The Story Behind the Name

It goes back to Shakespeare. In The Tempest (1611), a drunk jester crawls under a cloak with a monster to get out of a storm and says, "Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows."

The political version came later. Charles Dudley Warner, a Hartford editor and a friend of Mark Twain, wrote in 1870 that "politics makes strange bedfellows," and that is the form the phrase has kept ever since.

The meaning is simple: pressure pushes people together who would never otherwise share a bed. Enemies become allies because they need each other, or because they need to survive. It's a phrase about alliances of convenience, and it has always carried a wink — who is sleeping with whom, and why.