Meaning & Analysis
To detect the scent of a person, animal, or object carried on the wind, often in the context of hunting or tracking.
Insights
Suspicion and Detection
To be suspicious of someone or to have an inkling of their secret intentions or activities. It implies detecting a clue or hint about something that is not yet openly known.
Anticipation and Foreknowledge
To have foreknowledge or a strong feeling about a future event, whether positive or negative. It suggests anticipating an opportunity, a problem, or a discovery before it fully materializes.
Gaining an Advantage
To have someone under observation without their knowledge, thereby gaining a strategic advantage. This implies being aware of another's presence or plans while remaining undetected oneself.
Hunting and Sensory Experience
Originating from the practice of hunting, where a hunter detects prey by its scent carried on the wind, the proverb powerfully grounds the abstract act of suspicion in a primal, sensory experience. The 'wind' symbolizes the invisible flow of information, rumors, or subtle clues.
Psychology of Intuition
The proverb speaks to the psychological state of intuition—the feeling of knowing something without concrete evidence. It captures the moment of dawning awareness or suspicion, where a subtle clue ('scent') triggers a deeper understanding of a person or situation.
Literary and Dramatic Use
The phrase was popular among Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights like Shakespeare and Jonson, who used it to signify intrigue, dawning suspicion, or the discovery of a plot. Its usage in their works highlights a cultural fascination with hidden motives and surveillance.
Rhetorical Devices
Metaphor
The entire phrase is a metaphor, using the physical act of smelling a scent on the wind to represent the non-physical acts of intuiting, suspecting, or anticipating something.
Sensory Imagery
The proverb evokes strong sensory imagery of wind and scent, creating a vivid and memorable picture of tracking and detection that enhances its metaphorical meaning.
Synecdoche
The 'wind' functions as a synecdoche for the intangible medium through which information, secrets, and rumors are transmitted.
Transcription
Quotations
I haue in the wynde, some good sauour of gayne.
I smelde hir out, and had her streight in the wynde.
I haue him in the wynde.
That hardly we, shall haue them in the winde, To smell them forth.
No, she can smel a knaue a mile off.—Let vs go farther Licio, she hath both vs in the wind.
They haue vs in the wind.
Classus of late had his whore in the winde.
[As in 1562 Hey.]
Shee has me i' the wind!
I had him in the wind, and smelt him streight.
Shakespeare Citations
I sent to her, By this same coxcomb that we have i' th' wind.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.