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A Horse A Piece

Talking about family quirks, Anne came up with another interesting phrase.  She says her sister from Wisconsin says "a horse a piece" meaning "either way".  So it would be the equivalent of "six of one, half dozen of the other".  

The first long explanation I saw for this was at Everything Summer Camp.

It comes from a situation in a game where a player is trying to win a best-of-three match and each player has one win, so "one win apiece" eases into "a horse apiece".  This feels most likely to me.

I can see a link back to a friendly (or not so friendly) game of bar dice where, in the final best-of-three showdown, if you lose the first game, it's "a horse against you" or "a horse on you", after which, if the other player wins the second game, you would clearly have "a horse apiece."   A lot of gambling games have the tokens or stakes nicknamed "horses".

There's a bit of a time shift going on here, though.  For the third game, the loser has to buy everyone a round of drinks, so it very much does matter.  But at the moment you have a horse apiece, nothing you did up to that point mattered, the outcome is no closer to having been decided.  But the phrase is used as "either way" or "it makes no difference", not "so far, nothing we did many any difference."  Language is complex, and words and phrases catch on for unfathomable reasons.

I found some very old uses, but they all sound like a gambler's take on the situation.  None is convincing as evidence of anything other than the gambling origin.

Reddit had this hilarious romp through idioms.

Anne thought it was the same as "Catch-22" (from the book of the same name by Joseph Heller, 1961), but "Catch-22" was meant to be used for the very specific case where there is an unbreakable loop of circular reasoning: goal A requires goal B, which requires goal A, so there is no actual solution.  It can also be used for any no-win situation, although a fair chunk of the population would now call that a Kobiyashi Maru -- thanks to Captain Kirk at the start of The Wrath of Khan.  Usage can split either by intention or by error.  This is an interesting case, but it's not "a horse apiece".

One last note: it bugs me how many articles quote this phrase as "A Horse A Piece," which makes no sense.  It's clearly "a horse apiece", same as if we had just a dollar apiece.  But sometimes idioms take on a life of their own, and may even break grammar, again for unfathomable reasons ... that's just how it came out after millions or billions of uses.  So, whichever way you write it, it feels like a case of itself: "a horse a piece."  Does it really matter?

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