February 28, 2000

Hector (the pup)

Recently, I have found myself contrasting a recent event with one that occurred long, long ago (or never before) and have heard myself say "Well I haven't heard of that happening since Hector was a pup." [...] My father advises me that this expression was "current" in his grandfather's day before the turn of the last century, and not since. From whence does it derive? Who is Hector? I expect that he is a very old dog now.

Hector was a pup more than three millennia ago, and I suspect only his father, King Priam, could have gotten away with calling him a pup.

Jesse discussed who Hector was in his posting about the verb to hector. Hector's brother, Paris, stole Helen from Greece and started the whole Trojan war. Hector was the Trojan hero who killed Patroclus, the friend of Achilles, who in turn killed Hector and dragged him around the walls of Troy in a grisly triumphal display. The Trojans had to pay to get his body back; acccording to legend, the body was unblemished despite the mauling it took, and he became the symbol of the consummate warrior.

It's all but certain that the phrase since Hector was a pup refers to the Hector of mythology, although it's officially classed as "American; origin uncertain." One source says that the expression might have become popularized in the 1920s when a lot of boys studied Greek and had dogs named Hector, but it's more likely that the expression is older, and that both it and the dog-naming fad relate to the story told by Euripides: Hector's mother, Hecuba, got turned into a dog for killing the murderer of her older son, Polydorus, so Hector by extension was a dog's son--a pup. Perhaps the original S.O.B.?

The expression belongs to the same category as 'the last time I heard that, I fell off my dinosaur and broke my wooden underwear', but it sounds classier.

Maurice Sendak may have been thinking of Hector the warrior when he named the hero of one of his nursery rhymes Hector Protector. I certainly hope he wasn't thinking of the Australian object of the same name that is worn by cricket players to protect their manhood.

Wendalyn