Would someone please explain this saying to me? I’m not clever enough to understand it. Thanks in advance.
It means that someone is being hypocritical. In the olden days when cooking was done over an open fire, the kettle AND the pot were both black from the soot.
In olden times, you had to build a wood fire—originally in a fireplace, later in a woodburning stove—if you wanted to cook anything. Pots and kettles heated atop such fires became all sooty. In earlier English, before people became sensitized to racism in language, “black” was a metaphor for disgrace. So the pot accuses the kettle of being all disgraced with soot, oblivious to the fact that it’s in the exact same condition.
Tu quoque is a fallacy in logic. “So what if I’m a crook, you’re a bigger one.” That does not constitute a valid defense.
Jesus made a joke along these lines, the bit about criticizing your neighbor for having a teeny speck of dust in his eye, ignoring the fact that you have a huge piece of wood (a “beam”) in your own eye. Beam comes from the Old English word for ‘tree’, cognate with German Baum and Dutch boom. (The boom on a ship, which holds a sail, comes from this Dutch word, because like the beam that holds up a ceiling, it’s made from a tree trunk.) Jesus was supposed to have been a carpenter, and this bit of humor sounds like he thought of it while planing some boards.
Much thanks to both of you!
I just wanted to add that the full phrase is “the pot calling the kettle black”. “Pot… kettle… black” is just a condensed version.
(And my new favourite “Mr Kettle? Mr Pot on line 2” is a stylisation.)
‘Black’ as a metaphor for disgrace had absolutely no racist overtones as it had absolutely no racial basis.
It’s only our hyper-sensitive political correctness that has drawn a connection between the colour “black” as a metaphor for disgrace and “black” as a not wholly accurate description for a not wholly valid concept of a race, when there simply is no connection there.
Someone should have informed Enid Blyton about that (“His evil black face stared at them out of the tree”). And Shakespeare… (Iago: “An old black ram is tupping your white ewe”; “When devils will the blackest sins put on…”).
Actually, that one has no racist overtones that I can see. In this case, I think “black” is used as “evil” or “wicked” and has no “racial” root.
Until I read this thread I had always assumed that the pot and kettle in the proverb were made of cast iron rather than being blackened from the fire.
The Dictionary of Proverbs by Linda and Roger Flavell, pub. Kyle Cathie Ltd. 1996, has this entry (which I’ve shortened):
Except in the context of Othello, where presumaby (IMO) the audience is attuned to racial issues, even back in the 17thC.
BTW, I am so using this version from now on!
There’s also <telephone hand up to ear>Hello Pot? This is the kettle.</telephone hand up to ear>.
Yeah, I saw this on a Friends episode. Phoebe did that and said “Hello Pot? This is Kettle. YOU’RE BLACK!”
He’s busy.
Mr Kettle will call Mr Pot back
Well obviously in those cases the connotation is deliberately there. But using the word ‘black’ in a phrase that does not have racist/racial overtones does not automatrically introduce them either.
Well fair enough, though I do think in days gone by there was an occasionally expressed attitude that black = evil .: black people = evil people.