “double” is surely to increase in quantity, volume or speed or some other way of measuring a calculation. It’s hard to imagine the process of doubling, whether physical or mental, in conjunction with the preposition “down” rather than “up”.

We “double up” with laughter, and the sense there is to fold one’s body in two as we register something extremely amusing. Or we “double up” when we duplicate or increase something: the phrase carries with it a connotation of adding something if not literally multiplying it by two. The noun “a double” describes something or someone exactly the same as something else. But “double down“? It seems to contradict itself.

I find that it’s a technical term in the gambling game of Blackjack. This is a card game in which, as in Pontoon, the aim is to achieve a score of twenty-one or to beat the score of the dealer, whose cards are on the table in front of you. Among the instructions for play that I’ve read, there’s an injunction for “ties” to “pay the dealer”. In passing I ask myself, is this by any chance the same “round game” that the Lord Chancellor mentions in his “Nightmare Song” in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe? He dreams that he’s “tossing about in a steamer from Harwich”,

“And bound on that journey you find your attorney (who started that morning from Devon);

He’s a bit undersized, and you don’t feel surprised when he tells you he’s only eleven.

Well, you’re driving like mad with this singular lad (by the by, the ship’s now a four-wheeler),

And you’re playing round games, and he calls you bad names when you tell him that “ties pay the dealer’’….”

I haven’t played Blackjack so must rely on others for an explanation of the process the phrase describes. Doubling down, it seems, is a way of increasing your chance of winning while at the same time risking greater losses if you fail. Fair enough, even if apparently illogical. The implication is that you can “double up” and “double down” simultaneously. But why has this usage suddenly become a common expression that’s taken over almost completely from “double up”?

This isn’t to question the use of the phrase, only to wonder how, in the mind of the layman or non-Blackjack player, it became likely or necessary. Are all the writers who have suddenly adopted it, seemingly out of nowhere, familiar with Blackjack to the extent that its technical jargon trips automatically off their tongue (or keyboard)?

Come to think of it, Blackjack sounds like just the kind of challenging (and threatening) game President Xi might enjoy in his spare time.