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Chris -- 2018-04-11
On a sports talk show this morning FSU football coach Bobby Bowden was quoted as saying an opposing quarterback “can run like a scolded dog.” I thought the expression was “scalded dog” so I searched for them on Google. Scolded gave 2800 hits while scalded gave 16000. Kind of a cute eggcorn – both a scolded and a scalded dog probably run pretty fast.
I am not positive if this qualifies as an eggcorn rather than a malapropism so please clear me up on that.
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I’d say it was an eggcorn. No matter which way the derivation goes.
For what it’s worth, a Google books search shows that “like a scalded dog” was in use early in the nineteenth century. Until the mid twentieth century, however, the phrase was usually attached to verbs about making hurt noises (whining, yelping). Beginning about 1950 the use of “like a scalded dog” with verbs of motion started to appear. “Like a scolded dog” was also used in the nineteenth century, but then and through the twentieth century it was usually attached to verbs that expressed shame, abashment, discomfiture.
Last edited by kem (2008-10-17 23:06:12)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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As Kem suggests, a well-loved dog will look abashed, not skedaddle, when scolded. But other dogs might take a scolding for a prelude to something worse and take off running. I agree—a nice eggcorn.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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I’ve never come across the expression with a dog in the hot seat, ‘scalded cat’ being the only familiar one. It must have been familiar in the US too, as Google book search reveals that “Early American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases” c 1680 has: “the scalded cat fears cold water”. The image of a ‘scolded cat’ however, as any cat owner knows, is impossible to visualize.
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Scalded cats? That’s a new one on me. Cats don’t do well in the corpus of English idioms, do they? To wit:
You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting X
Dead cat bounce
There’s more than one way to skin a cat
Curiosity killed the cat
Cat on a hot tin roof
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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There was an episode of the comic strip Get Fuzzy a few years ago in which the human character, Rob, said to Bucky, the resident cat, that you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting something or else. Bucky objected strenuously (the only way Bucky ever objects to anything), and Rob said something like, “Aw, c’mon, Bucky it’s just an idiom.” Bucky replied, “You hear an idiom—I hear hate speech!”
Kem’s right—cats sure do take it on their cute little chins in our colloquialisms. I guess even when cats come out on top in idioms there’s often a suggestion that they shouldn’t have:
Grinning like a Cheshire cat
Looking like the cat that ate the canary
Fat cat
King o’ cats
But sometimes cat idioms are just bizarre:
It’s the cat’s miaow/whiskers/pajamas.
I was unfamiliar with both the scalded cat and scalded dog idioms.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2008-10-19 17:16:02)
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Here’s a variation I came upon yesterday:
Rainey was handcuffed and locked into a tight shower cell and blasted for nearly two hours with water that was over 180 scolding hot degrees in temperature.
article on prisoner abuse
“Scolding hot” could make sense in some people’s minds because scolding, like scalding, is unpleasant and can really cause pain.
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