There are many expressions in English which feature dogs, and our poor canine friends don’t tend to get a very good deal. We talk about ‘a dog’s life’ (a hard one), being ‘sick as a dog’ (yeurgh!), a ‘dog in the manger’ attitude (a sulk), or ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’ (really heavily). And, if you’re always given the horrible jobs around the house, you might be described as a ‘dogsbody’.

It’s a strange idea, because you don’t literally look like a dog. So where does the curious expression come from?

In centuries gone by, it wasn’t just dogs who had a hard life. Sailors on the high seas did too, living in very cramped conditions and eating rather cheap and nasty rations! That’s why, for example, when we want to have a long think or chat about something, we talk about ‘chewing the fat’, because in the old days, sailors would literally chew the fat of salt pork, sometimes for days on end! It was a bit like 19^th-century chewing gum.

But back to ‘dogsbody’. A staple of a sailor’s diet was a mixture of dried peas and eggs boiled in a bag. Yuck. Sailors thought the jumbled food bulging in the bag looked — and tasted! — like a dog’s body, and so the nickname stuck.

Over time, junior officers aboard a ship who had to do a lot of the most basic jobs were also called ‘dogsbodies’, because their tasks — such as scrubbing the deck or climbing up the mast in stormy weather — were often so unpleasant!