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Revealing a secret.
L T C O O the B
Let the cat out of the bag
Revealing a secret
There are two possible origins for this phrase. The first claims the idiom came from the Royal Navy, established by King Henry VIII in 1546. At the time, it was perfectly acceptable to deliver harsh physical punishments to sailors guilty of even minor infractions. By the 18th century, one of the more common penalties was whipping, often with a cat o'nine tails. This instrument had a wooden handle with nine braided and knotted cords of rawhide attached – sometimes tipped with bits of metal. It’s thought the device, which was kept in a bag when not in use, was named “the cat” because of the “scratches” it left on the miscreant’s back. Some therefore believe that letting the cat out of the bag originally referred to one sailor ratting out another, thereby causing the cat to be released from its confinement.
More commonly, scholars feel the phrase relates to the days of the medieval markets, when farmers would buy small livestock (piglets, chickens, ducks) in a sack. The theory is that some unscrupulous sellers would surreptitiously swap the costly animals for the ubiquitous and valueless cat. The unwary purchaser would then take the unopened sack home and find he’d been cheated when he let the cat out of the bag – i.e., he revealed the con. (As a cat owner myself, I’m not sure how it would be possible to pull this off, but that’s the legend.)
Of the two explanations, there’s much more weight to the latter. First, there are plenty of early references to similar sayings: “Don’t buy a pig in a poke” (1555 CE) and “When a pig is offered, open the poke” (1325 CE). “Poke” was an early term for a bag or sack, so the advice was to always check what it was you were purchasing rather than buying it blind.
In addition, a like idiom exists in both German (“Die Katze im Sack kaufen”) and Dutch (“Een kat in de zak kopen” – both of which translate to “buy a cat in a bag.”
It’s certainly possible, too, that neither origin is correct, and the phrase was just so accurately descriptive that it caught on. Once a cat is released from confinement it runs away explosively and uncontrollably, just as a juicy secret might. And, just as it’s impossible to put the cat back in the bag once it’s out, one can’t contain a secret once it’s told to others.
In Renegade and Prophet, Lyndal Roper’s 2016 biography of Martin Luther, the author cites a letter to the reformer from a friend, Johannes Agricola, written in 1530. In it, Agricola uses the expression “let the cat out of the bag.” It’s possible that this is the first appearance of the saying in print. Others believe it was first used by The London Magazine in 1760 (“We could have wished that the author…had not let the cat out of the bag”) with indications the phrase was well-known at the time.
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