Origin of “See a Man about a Horse”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Amit. I’m calling from La Jolla.

Hi, Amit. How are you?

Good. How are you?

Doing just fine.

Thanks for taking my call.

I have one question. I’m originally from India, and I came here as a graduate student almost 20 years ago.

And when I was a graduate student at University of Michigan, my first roommate was from Idaho.

He used to say that I need to see a man about the horse. And, you know, that’s when he would go to the restroom.

Okay.

And the first time he said that, you know, I looked out the window to see if there was really a man waiting with the horse outside.

There wasn’t, was there?

His family dealt with horses. They used to bring in horses from England, and then they would, you know, sell it to other people in the U.S.

So they were in the horse business.

Oh.

But, you know, I have since then wondered where did that expression come from?

Have you heard the variation of it, which is, I’m going to see a man about a dog?

No. I mean, you know, the only time I had heard that expression was from my roommate.

And he used to use horse all the time.

Well, the reason I ask is because the version that has people going to see a man about a dog is the older version, and the horse version is not only newer, much newer, but it’s much less common as well.

Okay.

The first appearance of it is in a play called The Flying Scud by an Irish writer.

We don’t know at this distance whether it meant that they were going to go to the bathroom or they were just leaving the room or they were just looking for any excuse to get away.

I see.

But we do know that by the time the American prohibition showed up in the 1920s, that is when alcohol was illegal to sell and to consume, that people were using it to mean to slip off to get a little hooch.

So then you’d go to the bathroom after that.

You would go to the bathroom after that.

And I guess after prohibition, there’s not really much use for that kind of expression.

And I think that’s when it became far more common for it to be pretty clear, in print anyway, that people meant that they were going to go use the facilities.

There was just another euphemism, a way of parting company without explicitly saying something crude about your having go use the toilet or anything like that.

English is this wonderful repository of all kinds of euphemisms for that.

I like the one that ladies of the 19th century would say, I’m going to go pluck a rose.

Oh, I see.

Or, Grant, one of my other favorites is, I’m going to go visit Miss White.

I see.

I never heard that one.

I tend to like the cruder ones.

What a surprise.

There’s one, I’m going to go drop some friends off at the lake, if that makes sense to you.

Yeah, I’ve heard dropping the kids off at the pool.

Right, exactly.

That’s another variation on it.

So there we go.

It dates from the mid-1800s.

The older version is about a dog, and these days it just means go to the bathroom.

Go to the bathroom.

All right.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

I really appreciate you taking me.

You’re welcome.

Thank you for your call.

Okay.

Thanks a lot.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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