by Kevin Burton
If you read this blog regularly, you know I am a cat guy. A cat whisperer, my wife says.
Today we’ll give equal time to dog lovers, by revealing some of the Merriam-Webster dictionary’s list of words inspired by dogs.
According to Forbes, 44.5 percent of US households have dogs, 29 percent have cats. The dog population was estimated at 83.6 million, the cat population at 60.2.
Some households have both of course. The first Merriam-Webster phrase will appeal to that bunch. Thereafter the list goes to the dogs:
Rain cats and dogs
The expression “raining cats and dogs,” indicating the occurrence of heavy rain and blowing winds, has been around since at least the 17th century. More than likely, the phrase does no more than implicitly compare the violence of a heavy rainstorm with that of a mighty cat-and-dog fight. However, no single explanation has been definitely established, and a few others have been advanced.
There are those who see significance in the fact that witches in Norse mythology rode upon storms in the shape of cats, while dogs and wolves were the attendants of Odin, father of Thor—the god of thunder, lightning, and storms.
Others call upon obsolete catadupe, meaning “waterfall,” which is derived from the Latin name for the first cataract of the Nile. A more literal, and rather unappealing, explanation holds that after a cloudburst in days of ole, gutters would rage with a filthy torrent that included dead dogs and cats. Maybe this is a mystery best left unsolved.
Bulldog Edition
The term bulldog edition has been in print since the early 20th century and is used by newspaper editors to denote an early edition of a morning paper printed (and even sold) the day before its publication date.
No one knows for sure how the term originated. One entertaining theory relates it to the editors of competing New York papers that printed early editions and subsequently “fought like bulldogs” to outscoop each other. Others have suggested that bulldog refers to the attention-grabbing headlines of newspapers hitting the streets early that figuratively bite the reader like a bulldog—but these theories do not hold when you consider that bulldog also was journalese for “filler.”
Another theory is that the bold headlines of the editions “barked” for attention. Regardless of how it originated, the term bulldog edition became an established part of the jargon of journalism.
The low-slung canine itself has bowed front legs that are so far apart that the dog looks as if it were eternally looking for a fight. Indeed, its whole body has a sturdy, rock-solid appearance, and there was a time when the bulldog needed all the sturdiness it could muster. It also needed plenty of courage and determination, as well as something the breed is not characterized by today: ferocity. The bulldog gets its name not from the fact that it resembles a domestic bull but from its use in the cruel and savage sport of bullbaiting.
Dog’s Breakfast/dinner
Since the late 19th century, the expression dog’s breakfast has been chiefly used in British slang for a distasteful, inedible mess or mixture, literally and figuratively.
A couple of etymologies on the expression have been served up: it could be an allusion to a culinary effort that results in something that is only fit for the consumption of one’s four-legged companion or the fact that dogs’ meals in the past (before canned and packaged gourmet dog food) were a mess of leftover people food. But, honestly, the connection between a dog and breakfast isn’t at all clear—nor is dinner, for that matter, which is the next course we serve—since a dog’s breakfast is usually the same as its lunch and dinner.
The term dog’s dinner fashionably arrives by the beginning of the 20th century. Like dog’s breakfast, it refers to a figurative mess but additionally connotes that someone or something is a mess concerning their dress or appearance.
It’s unclear how dog’s dinner became associated with one’s appearance. Another expression linking the two is “ to put on the dog,” meaning “to pretend that one is very stylish or rich”—but it’s American and, as such, is unlikely to be cut from the same cloth.
Dog by itself, in reference to affected stylishness, nuzzled its way into American English in the second half of the 19th century.
Mutt
Meathead‘s heyday was in the 1970’s with its somewhat regular appearance in the sitcom All in the Family, in which the character Archie Bunker was known for using it to address his hapless son-in-law. The Archie Bunkers of an earlier time in America expressed a similar sentiment with the word muttonhead, which goes back to the early 1800s and is believed to have influenced the formation of meathead.
By the 20th century, muttonhead was clipped to mutt and used as a generalized term of derision for two-legged as well as four-legged animals, especially a mongrel dog.
Mutton itself traces back to mutun, the Anglo-French name for the ram or sheep. The French also applied the word to the animals’ flesh used for food. Borrowed into Middle English as motoun with these senses, the word eventually came to be spelled mutton.
Tomorrow: another morning walk with Merriam-Webster and its dog words.
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