Photo By Kaitlin Knauer | Doc Jargon, cutting through the jargon that is the U.S. Army. Send your Army...... read more read more
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Hey there Doc Jargon! How’s it goin’!
I was talking to my dad the other morning over breakfast – he’s a retired artillery man – and he said the term “hold your horses,” had a military origin. I think he’s fill of beans and I told him if you say he’s right, I’d wash his car next weekend. What say you? Signed, Not Ready to Wash the Car
Dear Not ready:
Well, he’s right but the answer is bit more complicated. Of course, “hold your horses” -- officially called a common idiom by word experts -- means, “take it easy; keep calm; don't do anything rash.” A quick cruise around the internet shows that doing so helps horses when they get nervous or excited. Also, it could have an origin dating back to ancient Greece. In Homer’s Iliad, the author uses the term when talking about Antilochus driving like a maniac in a chariot race.
As far as the military origins are concerned, though, it refers to when horses were primary transportation forces for the Army in a wide variety of tasks, one of which was taking artillery pieces to and from the battlefield. For this task, holding the horses was a vital step when the weapons were firing.
Elting Morison, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the book Men, Machines and Modern Times, recounts the story of an efficiency expert watching old World War II films of British artillery crews. He noticed one guy in the film holding something, but otherwise doing nothing. When the expert asked the British what the soldier was doing, they said he was holding the horses so they wouldn’t spook during the firing of the gun.
Interestingly, by that time the British had gotten rid of their horses and were using motorized transport to move their guns now.
So maybe you and your father can share the car washing duties. Thanks for writing!
| Date Taken: | 06.17.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 06.17.2022 10:18 |
| Story ID: | 423238 |
| Location: | FORT RILEY, KANSAS, US |
| Web Views: | 215 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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