“When pigs fly!” exclaimed Marty McFly in Back to the Future, when hearing about the glorious hover boards. Ok so…maybe not… but, what a phrase! That sentence above, describes the following idiom, which is something that is very unlikely to happen, something improbable, something that only a gullible person would believe.
I have heard “When pigs fly” throughout my life. Everywhere from Lewis Carroll’s Alice and Wonderland to the names of different restaurants throughout the USA and even a fantastic statue in one of Ireland’s Airports. However….where does it come from? I search the Internet and found that it was recorded in a Latin-English dictionary, A Shorte Dictionarie for Yonge Begynners, published in 1616. It stated “Pigs fly in the ayre with their tayles forward.” This was originally used as a sarcastic remark to demonstrate something overly optimistic. Eventually, the phrase was switch around to the more come phrase we hear today.
Just a quick fun extra, a pig did fly on the 4th November 1909. John Moore-Brabazon, 1st Baron Brabazon of Tara took a small pig with him on board an aeroplane. So, I guess pigs do fly. I always did like to think of the phrase more like making the impossible possible.
