<\/a><\/p>\nNever look a gift horse in the mouth.\u00a0What is a gift-horse? Why shouldn’t you look in its mouth?\u00a0What does this idiom actually mean?<\/p>\n
A gift horse is a horse that was a gift, quite simply. When given a horse, it would be bad manners to inspect the horse’s mouth to see if it has bad teeth. This can be applied as an analogy to any gift: Don’t inspect it to make sure it matches some standard you have, just be grateful and say thank you!<\/p>\n
Where does it come from?<\/strong><\/p>\nAs with most proverbs the origin is ancient and unknown. We have some clues with this one however. The phrase appears in print in English in 1546, as “don’t look a given horse in the mouth”, in John Heywood’s\u00a0A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the Englishe tongue.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Never look a gift horse in the mouth.\u00a0What is a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1985,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,34],"tags":[182,562,564,307,166,563,1658],"class_list":["post-1984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-studentnews-didyouknow-facts-interestingwords-interestingpeople-onthisday-interestingwordsandexpressions","category-teachernews-trainingconferences-didyouknow-facts-interestingwords-interestingpeople-onthisday-interestingwordsandexpressions","tag-english-book-in-georgia","tag-gift-horse","tag-idiom","tag-interesting-phrase","tag-learn","tag-never-look-a-gift-horse-in-the-mouth","tag-october-2014","cat_35","cat_34"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1984"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1987,"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1984\/revisions\/1987"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}