Meaning
A person who spitefully keeps others from having or enjoying something that they themselves have no use for. It is a criticism of obstructive, mean-spirited behaviour rather than ordinary selfishness, and it survives most often in the collocation 'dog in the manger attitude', applied to petty obstruction of access or use. Negative and critical; usually modifies 'attitude', 'policy', or 'tactics', and it sounds slightly literary in casual talk. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The fable of a dog lying in a manger and snapping at the oxen that would eat the hay, though unable to eat it himself, is ancient Greek. It is documented in the lexicographer Diogenianus (1st century CE, glossing the saying as applying to those who neither use a thing themselves nor let others use it), twice in Lucian (2nd century), and in an epigram in the Greek Anthology; a similar image appears in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas (saying 102). Notably, no ancient source attributes the story to Aesop, and it is absent from the traditional ancient collections of his fables; it first acquired that attribution in Heinrich Steinhowel's German Esopus (c. 1476-80) and so entered English through Caxton's 1484 version. In English, John Gower versified the tale around 1390 in Confessio Amantis, and William Bullein's 1564 plague dialogue, describing cruel dogs lying in a manger, is recorded as the earliest specific use of the phrase itself. The popular label 'Aesop's fable' is therefore a later convention rather than a documented classical attribution.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a dog in the manger attitude
- act like a dog in the manger
- dog in the manger tactics
- dog-in-the-manger policy
Usage Examples
- By locking the field and refusing every offer to lease it, the council has behaved like a dog in the manger.
- He never plays the piano, but he flatly refuses to let his sister borrow it - a classic dog-in-the-manger attitude.
- Reviewers accused the airline of dog-in-the-manger tactics when it blocked the new route while flying it only twice a week.