Quote:
Originally Posted by silibran
|
Different terms for similar equine conditions.
Horses exhibit their emotions in many different ways. Humans once all knew what those emotions were when all of us depended on horses for our transportation, but our widespread understanding of them disappeared when the motor vehicle replaced the horse over 100 years ago.
If you have never been around horses, you would never understand the different shades of meaning in the two terms.
To understand the differences you would have to know what chomping at the bit actually looks like, and what causes a horse to do it.
The same with faunching. Two different words with slightly different meanings and both have loose interpretations of their meaning.
But a person has to know why a horse would ever chomp a bit. What's the definition of 'chomp'? Since a horse's teeth are much different from human teeth, the word doesn't apply in the same way it would with a human chomper.
Horses do bite, but not often with a bit in their mouths. Bits tend to prevent the ability to bite.
And since a bit is designed to fit into the gap between a horse's front teeth and the molars, it's hard to bite down with something that doesn't exist to bite with.
I've always understood the term 'chomping at the bit' as being the same as 'taking the bit in his teeth'. If the bit fits loosely in a horse's mouth, the horse can grasp the bit in his teeth. And once the bit is grasped, the rider may have lost control of the animal.
The purpose of all bits is to to control the animal through the avoidance of pain. The roof of the mouth is one of the few spots on a horse that is so sensitive to pain that the horse will stop what it's doing to avoid the pain.
A well-trained horse soon learns the human directions the motion of the bit gives him, so pain never happens almost all the time to a well-trained horse.
But a panicked horse can kill both itself and its rider, and must be prevented from that, as even the best trained horse can panic.
So if a panicked horse has seized the bit in its teeth, it can kill itself and its rider. If the rider has control of the bit, the pain the bit can inflict can be so severe as to over-ride the panic, and cause the horse to stop what it's doing.
To understand all that requires knowing any horse does not attack great danger. Every horse's natural response is to run away from danger as fast as it can run.
Once humans forgot that, they also forgot why chomping the bit was once something important, so the saying could take on different meanings.
Faunching is a word that describes a nervous horse.
The horse may still respond to the bit willingly, but it will be throwing its head around, sweating, twitching, stamping its feet, or many other body signals that it is nervous, impatient, frustrated, or afraid. But the horse may be chomping the bit too. Proper human interpretation all depends on what's happening at the moment.
It's like a lot of very old figures of speech.
There was once a time when either meant something very specific, but those times are gone, so the figure of speech becomes generalized and could mean just about anything the speaker intends it to mean.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
