Carthorses for courses – interesting uses of a metaphor for clumsiness, ungainliness, etc.

Sometimes a word is only ever a metaphor, like tipping point: there is no literal meaning describing something or someone physically tipping. Many other words have absolutely no conventional metaphorical meaning, like arctic tern or Polyfilla – though no doubt someone somewhere sometime could use them to create a novel metaphor.

In between these extremes sometimes a word’s metaphorical uses far outnumber the literal ones – although there are literal ones. Take gadfly, of which more, briefly, below. Unless you’re a vet or an equine specialist, you’re unlikely to come across it in its literal meaning although most dictionaries, in line with tradition, give that literal meaning first. (One exception is of course Cobuild true to its mission of illuminating words in real use.)

Man Leading a Cart-horse. Artist unknown. National Galleries of Scotland. Gift of Mrs. Riddell in memory of Peter Fletcher Riddell 1985

Another word turns out to be a less extreme yet surprising case of this metaphorical/literal imbalance.

I have long since described to myself a woman in the yoga class I used to attend – but for obvious reasons politely withheld my mental description from others till now –  as ‘a great carthorse of a woman’. No insult was intended: to my mind, it is an objective description of a woman who has a large frame and gives the impression of massiveness and solidity without being overweight, let alone obese.

Viewed in that light, it arguably comes close to being a compliment. After all, who doesn’t love a carthorse, horses in general and carthorses in particular being such noble beasts? But anyway, intentions aside, as there is nothing new under the sun and as language consists to a vast extent of endlessly repeated patterns, my curiosity was piqued: does the frame ‘a carthorse of a NOUN’ exist? After all, it’s not uncommon to compare a swift, graceful woman to a gazelle, so why not, at the other end of the spectrum, a carthorse?

So far, a delve into my usual sources suggests this is not a recognised pattern. Nevertheless, journalists routinely use carthorse used to describe different classes of people, especially sportspeople. Those people are mainly men, but there are exceptions.

Metaphorical carthorses far outnumber literal ones, which is perhaps not that surprising. When did you last see a carthorse? Apparently, before the Second World War carthorses in Britain still outnumbered tractors, but the industrialisation of agriculture long ago redressed that imbalance. It is also true that the term carthorse is primarily British. Synonyms are draught horse (UK) draft horse (US) and dray horse, but they are almost never used as metaphors or in similes.

When it comes to carthorse examples, Theresa May, the former British Prime Minister, in case anyone has forgotten – which no doubt many have and many more still would wish to – was doubly metaphorised in a piece in The Times:

For now he [sc. Jacob Rees-Mogg] is happy to play gadfly to the prime minister’s slow-moving carthorse but as spokesman for supporters of a hard Brexit his sting is becoming ever more potent.

I say ‘doubly metaphorised’ because of the coupling with the gadfly metaphor – and if you’ve only ever come across gadfly as a metaphor, as I had, in the above article it is doubly appropriate because it also partakes of its literal meaning: a gadfly is ‘A fly that bites livestock, especially a horsefly, warble fly, or botfly.’

Moving on, we swap the ungainly and unfortunate Theresa May – once seen, even the most potent mind bleach could never erase the memory of her squirm-inducing entry on stage at the 2018 Conservative party conference to the strains of Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’ – for the titanic queen of R&B (with huge dollops of schmaltz), Tina Turner, ‘like an angry carthorse trying to ice skate’:

Whatever her age, Turner spent much of Thursday’s show in Cologne wearing spangled micro-dresses that revealed her legendary legs in all their glory. Imagine twin columns of pure sculpted muscle, tightly wrapped in corned beef. She also mustered plenty of energy for her signature shuffling dance moves, like an angry carthorse trying to ice skate. For some reason, Mickey Rourke’s butch, bruising exertions in The Wrestler kept springing to mind.

The Times

To complete a triad of feminine inelegance, read how the British media personality Carol Vorderman, known to the red-tops as ‘curvaceous Carol’ and sometime winner of the ‘Rear of the Year’ award, dissed a duo of erstwhile style gurus who used to tell the clothes-blind how to make themselves more appealing. She described them, respectively, as ‘an anorexic transvestite’ and ‘…like a carthorse in a badly-fitted bin liner’. Miaooow, miaooow and miaooow.

Comparing sportsmen to carthorses is a staple of British sports journalism which cuts across different sports, including golf, rugby, football, tennis and even snooker:

‘When Ronnie’s [O’Sullivan] on song, everybody else looks like a carthorse in comparison’, said world-champion Steve Davis: ‘It looks as though snooker is what he was put on this planet to do.’

But the metaphor can also be re-applied from the physical to the mental or intellectual. Take Alfred Austin, the now largely forgotten turn-of-the-twentieth-century Poet Laureate, ‘who wrote as if his muse was a carthorse and owed his appointment purely to his personal and political friendship with the Marquess of Salisbury.’ Why a carthorse? As a clodhopping contrast to the mythological winged steed Pegasus, swift and agile, who was associated with the Muses.

A similar metaphor was used by the writer Margery Perham, ‘who had always thought Elspeth’s [Huxley] prose was Swiftian, whereas she was a carthorse by comparison — had asked Elspeth to help her correct the book…’.

In Animal Farm, Orwell used the carthorse Boxer to represent the working class. According to Jon Snow in his autobiography, when on VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) in Africa and teaching Animal Farm, the children asked ‘What’s a carthorse, Sir? What’s a sheep?’ I suspect many British children today would have to ask the first of those two questions.

Apart from being a literary metaphor, in the hands of the cartoonist David Low (1891–1963) a carthorse was also a visual metaphor for the TUC (Trades Union Congress) viewed as obstinately conservative or honest but simple-minded. In the 1956 cartoon linked here, the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, is shown as Tarzan battling with the TUC carthorse. This carthorse characterisation was much later punned on by the Farmers’ union head, who said that it was ‘biologically impossible for the T.U.C. carthorse to sit on the fence.’

When in 2015 the Independent chose to portray the TUC as a carthorse, the TUC’s press office itself was baffled and had to be informed about its own history. So much for ars longa, vita brevis.

Incidentally, carthorse is mentioned in some sources as the longest single-word anagram in English (orchestra), but that’s a huge, fat canard. At a puny nine letters it is leagues behind the Guinness Book of Record’s conversationalists = conservationalists, which frankly, however, reads like a bit of a swizz, first because only a few of its letters play musical chairs and second because, really, does anyone know or use those words? We’re on safer ground with twelve letters, as in mountaineers = enumerations, and several others, but each time one of the two terms is unlikely to trip off the tongue.