Don’t let the cat out of the bag.
Of course, we know what it means.
To let the cat out of the bag is to disclose a secret. This might be done either deliberately or inadvertently.
I often wonder where these phrases come from.
Which brings me to a sidebar. Phrases. We watch The Wheel of Fortune most every night. Don’t ask me why. I suppose we enjoy trying to guess the words. Though most of the time, we become terribly annoyed by at least one of the players who finds it necessary to shout out the letters at extremely high decibel levels.
Anyway. The Wheel. So many of the players choose “phrase” when they go to the final round for the big money. It always seems like such a bad idea because the writers at The Wheel of Fortune make up their own phrases. The other night, the winning phrase was “We played in the garden.”
What? “We played in the garden?” That’s a sentence. Not a well-known phrase. A phrase is something like “Don’t let the cat out of the bag.” Or. “Fit as a fiddle.” Those phrases. “A penny saved is a penny earned.”
Okay. Back to that cat. In that bag. It is commonly agreed that the origin of this phrase comes from the fraud of substituting a cat for a piglet at markets. In the old days, when people brought their pigs to market to sell, they often carried them in bags. But sometimes, they’d try to cheat someone and put a cat in there. Cats were a dime a dozen. (Another phrase — a dime a dozen.). So. You were exposing the trick if you let the cat out of the bag.
By the way. That is where “don’t buy a pig in a poke” came from. A poke is a name for a type of bag. So you would not want to buy a pig in a poke, sight unseen. This phrase is recorded as early as 1530. Seeing the pig before handing over your shillings was good advice.
Two things come to mind here.
Trust. And trust.
Trust in others — that is — their ability to keep secrets, promises, and their word.
Trust in ourselves — our honesty, our integrity, our moral code.
The pig in the poke, the cat in the bag. You know, when we have interactions with people — when we interact with them, listen to their words, hear their stories — we exhibit a level of trust in them. Or perhaps not. There may be times when we have complete confidence in the person standing across from us and in what they are telling us. Other times, we suspect we might be getting snowed.
And with ourselves. Our greatest measure is how we conduct ourselves when we are with no one but ourselves. And this display of decency, of integrity, carries over to our interactions with others.
What do we truly have in our pokes? In our bags? Pigs, cats?
I suppose it comes to light when that bag is opened. Which always happens. Sooner or later.
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“Three things cannot long stay hidden: the sun, the moon and the truth.” –Buddha
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“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”
― William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well
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“If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.”
― Virginia Woolf
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Here kitty, kitty. Get in the bag, kitty, kitty.
