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Joy Ho
2020-08-18 08:08
Don't put the cart before the horse British American informal verb phrase
Don't put the cart before the horse in the process of getting the job done.
My brother is putting the cart before the horse by leaving his current job before getting the new one.
You are waking up late at night and sleeping all day long. I don't think you should put the cart before the horse.
To do something in the wrong order
The verb "put" should be conjugated according to its tense.
This idiom derives from the time when people travelled by horse and cart and there was a predetermined order in which they travelled. You could not put a horse before a cart because the horse was necessary to pull the cart. From the 1500s on, numerous English writers like Sir Thomas More, William Shakespeare and Charles Kingsley used this phrase, which also appears in Greek, Latin, French, German, and Italian. In English, it was a cliché by the 1700s.
Do you see anything wrong?
Confusion made worse than before.
There was heavy traffic on the way to work this morning. Confusion worse confounded when some drivers were arguing with each other right in the middle of the street.
