When did the word "brag" originate?

People call it bragging. The boast comes from Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia and Inner Mongolia. In the past, people in these places crossed the river by raft, which was made of sheepskin and cowhide. When in use, blow air into it, bind your mouth, and use it as a tool to cross the river. When connecting small rafts together, you can turn them into big rafts and big rafts together, and you can carry thousands of kilograms of heavy objects across the river.

Bragging is blowing into the raft. It seems simple, but in fact it needs skill.

In the Song Dynasty, there was a man named Yang Pu who loved to brag and claimed to be a adherent of Dongye. Song Zhenzong asked for help, so people recommended him. There is nothing he can do. He choked in front of the emperor and didn't write a poem. Song Zhenzong was embarrassed to see him. He felt sorry for his old age and asked him to hand in a poem the next day.

Yang Pu stayed up all night, tossing and turning, starving many fleas. At dawn, he remembered the farewell message when the old woman came out of the house. The next day, he gave the old woman a farewell speech: don't be down and out, don't drink too much, don't recite poems wildly. I'm going to the palace today, and this time I'm going to ruin my old scalp.

After reading his poem, Song Zhenzong found it interesting and asked him who wrote it. He confessed that it was what the old woman said when she went out. Song Zhenzong said, "For your wife's sake, I'll let you brag this time, or I'll really need your scalp." .

Another saying is that it originated from butchers. In the past (and now), after killing pigs and sheep, the butcher would cut a small mouth on the leg of pigs and sheep near the hoof, put an iron bar in it and poke it, then put his mouth together and blow hard into it until the pigs and sheep were swollen. This will be very convenient when peeling, and the skin will crack by itself with a slight pull with a knife. It's called blowing pigs or blowing sheep. It's bragging that you deal with cattle like this.

But when slaughtering cattle, butchers rarely use this method, because cattle are huge, with tough skin and little subcutaneous fat. To blow up the whole cow, it is very human to have an extremely strong diaphragm and a huge lung capacity. Anyone who says he can brag is 99.9999 percent "bragging"!

"Bragging" is also called "bragging", but people who don't know its origin will call it "bragging B" or "cow B" in order to further strengthen its derogatory meaning; Because this last word is often replaced by "X" in writing, some people now call "bragging" "awesome".

When people "brag", they often look aggressive. On this basis, people describe prosperous people and things as "real cows" (greatness). The "bull" in the stock market "bull market" and "bear market" does not come from this. When the stock market rises, the trend curve will rise upwards, shaped like the outline of a bull with its head held high; When falling, the curve bends downward, similar to the drooping back of a bear's bow.

However, although the origin of "cow" and "real cow" in "bull market" is different, they are the same in terms of "prosperous wealth".

In the dialects of Suzhou and Guizhou, bragging means chatting.