Talk:Letting the cat out of the bag

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Comments[edit]

These 2 etymologies have been roundly disproven by snopes (if snopes can be considered a reliable source as solid as is necessary, I don't really know all the guidelines for source material yet, I'm new to this...) http://www.snopes.com/language/phrases/catbag.asp RyanG2203 (talk) 14:49, 1 May 2013 (UTC) RyanG2203[reply]

Letting the cat out of the bag and buying a pig in a poke come from an old scam. Scam goes a man is selling fat little piglets to unsuspecting buyers but when the seller goes to put the pig in a sack (or a poke) he switches it with a stray cat keeping the money and the pig. He then quickly moves on before the buyer notices the squirming mass in the bag is a cat. If the buyer opens the bag the cat will jump out and the scam is reviled and the seller is in trouble because "the cats out of the bag", but if the buyer waits to open to find the cat he learns not to “buy a pig in a poke.”70.211.79.53 (talk) 22:07, 28 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the possible link to "pig in a poke" -- I always assumed that "let the cat out of the bag" referred to a scam wherein the vendor swaps a large DEAD cat for a smallish butchered piglet (as the Snopes article points out, it would obviously be impossible for anyone to confuse a LIVE cat with a LIVE pig!). Throbert McGee (talk) 21:44, 22 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I know I'm really necroing this 10 year old comment but considering also that the term cat o' nine tails itself emerged long after this idiom it seems ludicrous to suggest that it could be a legitimate etymology Poiven (talk) 07:39, 9 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe it's just me, but I question Snopes' conclusion. I'd have to find another source claiming this, rather than just my reasoning (which admittedly may be tough if Snopes failed), but...

— Snopes' rationale for asserting that this is unrelated to the "pig in a poke" idiom seems to have missed something. Aside from their rationale being a bit weird (involving how unlikely it is to work), it ignores the fact that "cat in a sack" is literally the equivalent saying across much of Europe. There are loads of outside sources on this fact, and the Pig in a Poke Wikipedia page makes this very clear, with Germany, France, Latvia, Poland, and a dozen others using the "cat" variety instead of "pig." Given this, it seems plausible that "letting the cat out of the bag" could derive from the saying "cat in a bag," as the action that exposes the hoax. However, one point to note is that cats are very common subjects of idioms the world over. It wouldn't be an absurd notion for them to have both been created independently. Jtrnp (talk)