Enough Money to Burn a Wet Dog

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Greg Philipson.

Hello, Greg.

Hey.

Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Bloomington, Indiana.

Bloomington, yay.

What’s up?

All right, here’s the deal.

Some time ago, I encountered a phrase in a Sports Illustrated article that I was reading, and I have tried a lot of people asking what it meant, and nobody could tell me.

So here it is. It’s from an August 27th article in Sports Illustrated about Nick Saban, who is the new football coach at Alabama.

And it’s a really well-written article full of colorful language.

Really enjoyed it, but this phrase just stumped me, and here it is.

They have welcomed him as Caesar, as Pharaoh, and paid him enough money to burn a wet dog.

And I couldn’t often wifely figure out.

I kept looking for further references in the article about burning a wet dog and how that relates to how much money they’re paying him, and I couldn’t find anything.

Oh, what an awful phrase.

No, I like that mix of high and low language, though.

No, it’s horrendous.

It’s horrendous.

Oh, come now.

What do you think, Greg?

I mean, were you repelled by it?

No, not repelled.

It just puzzled me because I like language, so I pick up my cell phone, and here we are.

Well, you came to the right place, Captain.

Let me tell you right now.

Martha, the reason I don’t think it’s so terrible, and you keep going on about this.

Well, yeah.

I think it’s hideous.

I love animals, and I love pets, but the thing is, it’s just a metaphor.

They’re not actually talking about burning real dogs.

Well, no, but, I mean, maybe if we’re talking about a hot dog or something, I can understand that.

Well, no, they’re actually talking about real dogs.

Well, that’s disgusting.

There’s a variant of the phrase, burn a wet mule.

Oh.

Okay.

Because I can tell you that the phrase first appears in the late 1880s in the South.

A couple of the earliest uses that I know of are from Georgia.

And the idea here is that the animal is so wet that you need a lot of tender, in other words, money, paper money, to get the fire going.

That’s it.

It’s not about actually burning a dog.

But yes, it is.

Well, no, it’s a metaphor.

They’re not, no, Nick Saban’s not going to go out and burn a dog with his new big salary.

Yeah, I don’t think so either.

It would be a massive dog.

Okay.

I don’t want Alabama people calling me and saying that I’m commenting on his salary.

Irish wolfhound, huh?

Yeah.

Okay, well, maybe I’m being mollified then.

And if you’re saying it’s theoretical, that theoretically there’s this dog there.

But still, the idea, I mean, Greg, what bothers me about this is that the English language is this fossil record of how badly we’ve treated animals over millennia.

I mean, there’s so many expressions.

I mean, hang dog, for example, in English, refers to the literal hanging of dog.

Shakespeare talked about it.

So I don’t know.

I mean, it grosses me out, but I sort of like the metaphorical idea.

But you don’t mind about the burning mules.

Well, if you…

No, no, but…

Let’s not get politics into this.

How would you feel if I said, pay him enough money to burn a wet dictionary?

Now, wouldn’t that ruffle your feathers?

Well, I would just hope it was a big press run.

Greg, so we’ve established that the term does exist.

We’ve been giving you a variant.

We’ve showed you that it probably comes from the South, and we’ve given it a rough time period that it probably came from.

How do you feel about that?

That’s okay.

That’s okay.

Hey, I hope they’ll accept that at my lunch crew at the math department Monday, because everybody’s waiting.

Okay, hey, thank you, guys.

Thank you so much for your call, Greg.

Thank you, Greg.

Thank you all very much.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye.

If you’ve got a question about animals, call Martha.

If you’ve got a question about words and language, call me.

And if you have enough money to burn a wet dog, email us.

The email address is words@waywordradio.org, and the phone number is 1-877-929-WORD.