🎵Cliché Month: When Pigs Fly
The Ultimate Badge of Impossibility
Whenever someone says something completely absurd, improbable, or unlikely to happen—ever in a million years, our wonderful English language gives us a delightfully sarcastic reply: “Sure… and pigs might fly, too!“
It belongs to a colorful family of expressions known as an adynaton—a figure of speech so exaggerated that it highlights an absolute physical impossibility. We use these sayings whenever we want to express skepticism with a wink, whether we are talking about waiting “until the cows come home,” looking for something like “a needle in a haystack,” or promising to tackle an unpleasant chore “on a cold day in July.” Or maybe “when the sun rises in the west.”
Note: An ancient example of an adynaton was “Till the rivers run backward.” Of course, they could not have known that in 1812, an earthquake on the New Madrid Fault would do exactly that to the Mississippi River. It’s an interesting factoid you can read here.
From 17th-Century Satire to Real Biplanes
Long before our neon aviator pig took to the skies, people were using airborne swine as a comedic punchline. The earliest known variations appeared in 16th-century Scottish proverbs, but it was formally recorded in English print by lexicographer John Clarke in his 1639 collection Paroemiologia Anglo-Latina. His phrasing carried a wonderfully silly visual: “Pigs fly in the air with their tails forward.” It was the go-to retort for calling out someone telling tall tales or making promises they had no intention of keeping.
For centuries, the phrase remained safely locked in the realm of sarcasm. But on November 4, 1909, an eccentric English aviation pioneer named Lord Brabazon (John Moore-Brabazon) decided to take the idiom literally. Determined to prove the cynics wrong, he strapped a small wicker basket containing a live piglet onto the wing strut of his biplane. Before taking off into the skies over Kent, he pinned a hand-lettered cardboard sign to the basket that read: “I am the first pig to fly.”
With that short flight, history gained its first official airborne pig—and the world lost its most foolproof guarantee of an impossible event! And if you think that’s funny, check out my previous post about the first cow to be milked in an airplane.
What’s on Your “Flying Pig” List?
We all encounter dreams where our first instinct is to look up at the clouds, throw our hands in the air, and say this cliché or something else meaning we don’t believe it will ever happen. Maybe we try to tell ourselves that “With God, all things are possible” but that often doesn’t go beyond the encouraging words. What big dreams or everyday moments make you think you are more likely to see a pig soaring through the stratosphere than to complete your task?
- Getting a book published?
- Getting an entire house decluttered and organized?
- Emptying out your storage shed?
- Or finally crossing off the last lingering chore on your to-do list?
While we will always find things that seem impossible, with a little extra determination and maybe some ingenuity, we can do more than we think possible. Share your comments, and we’ll pray for each other to find hope (or supportive friends) to help us tackle the overwhelming obstacles that try to hold up our dreams. And speaking of tackles, here’s something fun:
A Super Bowl Take on Flying Pigs
One of the funniest modern takes on the idiom came from the 2015 Super Bowl in Doritos’ fan-created commercial contest. When a boy asks an older man on a porch for a chip, the man smirks and says, “Sure kid, when pigs fly!” Refusing to take no for an answer, the kid builds a harness with rocket fireworks and wings for a farm pig—launching the airborne swine right past the stunned man’s porch to claim his bag of chips! Here’s the video…
A Parting Riddle
And speaking of flying things…
Why did the boy throw his alarm clock out the window?
Because he wanted to see time fly! ⏰✈️
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