"you cant make a silk purse out of a sow's ear"

[Thunderbird+]

I know what it means but where puses ever made out of sows ears ? Cheers

[Quizmonster]

Probably not. Re the 'silk' purse, it's just another way of saying, "You can't get blood from a stone" or "Ye cannae tak' the breeks aff a Scotsman" or any other impossible thing. As for just a purse, the tough hairiness would not have recommended it as a matrial to make such things of.

[chakka35]

No, because -er - you can't. Geddit?

[Thunderbird+]

Thanks both, I just had this fanciful notion that in days of yore, folk may have sown a pair of sows ears together and hung it around the waist, sporran-style for stashing a few groats in. Now'a days they deep fry them and sell them as dog chews, keeps my dog quiet for at least 10 minutes!

[Octavius]

Massachusetts industrialist Arthur D. Little liked a challenge. In 1921, after hearing someone quote Jonathan Swift's adage, "You can't make a silk purse of a sow's ear," Little decided to try to do just that. From a meat-packer he obtained a form of glue made from the skin and gristle of sows' ears. Taking an amount roughly equivalent to one sow's ear, he had it filtered and forced through a spinneret into a mixture of formaldehyde and acetone. The glue emerged as 16 fine, colorless streams that hardened and then combined to form a single composite fiber. Little soaked the fiber in dyed glycerin. Then he wove the resulting thread into cloth on a handloom-and fashioned the cloth into and elegant purse like those that would have been carried by ladies of the Middle Ages.