MacGougan at Large

Notes on Confusing Expressions - 3

Eyes

Suppose I tell you that I’m planning to flap my arms and fly to the moon. There are many ways you might express your skepticism, but one quaint Americanism would be, “In a pig’s eye!”

What does a pig’s eye have to do with something being untrue or improbable?

Google very helpfully tells me that the expression is most likely a toned-down version of what was originally “In a pig’s ass!”

My first thought on receiving this information was that it didn’t answer the question. What does any part of a pig’s anatomy have to do with likelihood?

Then I remembered the extent to which the ass - not the bottom, mind you, or bum or posterior or heinie - but very specifically the ass sits at the exact nexus of probability. Consider, for example, the following, possibly fictional, exchange:

“I’m going to be president someday.”

“President, my ass! You’ll be lucky to be Assistant Dogcatcher!”

Moving on, nobody seems to know the origin of the toast, “Here’s mud in your eye!” If you look it up, the theorized explanations all appear to be attempts to reverse engineer the expression without any supporting evidence.

How might an expression about mud have become a toast? Maybe it has to do with winning jockeys, whose horses kick up mud on the losers. Maybe it has to do with doughboys, happy just to still be alive in the muddy trenches of the First World War. Maybe it has to do with farmers, looking forward to harvests yet to come from the wet earth.

To all of those theories, I say, “In a pig’s armpit!” For my money, it either has to do with beer foam getting in the drinkers’ eyes or it’s simply a superstitious use of a bad wish for a good wish, analogous to actors telling one another to “break a leg.”

Finally, I’d like to consider that bizarre call to watchfulness: “Keep your eyes peeled!”

That expression has bothered me my whole life. Peeling eyes? No thank you!

Again, the experts have some unlikely theories. Is it a reference to Sir Robert Peel? He got the British police organized and is the reason the officers were known as “Bobbies.” Still, I think the fact there was a parallel expression “keep your eyes skinned” argues that the image is simply that watchfulness requires eyelids to be temporarily moved out of the way.

I personally prefer to think of eyelids as being raised like blinds rather than peeled like potato skins.