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I am given to understand that the idiom comes from horse racing.
There are a lot of tipsters on any race track, and they aren't necessarily trying to make you rich. Stephen Foster wrote "I bet my money on a bob-tailed nag Somebody bet on the gray" because pari-mutuel subtracts the track's cut for all bets, then divvies up that pool among the winners. There are different pools for each proposition: win, place, show, exacta, trifecta, etc. A place bet on a longshot will pay better than a place bet on the favorite, because a third of the net pool is used to redeem each of the three winning horse's backers.
The horse's mouth is a particularly valuable source of information because
1. The horse should know, because he understands what the other horses are saying
2. The horse doesn't gamble on the race, and thus won't benefit from misleading you.
Of course if someone says they heard it from the horse's mouth, don't you suppose they may be either a candidate for the funny farm, or someone who wants to do you no favor?
My supposition and the first origin I find via Google searching has something different than deacon.
It has to do with looking at the teeth to determine the age of the horse. Horse traders, as a class, had no better reputation than used-car salesmen. (Come to think of it, they may be of the same class; they simply changed the objects of their sales as society changed their objects of their transportation.) So, horse traders could say anything about a horse's age, but the proof of the pudding was to look into the horse's mouth.
It turns out other animals can also be aged by their teeth. In fact, veterinarians (or their assistants) age every mature animal being sold at market not intended for immediate slaughter and mark their ages on tags glued to their backs so the bidders can know the age of an animal before bidding at an auction. Horses probably became pre-immanent because such a higher percentage of them were sold between individuals (who would discuss the animal as part of the dicker) and an uninterested mediary was unavailable to remove any discrepancies.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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