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

[Jonathan Lighter]

My grandfather, born in NYC in 1884, used the "dog" version many times.

JL

On Tue, Nov 23, 2021 at 7:54 AM Will Salmon <
00000f3af6842778-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:

> 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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>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


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