SICK AS A DOG

Junior Master has a dastardly cold. When Main Mistress came home tonight, she promptly drew a hot bath, filled it with peppermint oil and sat bath-side, reading to Junior Master while he groaned in the water.

"Mom," I heard him say. "Where does the expression 'sick as a dog' come from?"

My puppy ears pricked up immediately from the hiding place I had secreted myself into after learning that I would not be enjoying the tasty treat of Main Mistress's sweaty, post-workout feet. Though she had gone on a late night walk for a couple of miles, her final destination was the nail salon where she had a pedicure.

When I saw those ebony-dark toenails and buffed, lotioned and perfumed soles headed my way, I quickly beat it to the bottom of Main Master's side of closet, where I drowned my sorrows in his dirty shirts.

Anyway, the question of Junior Master drew me from my lair. To my surprise, Main Mistress burst into laughter and repeated the question to Main Master, who was trying to escape to his office. Determined to reward her child's curiosity, she mused aloud that perhaps the expression came from a time when dogs were not the pampered princes and princesses they are today, but rather, were treated like homeless vagrants.

Well, later at night, after Junior Master went to sleep and while Main Mistress was busy blogging on her site (check out http://bungalow-babe.blogspot.com/) I snuck to Main Master's laptop and did a little sleuthing. It paid off, as you will see from the following information, gleaned from www.worldwidewords.com:

Q] From Ehud Maimon in Jerusalem: “I would appreciate it if you could help me find the origin of the expression sick as a dog.”

[A] There are several expressions of the form sick as a ..., that date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sick as a dog is actually the oldest of them, recorded from 1705; it is probably no more than an attempt to give force to a strongly worded statement of physical unhappiness. It was attached to a dog, I would guess, because dogs often seem to have been linked to things considered unpleasant or undesirable; down the years they have had an incredibly bad press, linguistically speaking (think of dog tired, dog in the manger, dog’s breakfast, go to the dogs, dog Latin — big dictionaries have long entries about all the ways that dog has been used in a negative sense).

At various times cats, rats and horses have been also dragged in to the expression, though an odd thing is that horses can’t vomit; one nineteenth-century writer did suggest that this version was used “when a person is exceedingly sick without vomiting”. The strangest member of the set was used by Jonathan Swift in 1731: “Poor Miss, she’s sick as a Cushion, she wants nothing but stuffing” (stop laughing at the back).

The modern sick as a parrot recorded from the 1970s — at one time much overused by British sportsmen as the opposite of over the moon — refers to a state of deep mental depression rather than physical illness; this perhaps comes from instances of parrots contracting psittacosis and passing it to their human owners.

Anyway, poor little Junior Master is indeed sick, but I prefer a different simile. Let's just say that he's as sick as can be.

Luv and howls,

Alfie the Pomeranian

PS: What the HECK is psittacosis?????????????????????????????????