Stephanie in Green Bay, Wisconsin, was puzzled when a colleague used the expression like grabbing a wolf by the ears to describe an impossible task. Like the idiom to have a tiger by the tail, it suggests the paralyzing difficulty of having hold of a dangerous beast. The Roman playwright Terence expressed the same idea with auribus teneo lupum, or “I have a wolf by the ears.” Thomas Jefferson used the phraseWe have a wolf by the ears in a letter about slavery. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Have a Wolf by the Ears”
Hello, you have A Way with Words. Oh, hi, this is Stephanie. I’m calling from Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Hi, Stephanie. Welcome. Well, I have a question about a phrase I heard a colleague at work say. We were in a meeting and we were talking about a system that we use that has a lot of challenges and data issues. And we were talking about some of the solutions. And she said, it’s like grabbing a wolf by the ears. And I looked over her. I’m like, what does that mean?
What did she say?
She said it has something to do with an impossible task or once you let it get so far out of control, it’s hard to get it back.
Yeah, that’s pretty much it, right?
That sounds about right.
So she didn’t have direct experience with this. This was just a figure of speech for her, right?
Well, she didn’t give me much more information. I didn’t think to ask where she heard it from because I was just still thinking and processing the phrase itself. A lot of times it’s used as a synonym for to have a tiger by the tail. Do you know that one?
I have heard that.
Was there a notion when you were talking with your co-worker about that it was kind of a lose-lose situation, which is no matter what she did, she was going to end up in a—it wasn’t going to work out very well. Whether she fixed it or she didn’t fix it, it was just not going to be good.
Yeah, yes. There’s a sense of that just because the nature of the system that we were talking about. We both work in it, and so I know I got the idea where she was going with that. Because that’s the idea of having a tiger by the tail, too. You’ve got this tiger. Sometimes it’s called riding a tiger. You can ride the tiger, but if you ride the tiger, you’re in trouble. If you get off the tiger, the tiger is going to eat you. So either way, you’re in trouble.
You’d be delighted to know, I think, that this whole idea of having a wolf by the ears goes back to the Roman times.
Oh.
Yeah. In Latin, Martha has the better Latin pronunciation, so correct me, Martha, if you will. It’s tenere lupum arabus. It’s to hold a wolf by the ears, and it goes back to the Roman playwright Terrence.
Okay. And sometimes translated as to hold danger in your hands or to take a bull by the horns. And another expression that we don’t use anymore in English that you might run across in old books is to catch a tartar with a capital T, meaning the ancient ruffians of the East, these old rascals.
I guess they were often seen as just the enemy from the East.
Yeah, violent, strong.
Yeah, violent, strong enemies were always marauding and invading the Tartars. Yeah, if you got somebody like that by the shoulders, what are you going to do next? What are you going to do, right? You’ve caught them. Now what are you going to do? It’s kind of a cliffhanger, right?
Yeah. But, you know, this expression shows up again and again throughout classical literature. Chaucer has a mention in the tale of Meliby. Erasmus has a mention. And it starts showing up in proverbs and sayings. And there’s a lot of variations. And sometimes it’s attached to an expression about law, the practice of law, that to practice law is to catch a wolf by the ears because law is its own entanglement. So to bring a suit against someone or to pursue a legal case entraps you as much as it entraps the other person.
Oh. Somebody also mentioned something about it was used when they were trying to do away with slavery.
Yeah, Thomas Jefferson used it in that sense, talking about, we have a wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale and self-preservation in the other.
Yeah. Mm—
That’s amazing.
Yeah. It’s interesting that your colleague brought that up because I really don’t hear it in casual conversation. It seems a little bit more elevated than that.
Yeah. I wonder if they had been reading something, some kind of literature or something, and it just caught hold of their fancy and it just showed up in everyday speech.
She is a big reader. She loves to read.
Well, there you go.
There you go. And I believe that there are versions of this in other languages, too, like the romance languages.
Oh, yes, definitely.
Yeah. Because of the Latin origins and showing up in the classical literature, it’s going to be pervasive throughout Europe and European cultures.
Yeah, so a whole lot of history in that conversation.
There was.
There was.
There is. I’m going to have to ask her if she read it somewhere.
Cool. Well, Stephanie, thank you so much for calling.
Well, no, thank you, and you have a great day.
You too.
Take care.
We will now.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
Thanks, Stephanie.
Bye-bye.
