Bill Bryson, in The Mother Tongue mentions in passing the phrase "root hog or die", which I questioned in today's wwftd entry. so far I've had two(2) responses that don't mesh all that well:

1. a link to a song with this title, which uses the phrase as a pick-up line for the chorus - punctuated Root, hog, or die. http://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/usa/roothog.htm

2. and this:
I played football when I was in college, and we had a drill called Dig Dig Little Pig - Root Hog or Die
It had two linemen facing each other, a ball carrier and a would-be tackler. The coach took great joy in squealing out that name when it was time for the drill. The players didn't like it much because everyone got beat to death.

in the first verse of the song(1) we find: Big pig or little pig Root, hog, or die
which closely tracks the football drill: Dig Dig Little Pig - Root Hog or Die.

is anyone out there familiar with any of this?

I've heard the phrase infrequently. It has always seemed to be functionally similar to "sink or swim." I've never heard it used in a song and don't know anything about football.

k

dr.bill suggests it should be taken as a literal command to a Colonial Pig. (from thence it could be transferred as you suggest, FF)

A pig in a pen can just wait for the farmer to come feed him, but a wild hog has to find his own food, mostly by digging or "rooting" in the ground...or finding another acorn! In other words, You're on your own!

"sink or swim." - In German, there is a phrase that matches the sense even more closely: "Vogel friss oder stirb" ,i.e. Bird, eat or die.

The academic version:

Publish or perish.

Is there a work ethic element to this as well?

Somewhere I've heard: "All God's critters gotta scratch fer a livin'."

The pop grammar version:

Eats Shoots and Leaves.

Although I think the ‘sink or swim’ interpretation is the most plausible, and makes the most sense, when I first read the ‘root hog, or die’ expression, the initial image that popped into my head was someone threatening a pig to root for truffles, and find them, or be made into ham, meaning, more or less, “you will be of use to me, one way or the other, pig: one way you can live; one way you can die.”

initial image that popped into my head was someone threatening a pig to root for truffles, and find them or be made into ham


Never occurred to me in that sense. I've seen pigs on the farm, but not very close. More to the point I've seen them root on television - and even that was nothing so graphic or informative as the description Bill limned for me.

k

Oh, I also meant to say that when I played football, the drill described above was called ‘The Meat Grinder’. I imagine that the names for such drills are as varied as there are football teams. Two of the other drill names I remember were, “Beefeaters,” and “Do-dads.”

I think coaches revel in coming up with stupid, cutesy, little names for drills. It’s kind of like their pet sayings, such as: “We didn’t come to win today!”, “I expect the team to give one-hundred and TEN percent!”, and, my personal favorite, “There’s no ‘I’ in team!”

One day, while our coach was giving one of his puffed-up, overly-animated ‘pep talks’ he trotted out the ol’ “’I’ in team” saying. My tolerance for these song and dance routines had gotten extremely thin, and before I could stop myself, I asked: “Is there an ‘I’ in ‘win’, coach?” The room was dead quite, which was not quite what I had hoped for. Nevertheless, I had committed myself, so, while the coach was trying to come up with a retort, I followed up with: “How about, ‘lose’, coach? Is there an ‘I’ in ‘lose’?” This time, the brighter of the bunch began guffawing. Slowly, the rest of the team chimed in with their laughter, even though they obviously didn’t get my point. Fuming, the coach still couldn’t come up with a retort, and finally decided to fall back on his ‘authority’. “Go give me 20 laps – full pads!” he shouted.

He never did answer my questions.

Eats Shoots and Leaves. ~ AnnaS

Very topical!

I'm not quite sure which sense you're taking though, given the punctuation you've used makes it seem more like 'root hog and die anyway' if 'leaves' is a euphemism for 'dies'. Segueing naturally on to thinking about 'receive life, give life, leave life' perhaps 'eats, shoots and leaves' would be close after all. Then again, there's the Oz slang use of the term 'root'...

This public musing isn't taking me anywhere...

Spareye writes:
Charles Funk explained the expression, "root hog or die" this way, in Heavens to Betsy! & Other Curious Sayings:

Get to work or suffer the consequences. Although the earliest printed record of the Americanism so far exhumed dates only to 1834 ... it probably goes back to colonial times or, at least, to early frontier days. And, probably, its origin was literal -- an admonition to hogs or pigs when crops were scant to forage for themselves in order to survive. In fact, the expression sometimes appears as a command as given to a hog: "root, hog, or die!" The way it appears in each of the seven stanzas of the folk song under that title in the Archive of the American Folk Song Society, Library of Congress, each of which closes with the line, is:

Oh, I went to Californy in the spring of Seventy-six,
Oh, when I landed there I wuz in a terrible fix,
I didn't have no money my victuals for to buy,
And the only thing for me was to root, hog, or die.

this substantiates dr.bill's recollection; [editorial comment] and makes manifest why we miss some some old and dear friends.