Idiotic Idioms

I've been kicking around a couple of common phrases from the English language lately wondering just what deceptive fool created them in the first place. You know when something gets repeated so many times that we start taking its literal meaning for granted? If it ever had a literal meaning, that is.


Let's start with the meaningless phrase "healthy as a horse."


In my everyday wanderings, I hear folks say that someone is "healthy as a horse" if he is, for instance, running marathons at 85 years old and has never suffered an ailment, prolonged sickness, or injury. In fact, the specimen in question is so genetically superior that in seven and a half decades of life, he's never experienced even the most minor upset like indigestion, fatigue, toothache, or hair loss. And so, therefore, he is "healthy as a horse," right?


Nothing could be further from the truth. To be precise, if this gentleman were in fact "healthy as a horse," he would have been lucky to live to his tenth birthday without a major medical procedure, never mind his 85th. By now, he would have racked up a retirement's worth of medical bills and expensive nutritional supplements. He would become perilously ill from a fly bite or minor scrape on his leg, or he'd mysteriously develop gastric distress after eating his routine meal of 20 years.


Anyone with horses knows what I'm getting at. Horses are the most fragile animals I've encountered, susceptible to bizarre fevers and split-second injuries. They can be in fine health one moment and then in a welted rash the next. Or have an unexplainable swelling. Or a foot abscess. Or any number of debilitating anomalies which will empty a horse owner's bank account from vet bills quicker than a stock market crash.



Just last week I went to the barn on Monday to ride my horse who was bright-eyed and energetic as usual. We had a very pleasant ride, after which I washed him off and let him graze for a while in the sun, all the while pondering contentedly how wonderful life with horses was. On Tuesday, I went back out to the barn to ride again. And there stood my horse with a fever, three legs ballooned to the size of elephant limbs, and really gross edema pockets all over his body. What? I backed away, stupefied. What on earth could have happened to transform him overnight into... this?



The usual scenario played out. A vet was called. My horse was treated with every injection medicine available. A diagnosis formed loosely: "Hmm...not really sure what it is. Could have been caused by a tick bite... or an allergy... or who knows. Sometimes this stuff just happens. Call when you need more antibiotics." And that, dear reader, is how my bank account wound its way closer to $0.



I spent the last 10 days driving 40 minutes twice a day to the stable to administer drugs and check on my guy. He is fine now. Totally fine, in fact, and back to his normal healthy self. Who knows what caused his episode last week. Must have been a fly bite... or an allergy... or something. One thing's for sure, though. After writing out all those checks to my vet, I wanted to punch the lights out of whoever invented that idiom "healthy as a horse." I would have blurted out, in lunatic fashion, "oh yeah? healthy as a horse? You call this the epitome of health?-- a creature that can just fall to pieces overnight, possibly from some innocent wildflower blooming?" I think "healthy as an octegenarian" might be far more accurate. I intend to start using that phrase in fact.


My animosity over the idiom has settled since last week. I'm no longer screaming it-- 'healthy as a horse?!-- out my car window, anyway. Instead, my mood has turned more reflective, which accounts for my study of these horse-related phrases.

"Horsepower" is another one that mystifies me at the moment. At first, it seems to make sense. I mean, sure, a lawn mower could be called 'six horsepower' if it pushed itself along with the strength of six horses in full motion. But this makes the assumption that there is a basic unchanging standard for an ordinary horse's power output. As a horse trainer, let me assure you that this is not the case.

How do lawn mower manufacturers, for instance, account for times when horses just aint putting out any power? Like when a mare comes into heat and flat-out refuses to do anything for three days? Would she be counted as a 'fussy horsepower' during that period? Or then there's the stall bound horse recovering from a strained tendon that needs to be confined for three months. Is he counted temporarily as 'no horsepower?' Although maybe his tally gets cancelled out by the feisty Arabian who tears around the arena, tail arched over his back, and bucks off his rider every day. Perhaps he gets counted as 'one horsepower with spunk to spare?'

You can see how this Horsepower term gets vague. A dozen ornery Shetland ponies will not produce the same output as a dozen steadfast draft horses. And a dozen mares will simply never give a consistent output of agreeable, hormone-free, activity from week to week.

So who came up with this term in the first place? Definitely a non-horse person, that's who. Most likely, an enterprising salesman in a machine shop many moons ago looked out his window and came up with a genius marketing plan. No doubt he looked out at a team of harness horses clip-clopping its way down the street, lean and muscled and perfectly behaved. Such industrious animals, he probably thought to himself and then pondered how many more engines or motors or machine-like things he could sell if he aligned them with man's good friend, the noble Equine. And, thus, he began equating the capability of his motors and engines with the clip-clopping harness horses he'd seen. A common motorized something-or-other now became a "three horsepower" item. Consumers, therefore, now had all the muscle and brawn of a few horses but without the hay consumption and pooping. Perfect!

Today, I hope most consumers realize how defectively 'horsepower' defines what it purports to. For instance, I hope mega-billionaires realize when they rev up their 200 horsepower sports car engines that if, in reality, 200 equines stood at the ready in their driveways, only about ten of them would produce any power. The other 190 would be spooking, grazing, mating, or napping. How's that, for horsepower?