[Ads-l] see a man about a horse or dog

[Will Salmon]

I heard this regularly in south Texas as a kid in the 1980s, with the size of the animal you had to see about correlating with the urgency of the situation. So, seeing a man about a dog vs about an elephant, etc.
WS

> On Nov 22, 2021, at 10:56 PM, David Daniel <dad at coarsecourses.com> wrote:
> 
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       David Daniel <dad at COARSECOURSES.COM>
> Subject:      see a man about a horse or dog
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Going back to the 1950s when I was a kid, my dad would say he had to "see a
> man about a horse" when going to the bathroom. Thus, of course, I have spent
> my whole life with that in my going-to-the-bathroom repertoire. But an Irish
> friend of mine, when in the same situation, says "see a man about a dog."
> We've had some humorous exchanges over the "correctness" of the two
> versions, so I checked them out. Both get a similar number of Google hits
> (horse - 679,000, dog - 721,000), but many sources claim it is British
> usage. Yet there was my dad, born and raised in Indiana, saying it on a
> regular basis back in the 1950s and onward. It's possible he picked it up in
> England in WWII, but I have no way of knowing. Does anyone out there have
> any experience with the expression or info about which side or sides of the
> pond it came from?
> DAD
> 
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