Spot the mane clause: Equine terms are hiding where you’d least expect them

Chivalry, serfdom, industrial activity and the races have all yielded evocative horse-linked phrases. Surprises include hands-down, ride roughshod and Big Apple

Take a horse to water, horse-trading, hold your horses… given the interdependence we once had with these majestic beasts, it is no surprise that ourlanguage embraced them too.

In more recent times, a stellar show starring Will Arnett as BoJack gave the term horseman a new meaning.

There are, in fact, horses hidden in a number of phrases where one wouldn’t expect them to be.

Let’s start with a simple one. Riding and the age of chivalry (roughly the medieval period, from the 12th to 15th centuries) gave us “full tilt”. Tilting was an early name for jousting while on horseback. The aim was not so much to pierce the opponent’s armour as to spook his horse so that he would be unsaddled.

Knights would joust “at full tilt” when their honour, or the honour of a woman in their circle, had been questioned. They would also joust in jest, or as something akin to a war game or practice session ahead of actual battle.

There is also “high and mighty”, meaning “to act with a self-importance one likely hasn’t earned”. This one dates all the way back to the 1400s, a time when only the wealthiest and most powerful rode on horses. They were literally and figuratively more highly placed than the poor, who had to walk. This gave them an unfounded arrogance, based not on character or even achievement but merely on status. And so it is still frowned upon to act “high and mighty”.

Fast-forward several centuries and one arrives at “shoo-in”, which comes to us from the world of horse-racing, in the 1930s. Amid scandals over rigged races, this became the term for a horse that was shooed or ushered towards victory in dubious ways. Over time, the implication of dubiousness was lost and it became a term used simply to indicate the candidate most likely to win.

“Hands-down” is an interesting one. We’d never associate it with horses, and yet most of us don’t really think about what it means: perhaps surrender, an absence of effort, someone really good at cards?

It is none of those things. It comes to us, instead, from horse-racing. Towards the end of a race, when a jockey was certain of victory, he lowered his hands, relaxing his grip on the reins. It was a power move that said: “I don’t even have to try”. And so, today too, one wins “hands-down”.

Some equine phrases serve as a tribute to the pain these beasts suffered, in the years when they helped power our world. In a simple example, “to give someone gyp” means to cause deep pain, “gyp” being a contraction of “gee-up”, the command to urge a horse to move faster. In a more evocative example, we have “against the collar”. This phrase immortalises the image of a horse dragging a heavy load uphill, causing its collar to greatly distress its neck. To this day, “against the collar” indicates a person who is exhausted or having a difficult time, but is still striving.

I’d like to end on a slightly happier note, with my two favourites: “to ride roughshod over” and “Big Apple”.

“Ride roughshod” sounds like it might involve simply running a cart or carriage over someone’s plans or dreams, but really it has to do with horses’ hooves. This phrase, indicating utter disregard for another person, comes from a practice of shoeing horses roughly, leaving the nail heads of their horseshoes jutting out, so that they could be ridden anywhere without slipping. Imagine being trampled by an animal shod in this way. Ghastly!

Big Apple, meanwhile, has been dated to a newspaper column from the 1920s. “Apple”, in horse-racing, was slang for a major cash prize (the apple being the stereotypical treat for horses). A “big apple” was a significant prize. And so the city that gave out the most prizes became “the Big Apple”. And that city, of course, was New York.

(Adam Jacot de Boinod is the author of The Meaning of Tingo)