three-dog night

[Jonathan Lighter]

A journalist has prompted me to look into this phrase.

So everybody knows it comes from Aboriginal Australians sleeping with Fido
to keep warm in the desert.

Everybody, that is, but OED and the Web posters who think it refers to
Eskimos instead.  Eskimos have more dogs and it's colder, right? So why
wouldn't they think that?

What nobody knows is that "three-dog night" first appeared in English in
1957. My lingua-spidey sense tells me that it not a translation from any
Aboriginal language, but a phrase that popped into the head of the
researcher being interviewed or writing a press release.

Read the North American Newspaper Alliance dispatch at NewspaperArchive
(Steubenville Herald Star, July 23, 1957).

The relevant passage: "A chilly night is known as a 'three-dog night.' A
'five-dog night' is really cold."

This fun fact was often reprinted as a newspaper filler for the next ten or
eleven years.

The band first performed in May, 1968.

JL


-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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