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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!!
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To: cosmicforce who wrote (92632)1/5/2005 7:24:39 PM
From: Grainne  Read Replies (1) of 108807
 
Oh, you mean this part of the site I cited. I do not understand how anyone could hang a dog. Or a donkey for that matter, but those late medieval French movies are very strange . . .

hangdog

(HANG-dog)

Sad, shamefaced, browbeaten, or intimidated.

The origin of hangdog is grisly: It seems that in antiquity, dogs and other animals were sometimes convicted of crimes and sentenced to death by hanging. Centuries later, this reportedly happened in England as well. One report from 1595 notes that a dog was so executed "for inflicting a fatal injury on a child's finger." Shakespeare himself makes about a half dozen references to this practice.

Hangdog, then, is thought to allude either to the look on a doomed dog's face or to the characterstics associated with, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, "a despiciable or degraded fellow fit only to hang a dog, or to be hanged like a dog."
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