What Is The Origin Of (186)?..
Fit as a butcher’s dog
If I was to come back as a dog, perhaps being assigned to a butcher would be the dog’s bollocks. After all, there would be all that food around and surely even the most curmudgeonly of purveyors of meat wouldn’t begrudge me of some scraps. The upside would be that there would be a veritable feast to enjoy and I would be as full as a butcher’s dog, as the Australians so eloquently describe someone who has indulged in a substantial meal.
The simile, fit as a butcher’s dog, emerged in the 20th century, probably in Lancashire, to describe someone who is the epitome of rude health, fitness and robustness. In a sense there is a bit of an oxymoron in its current usage because having access to and being fed so much meat is likely to make the pooch fat and unhealthy, unless it is exercises vigorously.
The reason behind this disconnect is that the attributes to be sought in a butcher’s dog have changed over the years. The phrase butcher’s dog originally described an animal that could stay impassive amongst all the temptations of a butcher’s emporium or, as John Camden Hotten put it in his Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words, published in 1859; “To be like a butcher’s dog, that is, lie by the beef without touching it; a simile often applicable to married men.” This sense of stoically resisting something close at hand has disappeared into the mists of time.
Being a butcher’s dog, though, has to be better than a barber’s cat. Being confined to a barber’s shop would mean that other than for the odd stray rat or mouse there would be nothing for the moggy to feed on. No wonder then that the barber’s cat was a scrawny thing. It was used figuratively to describe someone who was full of piss and wind, unnecessarily loquacious, a blatherskite. This figurative meaning caused the inestimable Hotten some difficulty when he came to define it in his Dictionary, commenting that it was “an expression too coarse to print.”
The Dundee Courier and Argus in its edition dated 8th September 1877 was almost as bashful, using a carefully bowdlerised euphemism, but the sense is clear; “He should be the very last man in Dundee to call anyone a windbag, for it is a well-known fact that…he is generally considered the very Prince of Windbags. Indeed, it is often remarked about him that he is all wind and water, like the barber’s cat.”
James Plunkett’s 1969 historical novel, Strumpet City, set in Dublin, gives us probably the rationale behind the phrase; “Do you know the expression – wet and windy, like the barber’s cat? I know it well, Matthews confessed. Why the barber’s cat, I wonder? A consequence of frugality, the poet explained, its staple diet is hair and soapsuds.” James Joyce used a variant of the phrase in Ulysses; “all wind and piss like a tanyard cat.” –
But are we barking up the wrong tree in thinking that the barber’s cat is a moggy? One commentator has noted that a barber’s cat was a bottle of water with a pump which when operated by the barber sprayed water finely over the hair of his customer. I recall them but never knew them by that name and, of course, they operate by wind and water. But Joyce was clearly thinking of a cat and other phrases in which the barber’s cat appears – as poor as a barber’s cat to describe someone who was painfully thin and starving and as conceited as a barber’s cat to paint the picture of someone who fancies themselves – tend to suggest that we are thinking of felis catus here.
