Talking horse
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No, this is not about Mister Ed. The OED glosses to talk horse as "to talk the language of ‘the turf’; to talk big or boastfully", with quote from T.C. Halliburton's 1855 collection Nature & Human Nature:
Doctor, I am a borin’ of you, but the fact is, when I get a goin’ ‘talkin’ hoss,’ I never know where to stop.
But Sam Slick, the speaker of that fictional quote, is actually talking about a horse-riding incident, which would fit perfectly well in the current equestrian podcast Talk Horse. And I asked the OED about the "talk horse" phrase because of a quote in a collection of 1852-53 articles about Emma Snodgrass: Cross dresser, for which the "talk big or boastfully" sense might be more appropriate.
The context is an apparently regular column ("Letter from Boston") in the Daily Alta California, 7 Feb 1853, which includes this paragraph:
I mentioned, in my last letter, an eccentric female who roams about town, dressed in the habiliments of the other sex. She was arrested the other day on a charge of vagrancy, but the charge was not sustained and she was liberated. She was again arrested at the warrant of her father, who is Mr. Snodgrass, Captain of the First Ward Police in New York. When she appeared in court, she was accompanied by another female also dressed in men's clothes, and it was with great difficulty that the friends could be separated. Snodgrass was finally sent to New York in charge of an officer, and her friend was packed off to the House of Industry for two months. Snodgrass used to circulate in all the drinking houses, made several violent attempts to talk 'horse,' and do other things for which 'fast' boys are noted.
The linguistic interest here is the loss of an idiom whose cultural support is mostly gone. That hasn't happened to "put the cart before the horse", "beat a dead horse", "get off one's high horse", "stalking-horse", "straight from the horse's mouth", "swap horses in midstream", "look a gift horse in the mouth", or many others. In fact, Wiktionary's entry for horse has 453 derived terms, but "to talk horse" isn't one of them. It's also absent from the 119 derived terms in the entry for talk.
Just as words and word-senses come and go, so do idiomatic phrases (and also fixed expressions where the meaning of the whole is perfectly compositional). And each of us may well know a larger number of such phrases and expressions than we know simple words, especially if separate senses are not counted.
For more about the Emma Snodgrass case, see this recent New England Historical Society article.
Jerry Packard said,
December 30, 2025 @ 9:11 am
Sounds like talk turkey to me.
Robert Coren said,
December 30, 2025 @ 10:18 am
One equestrian-related idiom that seems to be losing its "cultural support" is "free rein", in that I see it more and more spelled "reign", reflecting a concept more familiar to most people currently alive than the original meaning. (This had been on my mind because I was pleasantly surprised to see it spelled correctly in this morning's Boston Globe.)
@Jerry Packard: If you're meaning to suggest that "talking horse" means something similar to "talking turkey", I would have to disagree; the latter means to get serious and/or specific about something that was previously left casual and/or vague.
Mark Liberman said,
December 30, 2025 @ 11:31 am
@Robert Coren:
See "Rein and reign", 11/24/2022.
David L said,
December 30, 2025 @ 11:33 am
The Guardian sports section has a regular column Talking Horses. I was puzzled by the title until I looked at one of the stories.
Also, "Emma Snodgrass: Cross Dresser" would be a great title for a comic strip or graphic novel.
Mark Liberman said,
December 30, 2025 @ 11:34 am
@Jerry Packard: "Sounds like talk turkey to me."
More like "talk smack" or "talk trash".
As the "talk trash" entry points out, there are lots of other talk X expressions, X = baseball, philosophy, shop, etc.
And as we've noted before, one of Gamble Rogers' Oklawaha County Doctrines of Citizenship is
Never talk metric to decent folk.
Like "talk metric" in the joke, apparently "talk horse" extended beyond the literal topic to various associated concepts and attitudes.
Philip Taylor said,
December 30, 2025 @ 12:28 pm
Well, I'm glad that you posted that comment, Mark, because (having followed your first hyperlink) I now have a vague idea what Yves Rehbein may have meant in another thread when he wrote :
Chris Button said,
December 30, 2025 @ 8:21 pm
I initially thought it was a pun on "talk hoarse" with a dropping of the -ly on the adverb.
ajay said,
December 31, 2025 @ 4:54 am
A quick look through Google Books finds lots of uses of "talk horse", mostly late 19th century, but all in the literal sense of "talking about horses". And it's possible that even in the Emma Snodgrass case that's all she was trying to do – hang around in pubs and talk about horses. I note that the two citations given in the OED both make sense if people are literally talking about horses.
Related, "manger" is another word whose cultural support has vanished – I would bet that to most people it is nothing more than "the thing they put Jesus in".
GK Chesterton, I think, noted that the same had happened to "tumbril", which had become purely "the thing you put aristos in to transport them to the guillotine" – when in fact it is just a less common synonym for "small cart".
Yves Rehbein said,
December 31, 2025 @ 5:48 am
Oh, oh no, that's not what I meant. Add that "to smack one's lips" as well as "to have a smack of …" are related to Germanschmecken, Geschmack ("taste, gusto") to the fact that you were bemoaning matters of taste indeed. Out of context and in comparison it sounds so harsh, "trash talk", and from the quotation "[Snodgrass] made several violent attempts to talk 'horse,' and do other things for which 'fast' boys are noted." lol. In British English I had better said "banter".
Since the quotation contextualised horse with fast boys, note also that the root of horse, course and currier (Latin currō, "run") connotes just that, cf. Old English horsċ ("fast") if you care. Also note fast e.g. requires no -ly.
To be perfectly honest with you though I was not really thinking of taste. It is odd how that works out – Humpy Dumpty.
bks said,
December 31, 2025 @ 6:21 am
"Horse sense" is a late scratch.
Michael Watts said,
December 31, 2025 @ 7:21 am
I've been annoyed by the "citations" wiktionary provides for their entry secrete (verb, transitive): to conceal…
Currently there are four such citations. Of those, three of them provide zero evidentiary value that secrete was used in this sense:
I'm left with the impression that someone was unable to come up with an attestation of this word within the last 100 years (there is an actual citation from 1914), and yet that person really really wants me to believe that it was still in use in 1999. What is the value supposed to be of a "citation" in which you can't even establish that the word you're notionally attesting was used at all?
Robert Coren said,
December 31, 2025 @ 10:13 am
@Mark, re "reign/rein": Ah, yes, complete with comment from me. I had completely forgotten about that.
ajay said,
December 31, 2025 @ 11:45 am
Michael Watts: please stop trolling. Instead, leave comments that are interesting, or informative, or witty, or something.
Thank you.