“You don’t put your boots on before your socks, or the cart before the horse, so why are you eating dessert before dinner?”
In cowboy times, driving a cart pulled by horses was a common occurrence. Nearly every day, the the cowboy was either doing it himself, or he saw someone who was. Carts often carried loads that would be harder to just set on the back of a horse. But what a cowboy didn’t see was a cart being pushed by a horse.
It’s much easier to get a horse to pull a cart than it is to get him to push it. Moving forward is what horses do minutes after they are born, but pushing against things that are in front of them isn’t second nature. So the point of this saying is that you put the cart behind the horse, not in front of it—meaning there is a natural order to things, and you don’t do things in the wrong order.
The first time this idiom was used in literature is in the 1500’s, but it was likely an oft used phrase well before then, since horses and carts have been around a lot longer. But now that horses and carts are a rare occurrence, we may not hear the phrase often. What about you?
Have you ever heard this saying before? Used it yourself? Could you see yourself using it now? Let me know in a comment!
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