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David Cronenberg, eat your heart out! |
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Yes, you caught me using an already overused idiom. The phrase is in my active vocabulary because it was a solution in last Sunday's heart-themed New York Times crossword puzzle. Which was how I found out that it doesn't mean what I thought it meant ("eat as much as you like")! |
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There's a lot of online speculation about the phrase, but the only answer that addresses the odd grammar came from Mark Israel in the alt.usage.english FAQ, who suspects Yiddish origin ("Es dir oys s'harts"). That's claimed by one popular author, but several other people have contradicted him. |
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"Har tout" is a Pictish term for a dying
person's last meal and the phrase was
deployed to signify the gravity and
finality of a desperate situation. This
meal was usually carried around in the
form of a dried mackerel head on a
length of
string. |
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When folk were described as being in a
state of extreme jealousy, they were
said to be fit to: "Ee toor har tout" |
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In time
this became absorbed into "regular
Anglo Saxon, then eventually English in
the corrupted form we recognise today. |
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Originally "eat your hard trout"? |
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[xenzag], my credulousness is rebelling. //dying person's last meal... usually... dried mackerel head on a... string// Really? I'd think you'd only do that to a convicted criminal - who'd refuse it. Or a starving person - but why would you plan that event far enough ahead that you'd know when to use it? Was starvation always just minutes away? Were Pictish wives history's worst cooks? Was the ultimate insult to take someone's dead fish? The mind reels. |
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I thought they used pictograms? |
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Up home we say, "Cut your heart out and eat the bones." |
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[lurch] to the Pict, the mackerel head
was a most treasured prize, mainly for
its contents: i.e. one canny brain of
walnut dimension. If consumed close to
the point of death, it enabled the
subsequently departed soul to traverse
the treacherous waters, that separated
them from heaven, with the ease and
swiftness of a frolicking mackerel. |
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