Читать книгу Bees Knees and Barmy Armies - Origins of the Words and Phrases we Use Every Day - Harry Oliver - Страница 37

If you’ve seen neither hide nor hair of someone or something it means you’ve seen nothing at all of them or it. This is certainly an American expression, and there a couple of stories related to its beginnings. It has been suggested that it derived from the habit of North American huntsman of saying, after a fruitless day’s hunting, that they had seen ‘neither hide nor hair’ of any prey, where ‘hide’ means the hide of prey such as deer. The expression first appeared in the nineteenth century, and examples can be found in the work of American writer Mark Twain. However, some believe it comes from an inversion of the English expression ‘hide and hair’, which dates back to the 1500s and meant all of something.