Have you heard the expression ‘I’ve got to see a man about a dog’ used when someone is leaving the room?
Have you ever used it yourself?
Why on earth would such a phrase be used as a jocular excuse for leaving?
And (as you probably know) some people use it when they’re leaving to go the toilet—which, if anything, is odder still.
Mind you, it’s not always used that way—quite often ‘I have to see a man about a dog’ is just a flippant way of excusing one’s departure for some undisclosed appointment.
Where did it come from?
Well, there is quite a long history behind this phrase—and a lot of the story is told by the brilliant Nigel Rees in his book A Word in Your Shell-Like.
There he tells us the phrase turns up in a line of dialogue in Dion Boucicault’s play The Flying Scud, or a Four-Legged Fortune—on the London stage in 1866.
In that play, one of the characters says: ‘Excuse me Mr Quail, I can’t stop; I’ve got to see a man about a dog.’
However, the Oxford English Dictionary has tracked down a use of the phrase a year earlier, in 1865, in a publication call the Anti-Teapot Review—a magazine that combined politics, literature, and art (published between 1864 and 1866, so it didn’t last long).
A year after its establishment it included this line: ‘The husband will… find that he has to absent himself by going to London, to “see a man about a dog”, or on some other important business.’
Did Boucicault pick up the phrase from the magazine?
Did he then make it widespread by putting it into a popular play?
Quite possibly.
Which means it just started as a false (jocular) excuse for refusing to say where you were going and what you were going to do.
In 1938 crime writer Ellery Queens (in Devil to Pay) turned it around, and had someone say they had to ‘see a dog about a man’ (very cute!)
Then the most famous Australia songwriter of the 1930s and 40s Jack O’Hagan (who wrote ‘The Road to Gundagai’) put the words into a song—in these immortal lines: ‘Excuse me for my hurry / But I tell ya boys I’m worried / ‘Coz I’ve got to see a man about a dog.’
The song was called ‘I’ve Got to See a Man About a Dog’.
I’d tell you more, but I have to go now (to see a man about a dog).
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