Historic idiom

Licked into shape. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Pigs might fly. English is full of colourful words and phrases. But have you ever stopped to wonder where they might have come from?

“Throwing the baby out with the bathwater” is now so common a way of describing a stupid rejection of the essential along with the inessential that it counts as cliché. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase first appears in English in the early twentieth century. But a foolish mother discarding a baby along with the contents of a bathtub appears as an illustration to a German book of proverbs in 1512, so the idea goes back at least four centuries. Probably longer, since it was considered worth illustrating in a book.

“Licked into shape” is a common phrase for making something presentable, finishing it or improving it. Where does it come from? It turns out to date back to at least the fifteenth century. Bestiaries, encyclopaedias describing the appearance and habits of various real and mythical animals, were immensely popular in the Middle Ages. According to a bestiary printed by Caxton in 1483, a baby bear was born as a formless bit of pulp and the mother bear arranged it into legs, arms, head etc by licking it – the baby bear was literally “licked into shape” by its mother. Shakespeare refers to “an unlicked bear-whelp” in Henry VI Part III.

“Pigs might fly!” is a standard derisory rejoinder in contemporary British English to an unlikely suggestion. Say “Politicians might be honest” or “The company might cut the directors’ share bonuses and give us all a pay rise,” and the likely response will be a laugh and some variant on “Pigs might fly!” or “Pigs have wings!” or “Look up there! It’s a flying pig!”. The flying pig is a staple of political cartoons, and the phrase is so ubiquitous and sounds so modern that one might expect it to have been coined only a few decades ago. In fact, it dates back to the middle of the thirteenth century. A Latin poem, De Mundi Vanitate (On the Vanity of the World), says that when the poor man finds friends “the winged pig will fly”. So the flying pig has been a byword for impossibility for well over 700 years and is still going strong.

So next time you use a colloquial phrase, stop and ponder for a moment. You may well be quoting a little bit of medieval history.

(Examples and references from Jones, M. The Secret Middle Ages, Sutton, 2002, ISBN 0-7509-2685-6).