Several phrases have stuck around long after a time when horses were much more common in daily life. They include don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, which is a warning not to expect a gift too closely, and straight from the horse’s mouth, which refers to information directly from the source involved. Also, to vet, as in to vet a presidential candidate, means to examine with the necessary thoroughness of a veterinarian. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Horses Run Rampant Through English”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Noam from the Bronx, New York.
Hi, Noam, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much, glad to be here.
Glad to have you, Noam, what’s up?
Why, within sayings such as, look a gift in the mouth, or straight from the horse’s mouth, how would the origin, what the origin of having the animal, a horse, within those sayings, is instead of, say, a zebra or a monkey, instead of any other animal.
So you’re asking about expressions like don’t look a gift horse in the mouth or straight from the horse’s mouth, things like that.
Right, right, precisely.
Sayings that encompass the word the animal horse.
Martha, why don’t we say straight from the monkey’s mouth?
That would sound interesting.
Yeah, well, both of these reflect a time when horses were much more commonplace in everyday life.
There are a lot of associations when it comes to straight from the horse’s mouth to horse racing itself.
Right, right, right.
Because in the late 19th century, for example, people talked about, you know, they would go to the track and they wouldn’t want to tip from the bettors hanging around there or the stable hands or the jockeys.
They wanted to tip on who would win the race straight from the horse’s mouth.
And there are other stories involving horse’s mouths and truth in the past.
When you talk about don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, you’re talking about a horse being given to you.
And when horses get older, their gums recede and so their teeth look longer.
And so that’s also why we talk about looking long in the tooth.
So there are all these terms that have to do with horses and they just reflect their place in our society a generation or so ago.
I see. I see. And do we know when those things were coined approximately or created?
Well, the straight from the horse’s mouth is, what, mid-19th century, Grant?
Yeah, roughly.
And it shows up early in not only just in horse racing, but it shows up in stories about horse trades gone bad, where somebody lied about the age of a horse.
And there was a funny anecdote running around in the 1860s or so that the newspapers were publishing about somebody saying, how did you know how old it was? And he goes, I got it straight from the horse.
But the other one, Martha, has got a lot more legs to it, right?
Yeah, four.
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth goes back to the writings of St. Jerome.
Yeah, centuries.
Centuries.
Oh, wow.
Hundreds of years.
And it also appears in pretty much every European language.
And you can find it in Latin, even.
Yeah, and the metaphor, of course, is don’t look too closely.
Don’t inspect a gift too closely.
Right, right, yeah.
So I see there’s a whole equine history to those things.
Yeah, I don’t know that new horse idioms are being coined now.
I suspect with the horses being relegated to specialty areas in modern life, they’re not being coined for everyday use.
Yeah, we certainly have a lot of horse racing terms.
My favorite is hands down.
You know, somebody wins something hands down.
It’s a reference to a jockey who’s so far ahead that he or she can lower his or her hands at the end of the race.
So I see that those sayings were largely coined at a time where events such as horse racing and other horse-based events were more popular than they might be now.
Yeah.
Yeah, horses in everyday life.
Yeah.
Horses have always been valuable animals.
Right.
So horses were property of some prestige.
Sales and trades and that kind of thing.
Noam, thank you so much for your call.
We really appreciate it.
Absolutely.
My pleasure.
All right.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
We could also talk about the term to vet something.
Sure, yeah.
Yeah.
Veterinarian going down to check out a horse before the race, right?
Yeah, yeah, thoroughly.
Thoroughly, which surprises people that it’s something so prosaic, but yet that’s it.
When you vet somebody for a job, you are carrying on a tradition of examining a candidate.
Right, right.
