The world is full of widespread misconceptions. For example, Vikings didn’t wear horned helmets, and the “five-second rule” doesn’t give blanket permission to eat food that fell on the floor. Another common mix-up is that bats are blind, which is not the case, despite the popularity of the colloquialism “blind as a bat.” The quality of the mammal’s vision may vary between individual species, but bats in general can see just fine. So, why do we say “blind as a bat” when talking about poor eyesight?
Written evidence of believing bats to be blind dates to the fourth century BCE. In his work Metaphysics, Aristotle wrote, “For as the eyes of bats are to the light of day, so is the intellect of our soul to the objects which in their nature are most evident of all.” Aristotle might have been referring to bats’ habitats in caves and other dark environments — his words are understood to relate the limits of a bat’s eyesight in the dark to an analogy for the limits of human intellect, while not fully understanding that bats can see perfectly well. Actually, bats’ eyes are packed full of rod photoreceptors, making them better at seeing at night, but Aristotle wouldn’t have known that.
This idea that bats have limited eyesight continued on for more than a millennium, primarily due to the lack of any scientific evidence saying otherwise. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, we see the idiom “blind as a bat” recorded in a 1639 compendium of English and Latin proverbs. It remained popular in the English lexicon until its usage tapered off around the mid-20th century.
But the phrase saw a resurgence in the late 20th century thanks to the 1992 film Batman Returns, in which the Riddler (portrayed by Jim Carrey) exclaims that Batman is “blind as a bat.” From there, this saying reentered our pop culture lexicon and once again became popular, despite still being rooted in a misguided belief.
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