"Look a (gift) horse in the mouth"

[Jonathan Lighter]

So it means nada that horses were sacred to Poseidon, who built Troy, and
that Hector was famed as a bronco-buster?

If the Horse was a muddled "folk memory" of "germ warfare" (not even known
to have been waged at Ilium), the memory was so attenuated that almost any
other explanation is automatically better.

JL


On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 6:39 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Look a (gift) horse in the mouth"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 4:39 PM, W Brewer <brewerwa at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Trojan Horse = metaphor for germ warfare.
>
>
> As they say on Slash Dot,
>
> Score; 5 (of 5), Interesting
>
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
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>



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