English courses for horses
THOSE of you who placed bets on yesterday’s big race may already know that a dead horse on the racetrack is slow rather than actually deceased (hence the beating), and that a stewards’ enquiry is what happens when officials ask awkward questions about how much water a horse drank before losing. I thought it was when a flight attendant asked if you wanted beef or chicken, but I know better now.
Our cover story made me look into some other racing terms. Everyone’s heard of the favourite and the going getting tough and being beaten by a nose in a photo finish, but there are less familiar phrases that were also born on the track.
Did you know, for instance, that bits and pieces come straight from the horse’s mouth? This revelation is courtesy of Gene Siudut, who wrote about the Kentucky Derby in the online Bleacher Report. He mucked around in a few stables and found the origin of “bits and pieces”. A bit is the metal thing that goes in a horse’s mouth. It is attached to the bridle by a small leather “piece”. Unused bits and pieces would be left lying around, and now lend their name to all manner of assorted objects.
Here are a few more bits (or pieces). A dark horse might be as pale in colour as the poor pony saddled with the fourth horseman of the apocalypse. “Dark” means the public have no idea how the horse will perform, so don’t know how to bet on it. In other words, the punters are in the dark.
When racing began, starting gates hadn’t yet been invented. A line was scratched in the sand and horses had to keep their front feet behind this until a cannon was fired to set them off, or face a stewards’ enquiry. Which is why we have “starting from scratch”. With progress came a wire strung across the track — probably thought of by the guy who grew tired of constantly having to redraw a line in the sand. This wire served as both start and finish, and if the finish was close the race would be “down to the wire”.
Winning “hands down” means an easy victory. It comes from the moment when a jockey whose horse is leading the pack feels confident enough to let go of his (or her) controlling hold on the reins and drop those hands, usually to give the horse a big hug around the neck. This has sometimes ended badly.
Being an outsider is a familiar term. It’s when no one believes you have what it takes to win a race or a presidential election. Being a rank outsider is even worse — it means no one thinks you’ll even get close. Rank is an interesting word. The verb comes from Frankish (take away fish and you have rank) and means to arrange in order. A rank outsider wouldn’t even be on the seating plan.
As an adjective, however, rank was changed in Middle English to mean corrupt, foul or loathsome, usually applied to an unpleasant odour. With the racing term, we are left in the dark as to whether rank outsider refers to one not in the running or a horse so smelly that none of the others will go near it. And, by the way, when a horse gets excited it champs at the bit. It does not chomp. That is what hippos do.
PS: The war against apostrophe abuse goes on. I received a notice from a publisher about their forthcoming “novel’s”. Weep. On a happier note, I stormed into a corner shop in my neighbourhood and demanded to know why there was an apostrophe in Texas (“Texas Café” is painted on the wall, but above the door is “Texa’s Café”). The man behind the counter told me that the original owner was called Texa. It was indeed Texa’s Café. “The guys who painted the other sign got it wrong,” he said. A luta continua.