As fit as a butcher’s dog. What does it mean? Where is it from?
5-minute read
Where does it come from?
As part of a campaign to improve the nation’s health and beat the obesity epidemic, the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, had himself photographed doing press-ups and proclaimed himself “as fit as a butcher’s dog.”
He’s drawing on a powerful image which immediately conjures up a lean, muscled dog in tip-top condition jumping up to take the offcuts his butcher owner is dangling over him.
It is not known how old this simile is. It doesn’t appear in the Oxford English Dictionary. A search on Google Ngrams for “as a butcher’s dog” finds the rather different simile “as surly as a butcher’s dog” This goes back at least as far as John Ray’s 1670 collection of English proverbs and is repeated in several collections of proverbs that Ngrams retrieves.
The online Phrase Finder provides another butcher’s dog simile with a rather different meaning:
To be like a butcher’s dog, that is, lie by the beef without touching it; a simile often applicable to married men.
John Camden Hotten, A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words, 1859.
This is noted in Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English and Jonathon Green’s Slang Dictionary and dates back to Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 2nd edition, 1788.
Why do we use it?
As mentioned, it’s a compelling visual image. But it’s far from unique: it fits into a pattern of similes that draw on animals as symbols of desirable qualities such as strength, speed, agility and so forth.
I investigated to see how large the menagerie is and came across a few surprises.
What animals can we be as fit as?
In the two data sets I dug into (2014 and 2018), there were the usual suspects.
(Use of as is optional; some similes appear without almost as often as with it.)
(as) fit as a fiddle is the most popular by a long chalk. The original meaning of fit in this simile is “appropriate, apt.” It was only in the nineteenth century that it acquired its current meaning.
From the animal kingdom, in order of popularity, and jostling to be first into the Ark, we have (as) fit as a flea, and (as) fit as a butcher’s dog. So far, so obvious.
Trailing behind them sprints, charges, crawls, springs or swims – yes, swims – a mottled menagerie of buck rats, greyhounds, whippets, bull moose, horses, trout, ferrets, fleas, Mallee bulls, mountain goats and pandas.
Pandas? Read on.
[image error] Here’s a ferret. Oh, dear. When I saw this image, I didn’t see the lead. Were I to anthropomorphise, I’d say those eyes are imploring “set me free”.
How “set in stone” is the idiom?
It’s one of those that allow a certain amount of wiggle room in the noun group.
It’s stating the obvious to say that the animals invoked have to display certain characteristics attributed to them, in reality or by convention. And what are they?
brute strength in horses, bull moose, and Mallee bulls;
litheness, agility, gracefulness (and speed) in greyhounds, whippets, ferrets, trout (?) and mountain goats;
simple speed in buck rats, I presume (try shooing rats away, as I have, and you’ll see what I mean)
As for fleas, well, they do jump around a lot on, from and onto their hosts – so I’m told.
[image error]
Historically, by the way, a butcher’s dog is a large mastiff or possible even a Rottweiler:
Gret bucher dogges, þe whiche bochers holdeth forto helpe hem to brynge her beestes þat þei bieth in þe contre. (Great butcher dogs which butchers keep to help them lead their animals that they buy in the country.)
a1425 Edward, Duke of York Master of Game (Digby) xv. 72
Jingle bells…
At the level of sound, it also seems clear why some are used more than others. After fit as a fiddle, fit as a flea is the commonest. Alliteration rules, OK! in both, as it does in fit as a ferret, which also has the repetition of the short /ɪ/ sound.
That double /ɪ/ jingle might partially account for fit as a fiddle’s pre-eminence, that and its antiquity (before 1605 in the OED). Fit as a whippet trumps them both by having the sound thrice. Compare it for pzazz with fit as a greyhound and the winner seems clear. Ramped-up alliteration combined with emphasis accounts for fit as a f****** fiddle. (As fit as a thistle, which also turns up once, can be explained by the almost-alliteration + vowel matching).
Another sound feature perhaps worth mentioning is number of syllables. No animal cited has more than two, and many have only one.
[image error] Whippets galore and not a cloth cap in sight.
How much variation?
Is it an “open set” as linguists would call it: can you just add to it ad infinitum, provided the animal invoked fulfils the criteria? The safest approach seems to be that there is a small established set of animal similes generally recognized by English speakers (‘institutionalized’, to use the jargon) and beyond them a rather larger, fuzzy set where wordplay sometimes has a role.
With the caveat that corpora cannot provide the full picture, on the basis of what I looked at and some further searches, the core, institutionalized group would be, in alpha order:
fit as a butcher’s dog
fit as a ferret
fit as a flea
fit as a greyhound
fit as a horse
fit as a mountain goat
fit as a trout
My late aunt once described my athletic cousin as “like a gazelle” (she runs up mountains!) and, sure enough, as fit as a gazelle shows up more than 5,000 times on Google, but I’m not sure it would be in most people’s mental lexicons.
Are there regional variations?
Fit as a Mallee bull is definitely Australian in origin. The mallee is scrub vegetation ‘consisting of dense scrub dominated by low-growing bushy eucalypts, characteristic of semi-desert areas of Victoria and some other parts of southern Australia’ (OED). For a bull to survive there, it would need to be fighting fit.
Fit as a buck rat seems to be a New Zealand speciality. (Are their rats different?)
Some examples
First, about that panda … it’s an ironically humorous way of saying how unfit the speaker was: Gilbert has just completed a trek up the 19,340ft Mount Kilimanjaro with Wales rugby legend Martyn Williams in aid of Velindre Cancer Centre. He raised more than £ 4,000 in the six-day trek, despite saying he was about as fit as a panda.
chortle.co.uk, 2013
The possibly surprising fit as a trout is, according to the Macquarie Dictionary, a creation of Conan Doyle’s. In my corpus we had, The All Blacks had a light training in sunny Swansea on Monday morning and the big news is captain Richie McCaw is as fit as a trout. The sore hip that ruled him out…
stuff.co.nz, 2015
While not confined to NZ, other searches suggest it is more popular there than elsewhere.
The use of ‘proverbial’ indicates clearly that a simile is standard, as in I think it’s genetic. I don’t drink, I exercise three or four times a week (in the gym – hard training) take vitamins, manuka honey (how expensive is that stuff!), drink green tea endlessly, eat fruit, veg, chicken, brown rice. etc. and I’m still always flaming poorly. Other people abuse themselves constantly and are fit as the proverbial butcher’s dog.
Daily Mail, 2013 (Brit.)
Apart from the previous metalinguistic example, there are minor variations that intensify the image, such as fit as a racing greyhound and‘Chico will take me out and do a bit of jogging along the waterfront,’ says Bobby, who adds worriedly: ‘Have you seen him? He’s fit as a butcher’s whippet’.
thisisplymouth.co.uk, 2014 (Brit.)
And the OED cites Ian McEwan’s variation:
As for Lola—my high-living, chain-smoking cousin—here she was, still as lean and fit as a racing dog.
2001 Atonement 358
First occurrence according to the OED.
This is excellent ynfayth, as fit as a Fiddle.
a1605 W. Haughton English-men for my Money (1616) sig. Gv
1889 As fit as a flea, as ready and eager as a flea for blood.
J. Nicholson Folk Speech E. Yorkshire iii. 19
1960 ‘All right. How’s Bubby?’ ‘Fit as a Mallee bull! Got another tooth.’
Overland (Melbourne) Apr. 7
Note: this is a simplified version of a post from 2019.
