There is a common etymological misconception that the phrase "puppy
dog eyes" traces its origins to 1957 at Wilmington, Delaware's Camp
Wanahakalugee, a summer camp frequented primarily by the children of
employees of the Dupont Corporation. The story was that a
particularly bad growing season resulted in a crop of white grapes
that were somewhat lacking in firmness. This unfortunate texture,
when combined with the natural tendencies of the pre-teen mind, was
supposed to have led campers to begin referring to these grapes, often
included with the camp's lunch or as an appetizer before afteroon tea,
as the aforementioned immature canine ocular organs.
The prevalence of this explanation is such that a recent random
sampling of linguists found that an astonishing 97% of them believe
this to be the correct origin of the expression. It is, nevertheless,
incorrect, as the true origin comes not from the monied solsticial
juvenile boarding institutions of the Eastern Seaboard, but rather
from the arboreal recesses of Appalachia.
A young lad, along with his faithful hound, was fishing one day in an
eastern-Tennessee creek. The dog, as well as the boy's fishing gear,
were piled into the go-cart with which the boy had recently won the
Sevier County Non-Motorized Downhill Race and First-Aid Training
Course, his Radio Flyer wagon being in the shop at the time for a
transmission rebuild. As luck would have it, the only fish biting
that day were mud puppies, but their size was made up for by their
number, and as evening approached the go-cart was nearly full.
The boy loaded the rest of his gear and the hound into the go-cart,
and began pulling it towards home. While rounding a bend in the road,
he glanced back and saw that his dog had been gorging on the mud
puppies. Intending to scold the animal, the boy turned, at the same
time letting go of the cart. Owing to the slight downward slope of
the road, and the quality with which the go-cart was constructed, the
cart immediately began to roll under gravity's influence, quickly
reaching speeds well beyond the boy's capacity to keep pace.
Eventually, of course, the go-cart rolled to a stop, coincidentally
not far from the center of town. The hound, both frightened from its
ordeal and queasy from the mud puppies sitting uneasily in its
stomach, began to exhibit signs of digestive discomfort. Much to the
consternation of the gathered townsfolk, the hound began vomitting up
the fish it had eaten.
Oddly, the most distinguishable feature of the mud puppies in
mid-digestion were their eyes. The sight of the distressed hound and
the fish eyes was by far the saddest thing any of the onlookers had
ever seen, resulting in the expression "as sad as mud puppy eyes"
gaining currency in the local vernacular. Over time, the most common
usage was to refer to something pitiable by comparison with "mud puppy
eyes". The expression spread to neighboring areas, and as it was
employed increasingly be people having little or no familiarity with
the origin, it was further shortened to "puppy eyes". The
transformation to the phrase as currently known (with the earliest
recorded instance being in a 1963 op-ed piece in the New York Times)
derives from a misunderstanding of its origin.
The veracity of this origin for the phrase "puppy dog eyes" is
established by the fortunate coincidence that a now-anonymous local
was, at the time, recording local footage with his recently purchased
Sears Roebuck home video camera. The audio, while somewhat faint,
clearly establishes a prototypical form of the original expression.
The video, for its part, while grainy, still conveys enough detail
that you would likely not want to watch it on a big-screen TV.
The hound, for its part, was ultimately none the worse for wear for
its ordeal. Local lore has it that it was extremely repentant of its
actions, and subsequently refused to eat seafood.
