I am sweating like a stuck pig!” was an expression I grew up with, and kept on hearing throughout my childhood. I had visions of this large, fat pig stuck in a fence, snout on one side and corkscrew tail and butt on the other, grunting and squealing away at the top of his voice, frantically trying his best to break free from this predicament.
Much later, I realised that this expression had nothing to do with pigs, but is a reference to hot iron or ‘pig iron’ which is made from iron ore. As the hot metal cools, the air around it cools, causing droplets to form on the metal’s surface looking very much like droplets of sweat! Also, pigs don’t sweat
as we do, but they do enjoy wallowing in mud and dirt and having a fun time. Wallowing in mud helps them regulate their body temperature.
This now reminds me of a comedy song, sung by the British pair Michael Flanders and Donald Swann titled, “The Hippopotamus.” A hippopotamus looks down from the banks of a river at an inviting patch of wet and mushy mud and entices his mate who is sitting on a hilltop to come down and join him in a wallowing spree in the marshy mud. He then goes on to sing her this melodious love song: “Mud, Mud glorious mud/ Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood/ So follow me, follow; down to the hollow/ And there let us wallow, in glorious mud!’’
My dad had a passion—no, not wallowing in mud—but for travel, and would take us on long, arduous journeys into the wilderness. During these long drives, he would suddenly stop the car, jump out and disappear into the bushes. Eventually, curiosity caught up with me, and I asked him: “Where is it that you keep on dashing off to, Daddy?” With a smug look on his face, he would say, “Oh, it’s nothing, I have to ‘see a man about a dog’.”
For many years I didn’t get it. Where had all these men and dogs gone to? Much later, it dawned on me that it was one of those quaint British phrases used for slipping away without having to disclose the true reason! Dad’s frequent use of old and archaic English kept us guessing as well as entertained along with his repertoire of amusing and long stories.
Thrilling isn’t it how a group of words or phrases take on a different meaning from the literal meaning of the individual words. Nevertheless, a language without its array of idioms and phrases would be like a cake without the icing!
Tilak Baker
Email: tilak@cds.ac.in