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Idiom: Bring Home the Bacon
It’s Friday, and if you’re getting paid weekly, this is the day you bring home the bacon.
It’s the perfect idiom for the people out there who are feeling hungry right now.
Anyway, a person who can bring home the bacon is a person who can provide for their family by earning money or a salary so it can be used to buy all the necessities of life such as food, heat, light, etc.
It sounds pretty straightforward. It also has a fascinating origin.
It’s said that the idiom bring home the bacon began in England way back in the 12th century.
A couple who were very devoted to each other impressed the local priory.
So, you probably don’t know what a priory is.
A prior is a person who is in charge of a priory.
That doesn’t help to clear things up very much because you don’t know what a prior is either.
Well, a priory is another name for a monastery or a building where monks and nuns live, work and pray.
It’s a tranquil place.
To get back to my story, the prior was impressed by the devotion a local couple had for each other, so he gave them a flitch of bacon as a reward.
A flitch of bacon is a side of bacon or a big piece of bacon.
Every four years in the town of Great Dunmow, which is in Essex, England, a flitch of bacon is still awarded to a devoted couple.
So, there you have it.
Bring home the bacon means providing for your family, but it has a very cool origin.
Take care, and have a fantastic day, everyone.
Perhaps after all this talk of bacon, pork will be on the menu this evening.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 76.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.