Sometimes You Eat the Bear, Sometimes the Bear Eats You

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, guys. This is Sarah Bailey, and I’m calling from Fleming Island, Florida, right outside of Jacksonville.

Hey, Sarah. Welcome.

Hi, Sarah. What’s on your mind?

Hi. Growing up, when I was a kid, for as long as I can remember, my grandmother and my dad always had this saying, whenever something kind of went wrong with one of the kids, like my cousins or me and my sister, they would look at us and go, well, kid, you know, some days you eat the bear and some days the bear eats you.

That was kind of their way of saying, hey, you know, sometimes it goes your way and sometimes it doesn’t.

And I find myself saying that to my kids all the time, especially when my son, who is an athlete, he plays like several different sports. Whenever they kind of win a game or lose the game, I’m trying not to make a huge deal out of it. I’ll look at them and say, you know, hey, some days you eat the bear and some days the bear eats you.

And it kind of has just proliferated my family, but I’ve never heard anybody else say that.

It’s so useful, though, right?

Right.

Sometimes on this show, we like to separate the idea from the language that represents this idea. And I think this is one of the times where we have to get just for a moment into that.

The concept of this is ancient. It goes back to many ancient cultures around the world. It’s this idea of eat or be eaten or dog eat dog. It’s just expressed differently.

So the idea is ancient. It’s just an essential part of humans trying to cope with a complex and dangerous world.

And we also talk in English about something being a bear to do, meaning it’s difficult to accomplish. And I think that’s the same bear as in your expression, just the bear often stands in for difficulty.

There is a fantastic website we’ve mentioned before on the show. It’s called Quote Investigator. Garson O’Toole runs this, and he’s tracked this expression back to Ralph Waldo Emerson, well, a version of it, the concept of it, who had an essay in 1870 called Farming, and he’s writing about what life might have been like for primitive humans.

And it goes, he falls and is lame, he coughs, he has a stitch in his side, he has a fever and chills when he is hungry, he cannot always kill and eat a bear. Sometimes the bear eats him.

And so although it’s not exactly the same wording, there’s a really good chance that this idea comes from Emerson adding the bear into this eater-beaten notion because Emerson’s work was widely shared and widely studied ever since he put it in print.

Oh, well, my dad was an English teacher, so that would make sense for him to have known that. And my grandmother was, I mean, she wasn’t a teacher, but she was college-educated and had a degree in English as well. So that makes perfect sense.

Yeah, but it’s not until the early 1900s that we see it almost in the form that you learned. Sometimes you hunt the bear, and sometimes the bear hunts you.

So approximately the version that you know is at least 120 years old.

Well, wonderful. Thank you so much. I’m so excited to call my cousins and let them know about it.

Oh, it’s our pleasure. Thank you for reaching out. Call us again sometime.

Thank you. Have a great day.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye.