The pot calling the kettle black
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The phrase "The pot calling the kettle black" is an idiom used to accuse a person of being guilty of the very thing they are pointing out. This may or may not be hypocritical or a contradiction.
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Alternative interpretation
As generally understood, the person accusing is understood to share some quality with the target of their accusation. An alternative interpretation, recognised by some, but not all, sources is that the pot is sooty (being placed on a fire), while the kettle is clean and shiny (being placed on coals only), and hence when the pot accuses the kettle of being black, it is the pot’s own sooty reflection that it sees: the pot accuses the kettle of a fault that only the pot has, rather than one that they share. See also projection.
Similar phrases
- In the Gospel of Matthew 7:3, Jesus is quoted as saying, during the discourse on judgmentalism in the Sermon on the Mount, "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?" Many scholars have interpreted this as a proscription against personal attacks in general, not just particulars.
- An aphorism sometimes attributed to George Herbert states, "People who live in glass houses should not throw stones"...
Uses
- Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote — "said the frying-pan to the kettle, get away, blackbreech"
- Henry Fielding in Covent Garden Journal — "Dares thus the kettle to rebuke our sin!/Dares thus the kettle say the pot is black!"
- William Penn in Some Fruits of Solitude in Reflections and Maxims — "For a Covetous Man to inveigh against Prodigality... is for the Pot to call the Kettle black."
- Margaret Mitchell in Gone with the Wind — "The pot's calling the kettle black.
- President Lincoln E. Sheritan in Sheritan's War - "I daresay: is this one of those contemptible, exasparatingly petty instances in which the pot remarks that the kettle is black?"
- Francisco Gabilondo Soler "Cricri" wrote El comál y la olla — a song that tells a fable in which a (male)grill and a (female)pot keep criticizing each other.
"In Lao language, it means: ພາສາລາວມີຄວາມໝາຍວ່າ "ນົກເຄົ້າ ທ້ວງຕາແມ່".
- Maynard James Keenan of Tool (band) in "The Pot" - "Now when you pissed all over my black kettle
You musta been high."
See also
