by Kevin Burton
Today I am owning my farm-country standing and taking a look at some phrases we have exported to the rest of the country.
Merriam-Webster calls them “barnyard idioms.” I don’t love that name but I must admit some of these phrases are more than a little muddy.
From Kansas with love, I send you images of hogs, horses and hoeing and other staples of farm life:
Pig in a Poke
Definition – something offered in such a way that the one to whom it is offered does not know exactly what the thing is nor what its real value is
The poke of the pig in a poke is the original, now little-used, sense of the word: “a bag, or sack.” One common theory behind the origin of this is that when one was buying a pig in a poke one was buying a sack of meat, and trusting that it was indeed pig, rather than some other, potentially less desirable, sort of food.
Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth
Definition – to look in a critical way at something that has been given to one
Why should one not look a gift horse in the mouth? Because it might mean that you are examining the animal’s teeth to see how old it is, and that is considered rude. Earlier versions of this idiom often were some form of “don’t look at a gift (or given) horse’s teeth.”
Happy as a Pig in Mud.
Definition – very happy
“In case you have a pig, and wish to make it happy, it may be useful to know that, based on our citations, there are many things that will make this animal content. Sometimes the pig is happy in mud, and sometimes it is muck that brings joy to the porcine heart. In the 1860s it was common to see happy as a pig in clover, or happy as a pig in a puddle. The important thing is, should you have a pig, that you figure out what causes this happiness, and then work to procure it.
Definition – something that is difficult to do or deal with
The row in this expression is a line of planted crops, and the word hoe means “to work with a tool with a thin flat blade on a long handle to cultivate, weed, or loosen the earth around plants.” This expression is often found today written (or said) as a hard road to hoe, a variant considered incorrect by most usage guides. Incorrect it may well be (we typically do not use a hoe on a road), but it has been in use for almost 200 years; a print, released in 1840 as a satire about Martin Van Buren’s re-election campaign prominently featured the text “A Hard Road to Hoe! Or, the White House Turnpike, macadamized by the North Benders.” Ya burnt, Van Buren.
Definition – to keep talking about a subject that has already been discussed or decided
There is no linguistic evidence, we are happy to report, suggesting that this idiom has any sort of literal roots; the English-speaking people, so far as we can tell, did not at any point have a practice of actually beating dead horses. The variants of flogging and whipping the horse in question are also occasionally found. All these seem to have begun being used in the 19th century.
Oddly enough, this is not the first proverb or idiom in our language to utilize a late horse. For reasons that are not entirely clear to us, in the 17th century the dead horse was viewed as being a sterling exemplar of something which was not flatulent.
Definition – from the original source; from an unimpeachable source
The earliest citations we have for this idiom have both a literal and a figurative bent to them. They are figurative insofar as horses do not actually speak to people, but literal inasmuch as they are dealing with the ostensible communication of information from equine to human. Most early uses are found in sporting newspapers, in coverage of horse racing events.
More colorful phrases from farm country, next Wednesday.
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