Our Living Language

 You may have heard the expression “get a wild hair up your butt.” In current usage, it usually refers to a person who is particularly exercised over some problem. Why on earth, you probably thought to yourself, would a hair up one’s rectum cause maniacal behavior? After all, how aggravating can one little hair be? And while we’re about it, how did it get there?

The illogic of this has caused some modern writers to write “get a wild hare up one’s butt”—presumably because having a wild rodent lodged in one’s anus would indeed cause rather animated behavior. But this, of course, is ridiculous. The largest rodent ever lodged in a human rectum is a small hamster, as reported in the August, 1997, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine by a physician at Cedars-Sinai Hospital.

The reality is quite an interesting story, and illustrates how our language develops over time. The first thing that needs to be said is that “up your butt” is a typical crude accretion added for emphasis in recent times and has nothing to do with the origin of the phrase, which in no way involves a medical condition such as might be presented to a proctologist.

The phrase was for centuries simply “catch a wild hare.” Its first known recorded use was in Chaucer’s Boysenbury Tales in the saga of King Harald the Angelic: “Thus didst auld Kinge Harald thys very daye kech a wilde harre, muche to th’amufement of hys courtiers.” As the story goes, King Harald was on a foxhunt when his dogs gave chase to something. It took the king a long hour and some adventurous riding to catch up to the dogs, only to find that instead of a fox, the dogs had cornered a wild rabbit. Through the centuries, the expression became divorced from the original story, as expressions almost invariably do, and came to refer to any enterprise which results in a disappointing (especially hilariously so) outcome.

Winston Churchill

The expression has remained in widespread currency from that day to this. Winston Churchill famously invoked the expression when he spoke in a radio address: “Never give up, never surrender, never, never, never catch a wild hare!” A few years later, a classic early Bugs Bunny cartoon was entitled “Wild Hare.”

Vanity Fair magazine undoubtedly added to the confusion when a 1978 article writer made the pun, “she caught a wild hair,” referring to a particularly troublesome supermodel who refused to continue posing until a stray hair was fixed, despite the fact that the shoot was thousands over budget and the light was fading. In this story, indeed, it was the Sports Illustrated photographer who went ballistic and had to be hospitalized for heatstroke. Because of this story, which was picked up by all the newswires, not only did the spelling of hair/hare become confused, but so did the meaning of the expression.

(For those readers under a certain age, “…picked up by all the newswires…” is the mid-20^th-century equivalent of “went viral.”)

There are thousands more examples of expressions which have lost their original meaning over time. One more will suffice: “Opinions are like assholes. Everybody’s got one.” Which begs the question, why assholes in particular? Why not noses? Another instance of adding crudeness for emphasis? Actually, in this case, no. In Abraham Lincoln’s lesser-known Colonial Williamsburg Address, he stated, “Opinions are like assholes. Everybody hath one, and everybody thinks theirs is the only one that does not stink.”

© 2014 Douglas J. Westberg. All Rights Reserved.