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Tiếng Việt

Let the cat out of the bag

To make known something that was meant to be kept hidden.

Hớ hênh làm lộ chuyện.

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Let the cat out of the bag

Examples

  • He let the cat out of the bag about their engagement.

    Anh ấy hớ hênh làm lộ chuyện họ đính hôn.

  • One careless email let the cat out of the bag.

    Chỉ một bức thư điện tử bất cẩn đã làm lộ chuyện.

In Popular Culture

  • Speech

    I think he's coming to speak to the Congress—I hope I didn't let the cat out of the bag.

    Tôi nghĩ ông ấy sẽ đến phát biểu trước Quốc hội — mong là tôi không vừa lỡ miệng làm lộ chuyện.

    George W. Bush

    Remarks in a Discussion on Women's Issues in Charlotte, North Carolina (2004)

Origin

In short

The market-fraud story everyone tells is a good story with no evidence behind it, which is worth knowing before repeating it.

The usual account runs like this. At market a suckling pig was sold tied in a bag, and a dishonest trader would substitute a cat; the buyer who opened the bag before paying discovered the fraud and let the cat out. It pairs neatly with buying a pig in a poke, which is a genuinely old English phrase for taking something on trust.

The trouble is that nothing connects the two. A pig in a poke is recorded from the sixteenth century, but letting the cat out of the bag does not appear until the middle of the eighteenth, and the earliest uses of it are about disclosing a secret with no market, no pig and no bag of any kind in sight. A rival explanation involving the cat-o'-nine-tails kept in a bag aboard ship has even less to support it.

It is included here as an honest example of how well a folk etymology can fit. The story is memorable, tidy and almost certainly invented after the fact — but none of that touches what the phrase means, which has never been in doubt.

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