the.com/rocking horse
A toy that teaches toddlers the lifelong art of going nowhere with confidence.
means A toy horse mounted on curved rockers (or springs) that a child straddles and rocks back and forth on.
from Straightforward compound of 'rocking' + 'horse,' emerging in the 1700s once furniture-makers had already mastered the curved-rocker design used in rocking chairs — someone simply put a carved horse on top of the same idea. Early versions were a wooden horse on bow-shaped rockers; the spring-mounted version came later, in the 1800s, to stop the thing from 'walking' across the nursery floor.
- origin
- Popularized in Victorian England as nursery furniture
- physics
- Curved rockers convert push into rhythmic, self-limiting motion
- idiom
- To be rocking-horse shit means something impossibly rare
- design
- Later replaced by safer spring-mounted versions