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No doubt it was in use in his time, for John Heywood, writing in 1546, has: ‘I praie the leat me and my felowe have a heare of the dog that bote us last nyght.’ (I like bote as the past tense of bite.) And Cotgrave in 1611 notes the same witticism from ‘our ale-knyghts’.
Pepys, whose diary is spot on Mrs Picard’s decade, is puzzled by the principle of the thing. He notes on 3 April 1661: ‘Up among my workmen – my head akeing all day from last night’s debauch. To the office all the morning; and at noon dined with Sir W. Batten and Pen, who would needs have me drink two good draughts of Sack today, to cure me of last night’s disease – which I thought strange, but I think find true.’
By 1738 Swift is including ‘the hair of the dog’ in his catechism of clichZ, the Genteel and Ingenious Conversation. In 1973 I heard someone facetiously suggesting ‘the hair of the dog that bit you’ as a suitable response to the Psalm in the new-look English liturgy. So it is a stayer.
The other expression that struck Mrs Picard comes in the Calendar of State Papers Domestic, of a man who escaped the fire of London ‘with the skin of his teeth’. This is from the book of Job (xix:20): ‘My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.’ It is a none too clear Hebraism; the Vulgate translates differently. People almost always misquote it as ‘by the skin of my teeth’. But it is in the nature of well-known phrases to misquote.
Now I find that all I have done is pick holes. I really do enjoy Liza Picard’s books, and make my remarks only as a fellow rummager through old lumber.
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