The Buckets by Greg Cravens for November 08, 2024

The phrase “when pigs fly” (alternatively, “pigs might fly”) is an adynaton—a figure of speech so hyperbolic that it describes an impossibility. The implication of such a phrase is that the circumstances in question (the adynaton, and the circumstances to which the adynaton is being applied) will never occur. The phrase has been used in various forms since the 1600s as a sarcastic remark.

The idiom is apparently derived from a centuries-old Scottish proverb, though some other references to pigs flying or pigs with wings are more famous. In his Fourth Book of Gargantua and Pantagruel from 1553, François Rabelais makes the aphorism into a dramatic event, when the giant Pantagruel fights the Chitterlings and its champion, “a huge, fat, thick, grizzly swine, with long and large wings, like those of a windmill.”

The phrase appears in the 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland_.

As Les Nessman, in the situation comedy TV show WKRP in Cincinnati, once said: “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”

I have flown with some pigs.

I know a restaurant with pig wings on the menu. They are a meatier version of buffalo wings, and anre pork instead of chicken pretending to be buffalo.

If one throws a pig- does that count as a flying pig?

Oh, look up yonder

On the telephone line

Just a-snortin’ and a-gruntin’

It’s a flock o’ swine!

If pigs had wings

and birds had none

My windshield wipers

could barely run

(Heywood Banks)

Have you tried our Hot and spicy pig wings! Yum!

We had to stop saying when monkeys fly when they came out with Wizard of Oz.

It dates WAAAY back to a popular sitcom character played by Polly Holliday.

In French the saying is ‘when hens will have teeth’ :)

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,

“To talk of many things:

Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—

Of cabbages—and kings—

And why the sea is boiling hot—

And whether pigs have wings."

_Through the Looking Glass : and what Alice found there.-

I’d like to know how that cow got over the moon and back without being steaks.

If they did, think of the windshield wipers you would need.

Ah, the wonderful days of youth, when I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Oh…wait….that’s NOW!

“Pigs…in…space…”