Manchester Vermont Real Estate Blog

One of the agents in our office will occasionally use the phrase, “people don’t like to buy a pig in a poke”. It will usually be in relation to how difficult it is to sell raw land that doesn’t have a septic design and waste water permit, let alone a current survey in place. Contextually I could grasp the meaning of the phrase but I was curious to find out where the phrase came from and what the heck a poke is. So off to Google I went.

On a side note, isn’t it amazing to think that 10 years ago many of life’s questions went unanswered? I’m not talking about the big questions like “Why are we here?”, but rather the every day curiosity questions like “Does it ever snow in Australia?” This specific question came up with my kids over breakfast one day. In a matter of moments I had the answer – occasionally at higher elevations but almost never at sea level. The information resources we have at our disposal today are incredible, as is the speed with which we have integrated them into our daily lives.

But I digress. It turns out that a poke is a sack, derived from the French word poche. The phrase originated in the Middle Ages when a con-man would place a cat in a bag and attempt to sell it to an unsuspecting and hungry person as a suckling pig. Interestingly enough, this also gave us two other common expressions “to let the cat out of the bag” which of course means to give away the trick or secret, and “to be left holding the bag” which means to end up with nothing for our efforts. I must give credit to the good people at Wikipedia for this information.

Feel free to share with me your own interesting but possibly useless information.