A devastated student flew 400 miles to meet her lover in Amsterdam only to be told she was the victim of a cruel 'pull a pig' prank.
Sophie Stevenson, 24, from Stoke, forked out £350 on a flight after being invited to the Dutch capital by her Jesse Mateman, 21, who she met in Barcelona in August.
But when Miss Stevenson arrived at her hotel she received a text message telling her it was all a ruse and she had been stood up by the heartless Dutchman who told her, 'You've been pigged'.
Daily Mail
Absolutely new slang for me but luckily the excerpt clearly tells me what “to be pigged” means.
I'm guessing that it is related to the informal BrEng expression, pig out: To eat ravenously; gorge oneself: “pigged out on cake”, and according to Macmillan Dictionary, to eat an extremely large amount of food
Oxford Dictionaries lists a long list of idioms citing the four-hoofed Suidae but no mention of the idiom used in the The Daily Mail
- Any idea as to when to be pigged was coined?
- Is the phrase also used in the US? If not what would be its equivalent? Prank doesn't seem to cut the mustard.
Best Answer
Deriving as it does from "Pull-A-Pig", which is described as a "drinking game" by Clare Longrigg in the 26 Aug 1993 issue of The Guardian ("Poison ivy and the wallflowers"), 'she is/was/has been pigged' probably originated sometime historically proximate to that publication.
In brief, "Pull-A-Pig...is a drinking game in which men compete to see who can pick up the ugliest woman" (op. cit.). The 'pig' in question, thus, is a derogatory slang reference to an "unattractive woman". OED describes that sense of 'pig' as "chiefly US"; however, I found no evidence that "Pull-A-Pig" is known in the US, and use of 'pull' in the sense of to "pick up (a partner), esp. for sexual intercourse; to seduce" is described by OED as "Brit. slang".
'Pigged' in the use quoted in the question ("you've been pigged") is likely to have sprung from a play on a slurred pronunciation of 'picked' ("she was picked/pigged"), a slur perhaps thought amusing by the semi-adolescent males who might find such a game appealing. Alternatively, of course, 'pigged' may simply have sprung organically from the linguistic demand to name the objects of the "Pull-A-Pig" 'game'.
The historically parallel and equivalent name of the US drinking 'game' (more appropriately called a crime, viz. "Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress"), if it existed, might have been, variously, "Dig-A-Dog" (midwest) or "Skin-A-Skank" (east coast), although more broadly "Pick-A-Pig" might have been adopted coast-to-coast.