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Introduction

Why English Went to the Dogs

English loves dogs because dogs understand people.

They watch us closely, forgive us selectively, follow us loyally, embarrass us publicly, and occasionally bite somebody important.

Over centuries, we returned the favor by turning them into metaphor.

So the language filled with dogs.

Not noble horses, not aloof cats. Dogs: close enough to absorb our habits, moods, and failures.

A dog waited beside the fire before there was literature to describe the fire.

A person can be dog-tired, top dog, underdog, or in the doghouse. We let sleeping dogs lie, work like dogs, and call the wretched ones a dog’s life.

These phrases compress whole emotional situations into a few words. An idiom is a tiny story wearing a collar.

Some are ancient. Some are cruel. Some are oddly tender. Shakespeare gave us “the cat will mew and dog will have his day.” Churchill made the black dog his metaphor for depression.

Freud kept chow dogs that wandered his consulting room while patients talked.

Dogs, unlike humans, rarely pretend to be something else.

That honesty runs through these idioms. The dog in language is loyal, hungry, shameless, brave, jealous, humiliated, faithful, and occasionally wise.

In other words: human. The book runs the way a day with dogs runs.

A day with a dog has a shape, and so does this book. Morning comes in on stiff legs and a low growl at nothing in particular.

Hunger arrives early and never fully leaves. There is a stretch of barking that settles nothing and a chase that settles even less.

Somewhere past noon the body discovers its limits and ignores them anyway. Appetite dresses itself up and overshoots the occasion.

Quarrels flare and cool like passing weather. The light goes long and gold. Old joints begin to remember every winter they have known. And by evening the whole restless animal narrows to a single want — the door, the worn step, the familiar weight of someone finally coming home.

The phrases come from everywhere. Shakespeare and Tudor proverbs. Race tracks, gambling halls, kitchens where somebody looked at a dog and recognized a familiar truth.

The dogs in these pages are not illustrations of language. They are little mirrors of us.

Some howl at the moon. Some wait by the door.

Some chase impossible things long after dignity suggests stopping.

And somewhere, a small dog believes that today is his own glorious day.