Bull in a China Shop

Look at this bull!

Look at all that fancy china, too! What’s about to happen here?

“Bull in a china shop” might be the most obvious turn of phrase I’ve written about so far. Long ago, actual cattle might really wander into an area where merchants were trying to sell wares.

I’ll go ahead and cast some doubt on this naming narrative—by the time there was china in the UK, cattle were much, much better controlled and less apt to roam the city, but… well hey, it’s still very easy to grasp the idea right away.

I’m not sure where it originates—nobody is—but I know for sure that there were lots of other phrases like this around by the time “bull in a china shop” made its way to print in 1834. Another similar phrase, “a fox in a henhouse”, comes to mind right away. This phrase is even more direct and obvious than the bull/china reference, or at least it would have been to people alive at the time, when people were much, much closer to their sources of food.

Everyone understood what a fox could do if it got into your henhouse.

While the two phrases are similar in meaning today, one presumes a very different intention from the fox than from the bull. Foxes are kind of supposed to go into henhouses, or at least to go where they can find easy prey. Bulls, on the other hand, have zero business in a shop that sells fine porcelain wares.

A fox is supposed to murder chickens by deliberately going into the henhouse. Sure, it’s inconvenient to the humans who want to eat those chickens later on when the fox enters, but that’s what a fox is genetically designed to do. In other words, the fox is acting appropriately, given the circumstances.

The bull, on the other hand, isn’t going to destroy the china shop so that they can eat something inside all those ornate teapots. Instead, their destructive rampage is brought about by nothing other than their wild nature, and perhaps a lack of tact. Bulls inside china shops are, in a word, clumsy.

Now, there are two other animal-related phrases I’d like to examine. First, “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” is much closer here to our “fox in a henhouse” analogy, but it has some differences, too. Namely, the wolf is disguising itself, indicating deception, whereas the fox (presumably) just trotted right into the henhouse in question. The bull in the china shop is more similar to the fox here, with no deception employed to enter into the shop or henhouse, respectively.

Second, and a personal favorite, is goat in the garden. Here, it helps to keep in mind that a person’s garden represented a primary and important source of food, not just some aesthetic plants as one might view a garden today. Like the henhouse, the garden was incredibly valuable to the average person living hundreds of years ago, even more so than today.

Anthropomorphism (depicting animals as though they are behaving like humans) is a very old way of passing along wisdom. Aesop’s fables are among the most well known examples of this concept, and they go back more than 2500 years. There must be something to this idea.

What is it?

For one thing, showing that an animal has a true nature can be a useful way to point out that, perhaps, human beings can have “true natures” they can’t really avoid expressing under certain circumstances. For instance, a heavyweight boxer might be amazing at punching people, but may be awful at something that requires a more cautious, delicate touch, like calligraphy.

Similarly, and more metaphorically, a person who is bold and ambitious may not be the ideal candidate for a peaceful negotiation. By telling the story in terms of animal natures, it might come across as less critical of a person’s attributes—after all, if it’s their nature, why would they be ashamed of a trait?