The Bottom Line
From the lighthearted and amusing, to the evocative and descriptive, horse enthusiasts and lovers of language alike will be delighted by the colorful phrases explained and illustrated in this work. Highly recommended to those with an interest in language and horse racing.
Pros
- Useful educational tool for both language and horse racing
- Enjoyable read for racing fans who may not realize the sport's influence on culture
- Cartoons illustrating the phrases are often funny
Cons
- May not interest all racing or language fans
Description
- Beating a Dead Horse: when jockeys whip a horse that has no energy left, but also a refusal to give up on something.
- Down To The Wire: describes any race, not just involving horses, where the outcome cannot be known until the very end
- Get Your Goat: Goats are used to calm horses down; in the past, goats would be stolen to make a horse too nervous to run well
- Start From Scratch: in early racing, the starting line was scratched on the ground
- A Leg Up: trainers help the jockey up into the saddle by giving him a leg up. Now the phrase refers to getting any help.
Guide Review - Off to a Flying Start by Bill Tivenan and Cassandra Cook
Bill Tivenan, formerly a quality assurance analyst with the Daily Racing Form, and Cassandra Cook, a freeland print and web publishing project manager and a lifelong racing fan, started this project after observing so many racing phrases and clichés used during the 2008 Presidential campaign. In their new book, "Off to a Flying Start: Horsing Around The Language", Bill Tivenan and Cassandra Cook have gathered over 60 common phrases used in the English language and show how they were imported from Thoroughbred racing.
For each phrase, a brief explanation of how the phrase came from racing and how it is used in modern context, is included, and some of them are accompanied by a cartoon by Budapest-based illustrator Ana Mirela Tache, originally from Romania. The authors referred to the Oxford English Dictionary to verify their findings. Above are five examples from the book.
This book could also make for a useful educational tool, possibly to gently introduce younger people in the process of learning about the English language, to the sport of horse racing.
