Horse sense

And one business professor thinks the idiom itself is due for retirement. Writing in last Sunday’s New York Times, Randall Stross argued that the buggy whip metaphor was obscure, anachronistic, and not an accurate symbol of the economic changes it supposedly represents.

Whether the buggy whip is a suitable, or optimal, metaphor for ”outdated technology” I leave to the business and economics crowd. But is it really so obscure that it ought to be thrown under the carriage? I think not. Horses may not be part of our daily lives, but thanks to classic Westerns and Cinderella, not to mention carousels and mounted police and ”Masterpiece Theatre,” they still loom large in our mental landscape--and in our language.

Think of all the horse sense embedded in cautionary phrases: It’s no use beating a dead horse. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, don’t change horses in midstream, don’t put the cart before the horse. You can lead a horse to water (but you can’t make him drink), if you’ve remembered to lock the barn door (before, not after, the horse is gone).

You can be a dark horse (a mysterious or unexpected competitor), or eat like a horse, or get up on your high horse; do some horse trading, or hold your horses, or horse around. And though farriers are as scarce as hen’s teeth, everyone knows horseshoes, either as a lawn game or as symbols of good luck. And those are just the explicitly horsy expressions. In other horse-powered idioms, the connection isn’t so obvious.

Hobson’s choice, for instance, has a back story so good that it sounds like fiction. The phrase refers to a stable in Cambridge, England, where Thomas Hobson (1545?-1631) kept horses for hire. Customers couldn’t pick a mount, however--they rode the one Hobson offered, or none at all. Michael Quinion, at his World Wide Words website, explains that Hobson rotated his horses, sending the freshest out first so none would be overworked by the hard-riding undergraduate clientele. Hobson’s choice is thus no choice--take it or leave it.

These everyday saddle horses were called hackneys, and later hacks, and both words were eventually used for any freelance worker (including, in the 16th and 17th centuries, a prostitute). The longer horses worked for hire, the lower the status of hack sank, till the word meant not just a worker-for-hire (human or equine), but especially an overworked and underperfoming one.

The horse senses still echo in taxicab lingo--officially, Boston taxis are Licensed Hackney Carriages--and in our use of hackneyed (since 1749) to characterize cliched language. Hack is also a disparaging word for journalists, known since the early 19th century: ”Let them hire a news-paper hack, a shameless, trading defamer,” says the Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation (1810). (The dictionary claims that the designation is ”now chiefly jocular,” but I’m not so sure.)

Of course, it’s not just exhausted freelance workers who share their lot with horses. A full-time employee may be in harness, saddled with responsibilities. Do you give subordinates their heads--loosen the reins and let them make decisions, even if they back the wrong horse--or do you rein them in? (Not reign, even if you do hold the whip hand.) If disaster strikes, do you get back in the saddle? Maybe your company sells to the carriage trade, though the big spenders no longer drive up in broughams, landaus, barouches, or cabriolets (VW or otherwise).

There aren’t many horsy people around these days, but a frisky, long-legged youngster may be described as coltish (though, oddly, coltish has become a chiefly feminine adjective). A classy grownup is sometimes called a thoroughbred, though the comparison, like familiarity with horse racing, is less common than it once was. Still, it was current enough in 1991 that the rapper Apache could appropriate it--”She’s a thoroughbred, walks and talks with class.” And since the 1930s, a reckless young man, especially when driving, has been a cowboy (in allusion, I assume, to the quick stops and starts that the quarter horse excels at); nowadays, of course, cowboy drivers come in both sexes.

Do you bridle at such comparisons? Then you’re showing resentment or taking offense, ”in the manner of a spirited horse under a strong rein,” says the Century Dictionary (1889)--the original image is of someone tossing her head or drawing it up haughtily. Or maybe you’re blinkered, seeing only what’s in front of you, like the distractible horses whose side vision is shielded.

Humans and horses, after all, were keeping company thousands of years before the dawn of English, let alone carriages and footmen. I don’t want to make rash predictions, but our linguistic buggy whips may prove harder to kill than the real ones were.

Jan Freeman’s e-mail address is mailtheword@gmail.com; for more language commentary go to her blog, Throw Grammar from the Train, throwgrammarfromthetrain.blogspot.com.