SHAGGY DOG:AN IDIOM from popular literature is a Dog in the Night-time- a phrase we might use to describe an unsuspecting conniver, someone who has unwittingly involved themselves in a crime, writes Albert Jack.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle invented the dog in question when he published the Sherlock Holmes adventure Silver Blazein 1892. In the story, the family dog would not bark during the night when horses were being stolen from the stable, because it knew the man who had taken them.
The following exchange between Holmes and Inspector Gregory has become famous:
"Is there any point to which you would like to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night time."
"The dog did nothing in the night time?"
"That was the curious incident," remarked Holmes.
Mark Haddon's book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time(2002), in which the dog itself is the victim, clearly had the world-famous detective in mind as the teenage hero sets out to look for clues for the killing (his "dogged" approach having unexpected consequences).
The phrase Two Ships that Pass in the Nightis used to describe people who encounter each other briefly, despite often being in the same place at roughly the same time on more than one occasion. The expression is lifted directly from popular literature and in particular a poem from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's collection Tales from a Wayside Inn(1863):
Ships that pass in the night, and speak with each other in passing,
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness,
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak to one another,
Only a look and a voice and darkness again and silence.
Longfellow holds the distinction of being considered the first professional American poet. Many lines from his work have passed into the English language, the most famous of these being the patter of tiny feet, which comes from his poem The Children's Hour(1860), an ode to his three daughters Alice, Allegra and Edith:
Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day's occupations.
That is known as the Children's Hour.
I hear in the chamber above me
The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened
And voices soft and sweet
Extracted fromShaggy Dogs and Black Sheep (Penguin Books)