your name is mud

A dishonored reputation. Folk etymology would have it that “mud” is really “Mudd,” as in Dr. Samuel Mudd, the physician who was imprisoned for conspiring with John Wilkes Booth and then treating Booth's broken leg following Lincoln's assassination. However, the phrase was recorded some twenty years before Lincoln died. In truth, one 19th-century meaning of “mud” was a fool (as in a rustic clodhopper), not a good epithet to have attached to your good name.