Matt Yglesias wonders where the saying "sick as a dog" come from, seeing as how most modern dogs are not sick very much.
Myself, I've started saying "hold your dogs" sometimes instead of "hold your horses". Dogs, I know. They are very, very impatient. Horses? No idea. I suppose they must be impatient too, hence the saying, but who knows anything about that? Why should I continue to propagate a saying that is meaningless to me?
2 comments:
Depends on the horse.
Speculation here, but dogs are fed quite well in modern America. Any dog that fends for itself will eat anything it can find and vomit quite often (like the strays that hung around my grandfather's ranch). Maybe that's the source of the saying.
"Hold your horses", meaning "don't start yet", almost surely comes from horse-drawn vehicles. Nothing like technology advance to render idioms obscure.
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