What Is The Origin Of (204)?…
(Don’t buy) a pig in a poke
When I go out shopping (more often than I would care to, I must admit), I have always treated the seller with some suspicion. After all, I don’t want to buy a pig in a poke, making a rash offer or striking a deal without firstly examining the thing I’m wanting to buy. Caveat emptor is always the best policy, I find.
Most of the components of the phrase are pretty straightforward, save perhaps for poke. A poke was a bag or a small sack and owed its origin to the Anglo-Norman and old Northern French poke and pouque. The word is still in use in Scotland and parts of the USA. The Oxford English Dictionary opines that it was “used particularly for the conveyance of raw wool.” But clearly if you had a small pig or piglet to get shot of or something you wanted to pass off as a pig, then a poke would have been of a size to do the job.
There is no mystery in the meaning of our phrase. You need to take responsibility for ensuring what you think you are buying is the real deal. If you don’t inspect the merchandise carefully, you will only have yourself to blame. Sage advice, for sure, and words of wisdom that have been around for centuries. The first recorded usage of the phrase dates back to around 1275 in the Proverbs of Hendyng; “when a man gives thee a pig, open the pouch.” It is inconceivable that it wasn’t a common idiom in speech before then.
Sleight of hand on the part of tradesmen seems to have been so commonplace that the warning crops up on a fairly regular basis throughout the centuries. A manuscript dating to around 1450 advises the would-be purchaser; “when a man proffers the pig, open the pough/ for when it is an old swine, thou do not take it.” Richard Hill, a grocer from London, produced a commonplace book for the years 1503 to 1506, in which he gave advice to potential tradesmen. Inevitably, it contained this nugget; “when you proffer the pigge open the poke.”
Despite Hill’s advice, the temptation to pass off an ancient pig sight unseen was too great for some to resist. And so the phrase continued to crop up. The epigrammatist and playwright, John Heywood, noted in his Two Hundred Epigrammes, published around 1555; “I wyll neuer bye the pyg in the poke:/ Thers many a foule pig in a feyre cloke.”
And if you are giving advice you may be a bit sexist as well. Robert Greene’s Mamillia, dating from 1583, contains this passage; “he is a foole, they say, that will buy ye pig in a poke: or wed a wife without trial.” Perhaps Henry VIII would have done well to have taken heed of the rider.
Passing off dodgy pigs was not confined to English traders. The Swedes had a similar phrase; “Köp inte grisen i säcken!”
Letting the cat out of the bag, which we looked at some time ago and is of more recent origin, is perhaps the other side of the coin and deals with the unmasking of a deceit rather than warning a potential buyer to beware. Whether cats were actually substituted for pigs is another story.
