4 September 2020
The phrase dog eat dog designates ruthless competition. The metaphor underlying the phrase is ancient, but we’ve flipped it on its head in modern times.
The metaphor first appears in Marcus Terentius Varro’s (116–27 BCE) De lingua Latina (The Latin Language), but the sense is that animals are better than humans in that they don’t prey on their own kind:
canis caninam non est
(dog does not eat dog)
The phrase enters English with a 1533 translation of Erasmus’s 1517 essay on war, popularly known as Bellum Erasmi. The original Latin work was something of a sixteenth-century bestseller, with translations and printings throughout Europe. The relevant passage of the English translation reads:
Nor it is not the nature of all wylde beastes to fyghte. For some are harmeles, as doois and haaris. But they that are the moste fierse of all, as lyons, wolfes, and tygers: doo not make warre amonge theym selfe as we doo. One dogge eatethe not an nother. The lyons, thoughe they be fierce and cruelle, yet they fyghte not amonge theym selfe.
The adage was extremely well known, and in the early eighteenth century we see the sentiment flipped and applied to humans. For example, the 27 March 1735 issue of the Grub-Street Journal, the 1730s London equivalent of The Onion today, makes it into a joke about lawyers:
Yesterday a noted solicitor was committed to Newgate, for robbing a fellow solicitor of a promissory note, value 10 1. DP.——What! dog eat dog!
A few decades later, a U.S. paper does the same. This headline appears the Pittsburgh Gazette of 5 November 1816:
DOG EAT DOG
Or, a Law Suit About Nothing
DUANE vs. BINNS,
For defamation of character.
And a few years before that, the phrase appears in an essay touting a mercantilist U.S. trade policy in the Examiner of 5 December 1813, taking it out of the world of lawyer jokes:
All the trade and commerce we are to have is among one another: if any body makes money, he must make it, not by his enterprise in foreign commerce, but out of his own countrymen. “Dog eat dog,” is now our commercial motto and practice; no duties being collectable from foreign commerce, it is very clear, that all the money wanted by government must be produced by taxes.
I leave it up to the reader to draw any conclusions about how the ethos of today’s capitalist society differs from that of ages past.
Sources:
“Dog Eat Dog.” Pittsburgh Gazette, 5 November 1816, 3. ProQuest.
“Domestic News.” The Grub-Street Journal (London), no. 274, 27 March 1735, 2. ProQuest
Erasmus. Bellum Erasmi. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1533, 8r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, s.v. dog, n.1.
“Taxes.” Examiner, vol. 1, no. 6, 5 December 1813. ProQuest.