Meaning: Look like/resemble. Sweat like a pig - Idioms by The Free Dictionary. Left in the lurch. Once produced, pig iron was not cool enough to move without burning anything it touched until it reached a point at which water vapor condensed on its surface, producing “sweat.” Hence, “sweating like a pig.” As for the barnyard animal, it doesn’t sweat much—not when there’s some nice mud to keep it cool. Have you ever heard someone say, “I’m sweating like a pig!”? What does sweat like a pig expression mean? You know – how come The animal type of pig actually can't sweat very well. They have only a few sweat glands — compared with more than 2 million in humans — and the sweat glands that pigs do have don't work very well. To put it quite bluntly, my husband sweats like a pig. The phrase "Sweating like a Pig" means sweating profusely. posted by The Horse Wrangler on May 15, 2000: : : : : Can anyone explain the above and where it derived from? Close. Posted by 9 months ago. This one is along similar lines to the pig in a butcher saying. Domestic carnivores are notorious for being emphatically sick in inappropriate places, and I would guess the phrase has its origin in being ostentatiously, unrepentantly and noisily sick. A real hillbilly wouldn't know the difference anyway, nor would he care. When I was growing up in southeast Kansas, I spent a fair bit of time working on farms. Lead balloon - Go over like a . So I asked him one day what in the hell he was talking about. For example, Hubby is in the garage, supposedly doing something of substance, but he is drinking beer and playing cards with his buddies. Sweating like a paedophile in a teddybear suit with a hole between the legs so the kids can get the sweets out. Sweating like a pig is an old expression. It refers to pig iron. Too little or no sweating means the fire is too cold or too far from the pig. W.E.B. Sweating like a bitch on heat. The phrase "sweating like a pig" actually has nothing to do with the animal that you might find on a farm. The problem, though, is if you were indeed sweating like a pig, you'd be super dry, with not one bead of sweat on your head. TIL The expression 'sweating like a pig' is nonsense because pigs don't have sweat glands. If someone is referred to as sweating like a pig it means he is doing absolutely nothing. 18.4K views The expression dates to the days of industrial steel production and refers to pig iron, which was shaped in molds that had the pieces branching off to look like piglets suckling on a sow. Allan MacLeod Cormack, physicist, developed the CAT scan. In traditional iron smelting, liquid iron is poured into a mold shaped like one long line with many smaller lines branching off of it at right angles. Definitions by the largest Idiom Dictionary. William Shirer, CBS broadcaster and author (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich). Let not poor Nelly starve. Lead-pipe cinch. Don't get in a lather at the local dance Contrary to the phrase " sweating like a pig ", pigs are unable to sweat and instead cool down by panting and wallowing in mud. Let bygones be bygones. Where does the expression “Sweating like a pig” come from? It has a French origin as 'poque' and, like several other French words, its diminutive is formed by adding 'ette' or 'et' - hence 'pocket' began life with the meaning 'small bag'. But more and more in my life, sweating is less about making my body be or do something I think it should. I'm not real sure if what follows is a list of colloquialisms or idioms. This sounds illogical, as pigs (the animal) have ineffective sweat glands, but the term is derived from the iron smelting process… Posted by Bob on May 16, 2000. Sweating like a pig! The pig's squealing because it's stuck, not bleeding because it's been stabbed. I can't recall the source of this and therefore my apologies to the author but this was what I recently found out about the saying. The expression “sweating like a pig” has nothing to do with the farm animal since they don’t really sweat. Archived. The popular saying has come about as people imagine that a cow in a slaughterhouse would be … This form of the saying still gets used, certainly in Yorkshire. [William Edward Burghardt] Du Bois, U.S. historian and civil rights leader, founder of what became the NAACP. When the pig is sweating, it's cool enough to be moved. : : : : Well it's like this. Pigs don't sweat much, so they wallow in the mud to cool off their bodies. Don’t miss the next Ask Mr. History question! Thanks, Sandy Stinson ??? Pig iron was made at least as long ago as the Zhou Dynasty in China, in the eighth century BC – hundreds of years before the process for making pig iron was discovered in the West. Left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Leopard cannot change its spots - A . Less is more. I think folks just misinterpreted the meaning of the word stuck and misheard squealing. Meyer Amschel Rothschild, banker and founder of the Rothschild dynasty in Europe. You say, "Sweating like a pig", which meant, NO. After the pigs are poured into the sand, they cool, causing the surrounding air to reach its dew point and turn into moisture on the pigs, like they are sweating. Pig iron, by the way, is so named because it's shaped in molds that branch off like piglets suckling on a sow. 11.Saying/ word: Ah cud eat three spuds more than a pig then go back fert pig. I can't answer where this idiom originated, looked, can't find. Once produced, pig iron was not cool enough to move without burning anything it touched until it reached a point at which water vapor condensed on its surface, producing “sweat.” Legend in one's own lifetime. Where did the saying "sweating like a pig" come from when pigs dont sweat? Let not the sun go down on your wrath. Instead, it refers to iron "sows" and "piglets" made when smelting pig iron. "I'm sweating like a pig" usually means that you are pretty gross and covered in perspiration. The saying is "bleeding like a stuck hog", and most city people don't understand it, because when we kill a hog, we stick the jugular vein to bleed it out good. It is but a short linguistic hop from that to "sweating cobs", so I would suggest that this is the most likely origin. As the pig is cooked it will begin to “sweat”. It comes from the old belief that a crocodile wept (insincerely!) HistoryNet.com is brought to you by Historynet LLC, the world's largest publisher of history magazines. This old saying does not come from the writer Charles Dickens (1812-1870). To receive notification whenever any new item is published on HistoryNet, just scroll down the column on the right and sign up for our RSS feed. Imagine what a pig would do if it found itself stuck in a confined space, like between two fence posts. But, anyway, that is where the saying comes from. Pigs don’t sweat at all. Smelting is the process of producing a … But where do these phrases originate? All of a sudden the popular saying becomes problematic.… So where DOES the expression come from? I suspect that the origin of this phrase may have to do with cooking a whole pig on a spit over a fire. HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 5,000 articles originally published in our various magazines. It's actually a reference to pig iron, which is form of iron smelting: When pig iron is originally created from iron ore, the smelter needs to heat the ore to extreme temperatures, and then move the liquid metal into the mold. CUT AND RUN. Of course, that got me to thinking about evolution. Then, they came up with bleeding like a stuck pig. 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