Carrot and Stick Origin

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Steve Austin from Dennis, Massachusetts.

Hi, Steve.

Well, something that I’ve noticed over the years, I guess, something that I remember as a cartoon years ago was a little cartoon of a little boy in a donkey cart with a long stick and a carrot hanging from the string on the end of the stick, holding it in front of his donkey, which obviously every time the donkey went for the carrot, it moved the cart.

And more recently, it seems that that has morphed into something along the lines of when they talk about a carrot and a stick, especially in diplomacy, they’re talking about either here’s a carrot or there’s a reward or here’s a stick, we’re going to beat you with it.

And it just, to me, has a totally different feeling and meaning.

So you’re picturing that carrot being a motivator hanging out in front of the…

Yeah, and almost just a little persuader that you never actually get, but it just kind of keeps you moving along in the direction whoever’s holding the carrot wants you to go.

Yeah, that’s often the modern interpretation.

But the other interpretation is actually the earlier one and what was originally intended, the idea that you use carrots that sometimes are given to the animal as a motivator.

You can’t just hold a carrot out of sight or out of reach and expect the animal to keep going after it.

At some point, they just give up.

And then you have the stick as the threat.

Some people kind of misunderstand and think the carrot and the stick are about the stick from which the carrot is dangling.

But that’s not right either.

It’s about the threat of the stick to wallop the animal, which you shouldn’t do, or the promise of the carrot, which eventually you will deliver.

And the reason, one of the ways that we can know that that was the original interpretation is varieties of this expression exist in other languages where they don’t use carrot or they might use sweet bread in German and gingerbread in Russian and a few other things.

In some cultures, they also use whip instead of stick and a variety of other things.

So the original really was about occasionally delivering on the promise of the carrot and occasionally delivering on the threat of the stick.

So you actually have to do them sometimes for them to continue to work.

Right.

That’s random reinforcement when you’re working with dogs.

Yeah, anybody who’s trained their animal knows about random reinforcement.

You don’t always give them the treat when they do the thing you want them to do.

Yeah, they’re more motivated if they get it only sometimes.

Okay.

Well, I had Googled it at one point, and one of the things that came up on Google was a quote from Winston Churchill during the Second World War talking about the German war machine slowly grinding its way after the carrot up the hill and mentioning a donkey, so sounding like, again, they were holding a carrot in front of the donkey for the German war machine to keep moving.

That’s right. Yeah, that’s the modern interpretation.

And the older version goes back at least to the 1800s, predating Churchill.

But the cartoon, it’s almost kind of iconic, the idea of using the carrot in front of the animal to motivate it so that it keeps going blindly and not really thinking about that it’s not actually reaching the reward.

Right.

So that cartoon has been used zillions of times in a lot of different ways, and it’s kind of part of our Anglo culture, just to think about it that way.

But it’s not this source of it.

Okay.

Steve, thank you so much for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Okay.

Thanks very much.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye now.

Thanks, Steve.

877-929-9673.