Idiomatic pigs and hogs

According to an aphorism by Maxim Gorky, he who was born to crawl won’t fly. This is probably true of most other creatures. For instance, English speakers have great doubts about the ability of pigs to fly. Idiomatic sayings with pig are often amusing. See a few remarks on them in my posts for February 21, 2018, and for July 31, 2019 (and don’t neglect the comments). Some phrases cited below I have never seen except in dictionaries, for instance, to carry the wrong pig by the tail “to accuse a wrong person” (American slang) or to teach a pig to play on a flute “to do useless work.” As a lifelong educator, I have a fellow feeling for such music teachers.

A pig in clover is a very happy creature, but this should not surprise anyone, because from animals we borrowed the idea that to live in clover means “to live in luxury and be happy.” Living in bliss will resurface as an important theme below. Does anyone ever say: “He who scrubs every pig he sees will not long be clean” or “in less than a pig’s whistle” (that is, “at once”)? Is the second phrase the beginning of the enigmatic combination pigs and whistles? Anyway, idioms are like words: they are countless, and all of us know only a tiny fraction of them. For consolation, I do know what to put lipstick on a pig means, because I am adept at performing this task.

Anyway, I hope I am not milking a dead cow by repeating the same thing from one post to another. But few people realize that idioms are a relatively late dessert to our incredibly rich language. Words may be as old as the hills, but most phrases, like the ones cited above, were coined in the postmedieval period, that is, at an epoch we associate with the Renaissance. In the entire text of Beowulf, perhaps only one phrase has a figurative meaning. Chaucer is already half-modern, and Shakespeare is, in this respect, like us.

Medieval people could say and did say grass roots but would not have understood, let alone coined, a phrase like grassroots efforts. If they tried to sell a pig in a poke, they did exactly that. To put it differently, they were used to calling a spade a spade. A leap from putting a cat into a poke and palming it off as a pig to the feat of coining proverbial sayings with a figurative meaning took a good deal of time. This leap presupposed the new ability to speak in metaphors. As we now know, the last six centuries or so have been enough to flood us with idioms. The reward is that we can now kick the bucket and even beat about the bush while lying in bed.

Some of the most obscure phrases that inspired this post are connected with hog (that is why I began with pig). The origin of the phrases to go the whole hog and hog on ice have never been explained to everyone’s satisfaction, though some hypotheses sound reasonable. They are easy to find on the Internet and on this blog. The hardest question is whether hog in such idioms refers to the animal. Can we be dealing with some figurative meaning? For instance, cold pig used to mean “a suit of clothes returned to a tailor if it does not fit.” No explanation of this odd phrase exists. Why pig, and why cold? Perhaps one of the most obscure among such animal phrases is to live high off the hog, that is, in the lap of luxury.

I would like to return to the enigmatic phrase as independent as a hog on ice. Charles E. Funk spent years exploring the origin of this odd idiom. I would also like to note that quite a few of such phrases originated (or at least were first recorded) in American English, which means that they may go back to some obscure British words, once current only in dialects, later brought to the New World, and resuscitated almost by chance. In Joseph Wright’s multivolume The English Dialect Dictionary, two senses of hog (in addition to the main one) are given: “a heap of earth and straw used to store potatoes and turnips” and “a stone.” Stone in this context is also featured in the OED.

The common denominator seems to be “a huge (unwieldy) object.” If hog ever meant “great property, accumulated wealth,” the odd phrase to live high off the hog would make sense. Hog is naturally associated with things huge and greedy, and the verb to hog means “to appropriate or take hold of something greedily” (as in “to hog the road.” The incalcitrant hog on ice may belong here too. I’ll quote the entry about hog, connected with hog “stone,” from the second (1914) edition of The Century Dictionary: “…by some identified with hog [animal name], as ‘laggard stones’ that manifest a pig-like indolence, or it might be thought, in allusion to the helplessness of a hog on ice, there being in the United States an ironical simile, ‘as independent as a hog on ice’. But neither this explanation nor that which brings Danish hok, a pen, kennel, sty, dock, is supported by any evidence. Perhaps first applied not to the stone, but to the long-score or line ‘cut on the ice. […] in the game of curling, the stone which does not go over the hog-score’…. [Scotch].”

Language historians know that words like bag, big, bog, bug, dig, dog, hug, lag, lug, rag, jig, jag, and so forth are usually obscure from an etymological point of view. Are they expressive coinages, baby words, or borrowings, changed beyond recognition? None of those hypotheses is improbable. Therefore, we need not assume that hog “animal name” and hog “stone” are related, even though they may be. People are probably apt to coin monosyllables like jig, bog, and hog many times. Some of those coinages stay, others lead a precarious existence in regional speech, and still others die without issue. The idiom to go the whole hog has not been explained either. I would like to suggest that hog here is, in principle, the same word as hog, applied to an unwieldy mass. The impulse for coining hog “swine” and hog “stone” must have been the same, but we are probably not witnessing two senses of the same word. Living high off the hog seems to belong with going the whole hog. There is nothing piggish about either.

As a final flourish, I may mention the fact that animal names should in general be treated with caution. I suspect that it is raining cats and dogs has nothing to do with animals (see my post for March 21, 2007), the objections in the comments, and the post for November 13, 2019, on the phrase to lie doggo. Everything is shaky in our world, and everything is in a state of flux. Knowing this, sleep well and let sleeping dogs lie.

_{Featured image: Photo by Vaida Krau on Unsplash.}