Of Hoofs and Flies
Nov. 19th, 2010 05:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
steepholmI see that ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
owlfish is letting off steam about the sudden ubiquity of the phrase "bang on trend" (a new one on me, by the way). It reminded me how irked I get whenever I hear "on the hoof" used to mean "as one goes along", as for example in "The Chancellor was inventing his figures on the hoof".
This usage isn't very new - in fact I've been being annoyed by it since the 1980s - but I don't think it's that old either. The OED, at any rate, doesn't have the phrase in this sense, but only to describe cattle that are sold while alive - which is what I'd always understood it to mean. My long-held theory was that "on the hoof" had been coined by analogy with "on the fly", which I certainly heard used quite a bit when I hung out with computer programmers in the mid-80s, to describe programmes that worked stuff out in real time. "On the fly" itself is a piece of thieves' cant, apparently, describing a way of begging; but I imagine this particular sense derives indirectly from baseball.
But why did anyone think that "hoof" was a suitable word to imply being light on one's feet? Something to do with hoofers, perhaps?
owlfish is letting off steam about the sudden ubiquity of the phrase "bang on trend" (a new one on me, by the way). It reminded me how irked I get whenever I hear "on the hoof" used to mean "as one goes along", as for example in "The Chancellor was inventing his figures on the hoof".This usage isn't very new - in fact I've been being annoyed by it since the 1980s - but I don't think it's that old either. The OED, at any rate, doesn't have the phrase in this sense, but only to describe cattle that are sold while alive - which is what I'd always understood it to mean. My long-held theory was that "on the hoof" had been coined by analogy with "on the fly", which I certainly heard used quite a bit when I hung out with computer programmers in the mid-80s, to describe programmes that worked stuff out in real time. "On the fly" itself is a piece of thieves' cant, apparently, describing a way of begging; but I imagine this particular sense derives indirectly from baseball.
But why did anyone think that "hoof" was a suitable word to imply being light on one's feet? Something to do with hoofers, perhaps?