The Rich Use of Canine Metaphors in English

An organisation with unlimited funds, it seems, wishes to fly me to California to create a style guide. They asked me by email last Friday, and as I hadn’t answered, repeated the request yesterday, Monday, more insistently, and more or less organising my life for me in a way that struck me as a bit pushty. Flattered though I am, for various personal reasons, I simply cannot go.

My partner quipped that my interlocutor was ‘at my heels’. Which was quite the coincidence; I’d already decided to write today about some of the many ways in which we use dogs as metaphors for our own behaviour, and right there was a living – almost breathing – example.

Not every English household keeps a dog at home, but every English speaker is completely at home with dogs, linguistically speaking. We currently draw on well over 200 doggy metaphors, proverbs and related expressions to react to a whole swathe of our circumstances and emotions.

Some are as recent as the late twentieth century, like I don’t have a dog in this fight. Some go all the way back to Latin. Dog does not eat dog derives from the first-century BC canis caninam nōn ēst. Some are self-evidently doggy, others are buried, such as to fawn, which I’ll come back to.

 According to Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, metaphors are literally embodied. That’s why we describe happiness as up, because we literally look up when we’re happy and down when we’re sad, and talk about being ‘on a high’ or ‘down in the dumps.’ To expand our range of expressions we then draw on the animal kingdom, as I explain in my The Metaphor Zoo: Why the English language loves animals.

Here are a few of the many human emotions we can express doggily.

Happiness:

We can talk about someone being like a dog with two tails, an image which is earliest recorded in the formulation ‘as proud as a dog with two tails’ in 1829. And of course there is a rather more vulgar version of this simile which I will spare the reader. Another image we borrow from our four-legged chums is with one’s tail up, which is clearly based on dog behaviour, for anyone can observe that a dog with his tail up is in a good mood.

Sadness or dejection:

Of course we can also express the opposite emotion, sadness or dejection, by drawing on the behaviour of our canine friends. Let’s imagine someone has been bested in an altercation or argument and then scuttles with their tail between their legs, just as a skelped dog might. And then we can talk about someone having ‘a hangdog expression’. We’re not quite sure exactly what the underlying justification of the word hangdog is. There are two options. The first, that it refers to someone who is only fit to hang a dog – though I’m not quite sure what kind of person that might be. The second that dog here stands for a person who is only fit to be hanged, and that’s the interpretation I plump for. Words of this kind, formed by joining a transitive verb to its putative noun object, such as cut-throat, killjoy, pickpocket, scarecrow, etc. are sometimes known as ‘tosspot’ words, after this sixteenth-century word for a drunkard which has now been updated to also mean ‘a fool’ or, pardon my French, ‘a tosser’.

Aggression:

Aggressive behaviour or an aggressive nature is another human characteristic we use dogs to symbolise. For instance, there are real attack dogs, that is, dogs trained to defend their owners with extreme viciousness, and then there are human attack dogs. President Obama was once described as Joe Biden’s attack dog when he was campaigning for Biden. And on a historical note, T. H. Huxley who staunchly defended Darwin’s views as expressed in On the Origin of Species was referred to as Darwin’s ‘bulldog’.

But those aren’t the only instances of dogs as metaphors of aggression. Just think of Mark Antony standing over Cæsar’s corpse in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar and threatening to unleash the dogs of war on Italy and cause civil strife and mayhem:

Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;

[…]

And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry ‘havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial

(Act iii, Scene 1, 266–7; 273–8)

And while Mark Antony speaks very calmly, if persuasively, we can also talk about somebody foaming at the mouth with anger, a metaphor which is presumably based on the behaviour of a person afflicted with rabies or a dog afflicted with it. And then we use the related simile ‘like a rabid dog’ if someone is angry beyond all bounds. Finally in this line, what about biting the hand that feeds you, which for me conjures up a very clear and distinct image of bending down to give some food to Rover with your outstretched hand and then having him nip your fingers.

Lack of aggression:

I’ve spoken about aggression, but we can express the opposite using doggy language. Someone who is a nodding dog is the opposite of an aggressive dog, a yes person, someone with no spine, no backbone, no independent opinion. What intrigues me about this metaphor is that it first appears in print according to the OED in 1987 and it only takes just over a decade for it to be converted to a metaphor:

I just like to push my ideas through, and why shouldn’t I? I’m not paid to do a nodding dog act.

Daily Telegraph (Electronic edition) 22 January, 1998.

Another example of someone being at someone else’s beck and call is poodle, a word first used in that sense by David Lloyd George, that great orator, in a speech rich with dog metaphors. And on the same topic of servile behaviour, if somebody fawns on you, they’re behaving in a way which is totally subservient, obsequious, creepy in a way which makes your flesh crawl. And this verb comes from dog behaviour as observed in the thirteenth-century Ancrene Riwle, a guide for anchoresses, that is nuns who shut themselves off from the world and lived as hermits. This is how to deal with flatterers:

Spet him amidde þe bearde..ðet..fikeð mid dogge uawenunge.

Spit right in his beard…he who flatters with doggy fawning.

And then finally under the non-aggression angle, think of someone making puppy eyes at you, that is great big innocent wide-open eyes designed to play with your emotions to manipulate you into doing what the person putting those eyes on wants from you.

Why don’t you prick up your ears this week to see – or hear – how many doggy metaphors you come across? I bet there’ll be some.