Hair of the DOG

I knew the meaning, knew the reasoning, never knew the origination of that saying...my friends say it all the time so I looked it up....

Hair of the dog is a colloquial English expression predominantly used to refer to ingestion of alcohol as treatment for a hangover. It is occasionally used with respect to dealing with the aftereffects of use of other recreational drugs. It is a shortened form of the expression “the hair of the dog that bit you.”

Instances of the phrase have appeared in English literature since the time of William Shakespeare. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer writes in the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898): "In Scotland it is a popular belief that a few hairs of the dog that bit you applied to the wound will prevent evil consequences. Applied to drinks, it means, if overnight you have indulged too freely, take a glass of the same wine next morning to soothe the nerves. 'If this dog do you bite, soon as out of your bed, take a hair of the tail in the morning.'" He also cites two apocryphal poems containing the phrase, one of which is attributed to Aristophanes. It is not known whether the idea of like curing like with like, or the practice (which may have other psychological causes) came first. Certainly it is possible that the phrase was used to justify an existing practice. It is also possible that the modern use of the phrase arose as a metaphor for that idea and did not have a former basis in practice.

The phrase is also used in a more general context to mean "a little dose of something which caused your problems in the first place," can be used to cure the problem. The phrase may have some roots in the Latin phrase Similia similibus curantur ("like cures like").

The phrase also exists in Hungarian, where the literal translation to English is "(You may cure) the dog's bite with its fur", but has evolved to a short three word phrase ("Kutya harapást szőrével") that is used frequently in other contexts when one is trying to express that the solution to a problem is more of the problem. Among the Irish and Mexicans, the phrase 'The Cure' ("curarse la cruda", in Spanish) is often used instead of 'hair of the dog'.[1] It is used, often sarcastically, in the question "Going for a Cure?"