The inside of the body begins to make strange sounds. The guts roar. The appetite has awakened and the need to eat does not stop growing. The feeling is getting more and more annoying. If food is not eaten soon, the person will become irritable, moody, and may suffer from headache and dizziness. Faced with this situation, there is an expression that comes in handy: “To be hungrier than a blind man’s dog.”
Everybody understands the meaning of “being hungrier than a blind man’s dog”; it is a hyperbole, an exaggeration to express that one is very hungry. The phrase is part of popular knowledge despite the fact that today a guide dog is no longer associated with an animal that is experiencing hardships.
The dogs that currently become the eyes of those who cannot usually have a good life. As puppies they go to live with foster families, after a year they begin their training, a process that lasts six or eight months and, finally, they look for the right person to help. In general, they receive exquisite care, so they do not go severely hungry.
Modern guide dogs were born in Germany in the aftermath of World War I as a solution for soldiers who were blinded during combat in which mustard gas was used. However, the origin of the relationship between these animals and blind people is lost in time.
Although since the first century there are records that demonstrate the special relationship between dogs and blind people, it is considered that it was during the Middle Ages when the use of dogs by the blind spread in Asia and Europe. Those were extraordinarily difficult times for people deprived of sight, almost all of them destined to suffer miserable living conditions as beggars.
And if a blind man in the Middle Ages barely had enough to eat, his canine companion had even less, who had to make do with the leftovers of what little his master ate. That’s when the expression “being hungrier than a blind man’s dog” makes sense.
The idea of ??penury of a blind man’s companion is well reflected in the work El lazarillo de Tormes (1554), where the protagonist uses mischief to steal a little food and wine from his master so as not to starve. Already in 1605, the meaning of lazarillo as a person or animal that accompanies and guides someone, especially a blind person, is documented for the first time.
According to the Historical Dictionary of the Spanish Language, the role of guide was initially associated “with a boy who served a blind man”, although “with time it was extended to any person who helps another”. And since the beginning of the 20th century “it is commonly used to refer to dogs that guide the blind”.
The truth is that dogs (like cats) abound in Spanish proverbs, almost always with negative connotations: “a day of dogs”; “Dead the dog, the rabies is gone”; “a skinny dog, everything is fleas”; “The dog dances for money, not for the sound that the blind man plays”; “He is like the dog in the manger, who neither eats nor lets himself eat”… Not surprisingly, one of the meanings of the word “dog” in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) is “unpleasant person”.
There are other expressions equivalent to “being hungrier than the blind man’s dog.” One of them is “a school teacher spend more hunger”, which refers to how poorly paid the teaching profession was when most of society was illiterate.
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