Way With Words: Cat Out of Bag

So you “heard through the grapevine” yesterday that your girlfriend is cheating on you.

Your friend Jeff just “let the cat out of the bag.”

Clearly in this situation the ‘cat’ let out of the proverbial bag is a secret, a secret that just been revealed.

But why a cat in a bag?

Turns out that as early as the 14th century, farmers would take suckling pigs to market in a bag.

A popular trick to swindle the buyers was to put a cat in the bag that normally held suckling pigs, and make a large profit.

Once the buyer opened the sack, the cat was let out of the bag, revealing the trick used.

Phrases.uk.org cited the first instance in a print medium, “the first known use of the phrase in print that I have found is in a 1760 edition of ‘The London Magazine’ “We could have wished that the author... had not let the cat out of the bag.”’”

LIVE! just “let the cat out of the bag” on the origin of “let the cat out of the bag.” Is that cool enough for you?