Elaine and I wondered about the pot in go to pot . We had three guesses between us: a chamber pot, a cooking pot, and a pot for a plant.
The kitchen wins. The idiom “dates from the late 1500s and alludes to inferior pieces of meat being cut up for the stewpot.” Source: Christine Ammer, The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
I suppose that if something wasn’t good enough for the stewpot, it might have become hogwash.
Wednesday, July 1, 2020
Idiom of the day: go to pot
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comments: 8
I guess “humble pie” might be between the stewpot and the hog-wash.
Ha! What’s in that anyway? Must look up.
Well, as long as you're looking that up, how about "eat crow"?
Humble pie “alludes to a pie made from umbles, a deer’s undesirable innards (heart, liver, entrails.” It dates from the early 1800s.
“Eat crow”: the origin is lost, “although a story relates that it involved a War of 1812 encounter in which a British officer made an American soldier eat part of a crow he had shot in British territory. Whether or not it is true, the fact remains that crow meat tastes terrible.”
Both from The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms.
Trust me, you don't even want to get into "4 and 20 blackbirds baked in a pie." That's a whole other kettle of fish.
I wonder if the crow in question is not a corvid but rather a cock’s crowing? This could put the saying in league with “nothing to crow about”.
I’ve read about those pies, or at least the ones with live birds flying out. Special effects!
My university library’s website is down for maintenance. When it comes back I’ll see if the OED has anything helpful about eating crow.
The crow is indeed a bird, and the idiom is sometimes “to eat boiled crow.” The first citation is from the San Francisco Picayune (1851): “I kin eat a crow, but I’ll be darned if I hanker after it.”
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