Chasing Our Tails: How Dog Metaphors Help Shape English Emotions

In a couple of previous posts, I homed in (or honed in, if you prefer, but I don’t) on the canine qualities we apply to ourselves, such as happiness – like a dog with two tails – aggression – attack dog, like a rabid dog – or lack of it – nodding dog, and social relations – dog does not eat dog.

After posting those, I was intrigued to find in William McIlvanney’s Strange Loyalties (Canongate 2021, a reissue of a 1991 book) two very pertinent examples of the conceptual metaphor ‘human aggression is canine aggression’, which are elaborated as the narrator/protagonist says to himself:

Driving, I was annoyed at myself for becoming angry. Muzzle the dog. My anger wasn’t for him.

and then, much later:

Only my head was rabidly alive […] I remembered my feeling in the car after talking to the stranger outside Scott’s old house. Muzzle the dog, I had said to myself. How did you muzzle this one? That had been a Chihuahua. This was a Great Dane. I felt such rage.

Chasing our tails

Given the huge popularity of dogs as animal companions, it’s no surprise that the above don’t exhaust the human situations and emotions we illustrate with them.

Let’s look first at our own mental states. If something is frustrating us, if we’re doing something that isn’t achieving any result despite our frantic efforts, we might talk about chasing our tails. If we disagree with someone else’s viewpoint, we might say that they are barking at the moon, a phrase that goes back to the mid-nineteenth century, from the US. Or we might suggest they themselves are barking mad. Nowadays it’s mostly shortened to barking on its own, first used by Nancy Mitford in her 1960 Don’t tell Alfred.

Alternatively, we might not wish to entirely discredit what someone says, we might just think they’re slightly misguided, so we could say they’re barking up the wrong tree. The image here must be of a dog who is chasing some kind of animal – perhaps a squirrel – that is tree-borne and is barking up a tree where the squirrel was, but clever Mr Squirrel has now managed to escape.

Like a dog with a bone

A few short weeks ago, on BBC Radio 4, the Labour Party’s chief whip, Anneliese Midgley, was described as ‘like a dog with a bone’, and her persistence was then highlighted by calling her ‘a terrier’.

The presenter wasn’t implying she was small, furry and endowed with a tail and paws; he was using a tried-and-tested simile followed by a metaphor.

The OED dates the first occurrence of like a dog with a bone to as recently as 1887; surely people must have drawn that mental comparison before then?

Anneliese is clearly doggèd in her determination (and I’d be surprised if you haven’t thought something similar about someone at some point). We’ve been using the adjective, derived directly from dog, in that approving meaning since the start of the 1700s, although the word itself goes back to the 1200s, and its meanings have evolved several times over the centuries into something we now regard usually as rather positive. We can use it in the proverbial ‘It’s dogged as does it,’ which suggests that patience, perseverance and unflappable grit will carry the day in the end. Similarly to like a dog with a bone, it’s a Victorian (1864) coinage, according to the OED.

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Great Expectations

And it was that pre-eminent Victorian novelist Charles Dickens who used the now somewhat archaic proverb ‘Brag is a good dog but Holdfast is better’ in Great Expectations, when the slightly sinister lawyer Jaggers brings some surprising news to Pip, bound apprentice, and his guardian/brother-in-law, the huge-hearted Joe Gargery. It means that tenacity and quietness are preferable to boasting and showiness, and dates back to the late sixteenth century:

“Now, Joseph Gargery, I am the bearer of an offer to relieve you of this young fellow your apprentice. You would not object to cancel his indentures at his request and for his good? You would want nothing for so doing?”

“Lord forbid that I should want anything for not standing in Pip’s way,” said Joe, staring.

“Lord forbidding is pious, but not to the purpose,” returned Mr. Jaggers. “The question is, Would you want anything? Do you want anything?”

“The answer is,” returned Joe, sternly, “No.”

I thought Mr. Jaggers glanced at Joe, as if he considered him a fool for his disinterestedness. But I was too much bewildered between breathless curiosity and surprise, to be sure of it.

“Very well,” said Mr. Jaggers. “Recollect the admission you have made, and don’t try to go from it presently.”

“Who’s a-going to try?” retorted Joe.

“I don’t say anybody is. Do you keep a dog?”

“Yes, I do keep a dog.”

“Bear in mind then, that Brag is a good dog, but Holdfast is a better. Bear that in mind, will you?” repeated Mr. Jaggers, shutting his eyes and nodding his head at Joe, as if he were forgiving him something. “Now, I return to this young fellow. And the communication I have got to make is, that he has great expectations.”

Joe and I gasped, and looked at one another.

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Pug image courtesy of Marion Nabinger on Pixabay.