Dead cats, high horses

No sooner had I mentioned the phrase in a recent column, than an ad for personal computers has turned up on radio warning customers not to risk buying "a pig in a poke". All very well, except that the ad features a customer complaining that, having been sold a pig in a poke, he has ended up with - wait for it - a pig!

Oh dear, of dear, oh dear. Excuse me while I get up on this high horse here, but a pig is precisely what you wouldn't have if you'd bought a pig in a poke. You'd find about as much pig in a poke, in fact, as you would in a kosher sausage factory. What you would find - as I mentioned a few weeks back, though I don't know why I bothered - was a cat.

I know there's a credibility problem with this phrase: namely that, on the face of it, only an Olympic-standard eejit would mistake a cat for a pig, even in a bag. But as Brewer's dictionary points out, we're talking about a "sucking pig" here, so the once-common trick could in fact fool any medium-sized eejit with drink taken. Unless of course he opened the "poke," or bag, in which case he would let the cat, along with another popular expression, out of it.

If it was a well-trained cat, it would say "Oink" at this point and see what happened. Whatever happened, though, there'd be no pig - which is the whole point of the phrase! But I mustn't get myself agitated, or I'll fall of my horse.

It's only right that the ad is for computers; because computers have inspired a whole new vocabulary which, unlike the expressions of other professions or of everyday speech, has no origins in pastoral or seafaring tradition, or indeed anything. This is despite the fact that many old traditions are alive and well in e-commerce, especially in the US, where investors continue to plunge into every piginapoke.com that comes along, provided it meets the key criterion of losing money.

Not that I can criticise. Like many people, I bought a small stake in Telecom (now Eircom) earlier this summer; and although it looked like a pig, smelt like a pig and - perhaps I could take this opportunity to remind Eircom's lawyers that I'm speaking figuratively - oinked like a pig at the time, I knew I was in trouble this week when our finance pages reported that a recovery in the share price might be nothing more than a "dead-cat bounce".

I hasten to say that the term was used correctly, in the stock-market sense. (I'm not worried about the share-price, incidentally. I'm in for the long haul; and if a cat can die nine times, and you add the same number of bounces, the coming years should at least be entertaining). Indeed, unlike the computer world, the markets are famous for their colourful animal phrases, like "bull", "bear", "stag" and, of course, "lame duck" (a dealer who can't pay his losses, in case you didn't know).

But figurative speech has to have some standards, which forces me to question whether a real-life - as it were - dead cat could bounce, even slightly. Unfortunately, I wasn't in a position to research the issue before going to press (if the neighbour's cat doesn't stop messing with our flower-beds, I'll rectify this next week).

There was no livestock involved, luckily, but there was serious linguistic confusion earlier this week, when RTE reported that the Opposition had accused Charlie McCreevy and Mary Harney of openly "flaunting" Cabinet guidelines. I thought I'd misheard, at first. So I checked on Aertel and, sure enough, there it was again: "flaunting".

This seemed unfair to both politicians who, I know for a fact, keep the Cabinet guidelines discreetly in their briefcases at all times, except when they're needed. So I was relieved to read in this newspaper the next day that all they'd been accused of was "flouting" them. A serious charge in itself, but at least it didn't carry the taint of exhibitionism.

Still, the episode wasn't half as alarming as another story earlier this year, in which Aertel referred to - I swear this is true - a "now-defunked" republican paramilitary group.

I admit it's possible this was intended to mean that the organisation had handed in all its old records by the Average White Band and Kool and the Gang to the international decommissioning body. And some of those paramilitaries were seriously influenced by 1970s funk, to judge by their prison photographs. On the other hand, you have to suspect this was a case of mis-spelling.

But whether we're talking about misspellings, grammatical errors or mixed metaphors, it's important to remember that people in glass houses should always look before they leap. I feel this even more strongly since receiving a letter from a reader, Lars Bjork, who gently chided me for using the expression "me and her" in a recent column about my daughter, immediately following one on "linguistic accuracy".

What can I say, Lars? Except that I stand corrected. Or at least that I would stand corrected, if only I could get down off this horse.