WTI Magazine #85    2016 November 21
Author : Giulia Casati for the Italian School NJ      Translation by:

Talking about Italian expressions, one that has always interested me while growing up is "to have a tail made out of hay." How many times did my mom ask me if I had a "coda di paglia"!? But what the heck did it mean? Growing up, at first I couldn't figure it out, but then I started to think back to the times when I heard people referring to this mythical tail of hay.

I remember that I once forgot the milk out of the fridge, but I pretended I didn't do it, and my mom told me I had a tail of hay. And then, there was that time in which my brother and I broke a ceramic angel on top of the shelf, but we glued it back together, and just by looking at our expressions she asked us if we had a tail of hay for some reason. Well, it kind of seems that every time I did something wrong, and I really, really feared I was going to get caught, I had a tail of hay. Mystery solved! Having a tail of hay, in fact, means exactly that: the feeling you get while trying to avoid humiliation or shame for your actions. Even though in my case, I actually always got busted.

The origin of the expression is not really clear, there are many theories, and, as it is with all things like this, everyone wants to be the one who used it first or invented it. However, I'll narrow it down to my two favorites.

In the first version, the expression derives from an ancient tale in which a fox got his tail caught in a trap while trying to get some chickens in a farm. The fox managed to free itself and run away, but it lost its beautiful tail. Too ashamed to go around and be seen without its tail, the fox decided to attached a fake tail, made out of hay, trying to fool the other animals. However, the farm owners notice the fake tail and lit a fire in front of every chicken-coop. The fox, afraid of catching on fire, couldn't get close to the chicken-coop and to the chickens anymore. The fox hasn't been that cleaver after all.

The second version goes back to an old Medieval custom. As a humiliation to defeated enemies or as a punishment to criminals, people used to attach a tail made out of hay to them, with which they had to parade all around town. Moreover, the town people might light the tail on fire as an additional punishment.

Not really a gesture of kindness. The tail was put as a symbol of degradation from human to the state of animals. This punishment would not only create a sense of humiliation, but also of guilt, responsibility of the mistake made, and mistrust of all the people around the humiliated. All emotions that a person, like me, who had a tail of hay felt before. This version also seems to have some historical base. In Manipulus Florum, Galvano Fiamma describes an event in which the Milanese people made the defeated people of Pavia walk out of their town with a tail of hay attached.

Whichever you decide to believe, the fable or the more vicious historical version, either one didn't end very well for the protagonists of the stories. It's really up to you to decide. Anyhow, you have to be careful, if you have a tail of hay, it won't be long before it catches on fire!