“That clinches it. I’m going with the red one over the blue.”
A horse’s hoof is much like a person’s fingernail. There’s a portion that is just keratin, and doesn’t have an active blood supply. This is called the hoof wall. When a farrier or horseshoer nails a shoe onto a horse’s foot, he makes sure the nails are beveled and set at an angle that ensures that the nail will remain in the hoof wall long enough to keep the horse shoe on, and that the nail comes out at the appropriate level on the hoof so that the horse doesn’t feel any pain in its hoof. If the nail goes into the wrong area, it is similar to the “quick” of our own nails and gets into the blood supply, causing the horse pain.
No farrier wants that.
But once a farrier has decided that the nails in the horse’s foot are good, he clinches them in place to keep the nails from coming out or the shoe from being easily pulled off. In the same manner, when we are faced with a problem that has more than one option, we may waver between them, and become unsure of what decision to make. But sometimes things happen, or someone says something that helps us make a firm decision one way or the other. That’s when we know that our decision has been “clinched.”
In cowboy times, they would use this saying frequently and knew the meaning with surety, since horses and horseshoeing were a regular occurrence (about every other month horseshoes need replacing.) So the meaning may have become lost as horses were replaced with cars.
Over time, this saying has just became a commonplace way of saying that a choice has been made and is solidified. It indicates that a person has found a decisive or final piece of evidence or argument that settles a matter.
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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