Doggy Phrases

You can tell how important dogs are to humans by the fact that there are lots of phrases using the word dog.  Today I am going to talk about two of these phrases.

The first one is dog-eat-dog.  Sometimes people will say, "It's a dog-eat-dog world."  And what they mean is that everybody is very aggressive towards everybody else, and they will do whatever they have to in order to succeed, like eat anybody who gets in their way.

I don't like this phrase much because it makes dogs sound like they are always killing and eating each other, which is not true.  Sometimes one dog will kill another dog, but I have never heard of a dog eating another dog.  I guess if a dog was really starving, he would eat a dog, but I don't think this happens very often.  What I have heard of is when a coyote kills a small dog and eats it, but this is not what you would call "dog-eat-dog."  It's more like "coyote-eat-dog."

Anyway, a phrase that I like much better is putting on the dog.  This means getting all dressed up and fancy and looking snazzy.  It's the same as putting on the ritz.   This phrase got started a long, long time ago, back in the 1860s, as college slang.  You could also say that something was doggy, and that meant it was attractive and flashy and expensive.

These phrases might have got started because it was very popular back in those days for rich ladies to have little dogs that they "put on" their laps.  So the fact that they could sit around with dogs on their laps showed that they could afford to lead a life of leisure.  Working people did not have time to just sit around, so they didn't have lap dogs.  They had working dogs that helped herd the sheep and did things like that.

I like the phrase putting on the dog because it is a much nicer way to think of dogs than in the phrase dog-eat-dog.  Mom said maybe I should start an Anti-Defamation League for dogs, and the purpose of this group would be to ask people not to use phrases like dog-eat-dog that show dogs in a bad light.  Then if people insisted on using these phrases anyway, we could bite them on the ankle!  I think that would work, don't you?