Meaning & Analysis
It is pointless to ask a naked man for breeches; he cannot give what he does not have.
Insights
Futility of demands
Rebukes requests made to those without means—whether debts, favors, or labor—because no pressure can conjure resources that simply aren’t there.
Misdirected appeals
Advises asking from the able, not the destitute; prudence starts with assessing a person’s actual capacity before seeking help.
Cruel expectation
Exposes the callousness of demanding payment or service from the impoverished, where insistence becomes harassment rather than justice.
Limits of authority
Warns officials and creditors that power cannot override scarcity; decrees and threats don’t produce cloth on a bare body.
Poverty foregrounded
The naked backside centers material lack, not moral failing; the proverb’s humor cuts toward empathy by making the impossibility stark and bodily.
Economic targeting
A practical rule for charity and policy: channel demands and asks toward surplus, not subsistence; otherwise you waste effort and worsen hardship.
Proverbial family
Cognate with ‘to take raiment from a naked man’ and ‘can’t get blood from a stone’: across cultures, impossibility is taught by concrete, unembarrassed images.
Shame as critique
The bawdy picture shames the asker more than the poor, implying that the indecency lies in the unreasonable request, not in nakedness.
Speech as triage
Encourages triaging one’s petitions—know your audience, match the ask to their capacity—conserving social capital and time.
Rhetorical Devices
Vulgar imagery
A ‘bare-assed man’ delivers shock clarity; the coarse image fixes the lesson by making impossibility visually undeniable.
Antithesis
Juxtaposes ‘breech’ (garment) with ‘bare’ (absence) to dramatize the zero inventory against the demand.
Alliteration
The b-sounds in ‘breech’/‘bare’ produce a punchy beat that aids recall.
Ellipsis
Compressed phrasing leaves the judgment to inference, giving it gnomic authority.
Hyperbole
Overstates the scenario to make the underlying principle—don’t demand the impossible—memorable.
Transcription
Quotations
There is nothyng more vayne, as your selfe tell can, Than to beg a breech of a bare arst man.
To take rayment from a naked man, prouerbially vsed to take or seke a thyng of a man that he hath not, to take a brieche from a barearst man.
(To pull a breeche from).
(It's ill begging).
To seek a breech from breechlesse men 'twere vain.
(You begg).
(To beg breeches).
(You seek breechs).
(You seek breechs).
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.