Readers of this blog often tell us that they want to learn more English idioms. To help with this, we’ve decided to publish a short series of posts on animal idioms. Animals feature in a lot of English idioms. Some learners find them easy to remember because they create such a strong image in the mind.
Let’s start with an animal that features in a number of frequent English idioms: the cat. Sometimes when it is raining very hard, you might say that it is raining cats and dogs:
It’s raining cats and dogs out there! I’ll just wait in the store a bit longer and hope the rain lets up.
If someone allows a secret to be known, usually without intending to, you might say they let the cat out of the bag:
It was supposed to be a surprise party but Sam let the cat out of the bag!
To describe a place that is extremely small, you might say there isn’t enough room to swing a cat:
You certainly couldn’t fit a double bed in here. There isn’t enough room to swing a cat!
If someone says or does something that causes trouble, or makes a lot of people very angry, in UK English you can say they put or set the cat among the pigeons:
The announcement certainly set the cat among the pigeons!
Finally for cats, the expression while the cat’s away, the mice will play means that when the person who is in charge of a place is absent, people often behave badly:
Jo’s been away this week so the office hasn’t been getting much done. While the cat’s away, the mice will play.
As you’d expect, dogs feature in English idioms too. In UK English, an informal way to refer to something that has been done very badly is a dog’s breakfast:
Alex had attempted to fill in the form and made a complete dog’s breakfast of it.
A saying that you sometimes hear is you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, meaning that it is difficult to change someone’s habits after they have been doing the same thing for many years:
He’s been driving that way for so long now. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
Another animal that is used often in English idioms is the horse. One popular idiom featuring the horse is you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. This is used to emphasize that you can make it easy for someone to do something, but you can’t actually force them to do it:
I’ve paid for Ollie’s gym membership but whether he actually goes is up to him. You know what they say – you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.
A rather disturbing (but common) horse idiom is beat a dead horse or (UK) flog a dead horse. If you beat/flog a dead horse, you waste effort trying to do something when there is no chance of it succeeding:
He keeps trying to get his novel published but, personally, I think he’s beating a dead horse.
Finally, if you say wild horses wouldn’t drag you somewhere, you mean you absolutely do not want to go somewhere:
Wild horses wouldn’t drag me to one of their concerts.
Next month we’ll look at idioms related to fish and flies, among other creatures.