The idiom was also the title of a Persian children story book. Rumi described in Masnavi that bad deeds of a person were as the smoke blackening the outside of a pot. Blackened cooking pots in the Persian literature were symbolically used to describe negative personalities Sanai said in his book unwise people's words are like pots, empty on the inside and black on the outside. According to Dehkhoda, the idiom in its current form was first documented as a historical Persian proverb in the Jame ol tamsil, a comprehensive collection of Persian idioms written in 1640, but the origins are thought to be much older.
#Cat in the kettle artist free#
"If thou hast not conquer'd thy self in that which is thy own particular Weakness, thou hast no Title to Virtue, tho' thou art free of other Men's. A nearer approach to the present wording is provided by William Penn in his collection Some Fruits of Solitude in Reflections and Maxims (1682): This translation was also recorded in England soon afterwards as "The pot calls the pan burnt-arse" in John Clarke's collection of proverbs, Paroemiologia Anglo-Latina (1639).
Among several variations, the one where the pan addresses the pot as culinegra (black-arse) makes clear that they are dirtied in common by contact with the cooking fire. It is identified as a proverb ( refrán) in the text, functioning as a retort to the person who criticises another of the same defect that he plainly has. The protagonist is growing increasingly restive under the criticisms of his servant Sancho Panza, one of which is that "You are like what is said that the frying-pan said to the kettle, 'Avant, black-browes'." The Spanish text at this point reads: Dijo el sartén a la caldera, Quítate allá ojinegra (Said the pan to the pot, get out of there black-eyes). The earliest appearance of the idiom is in Thomas Shelton's 1620 translation of the Spanish novel Don Quixote.