verbal phr. (popular).—To unexpectedly meet with one’s superior; to fall into one’s own trap; having a design upon another, to be caught oneself. [Explanation may be found, perhaps, in the horror born of the atrocities of the Tartar hordes who devasted Eastern Europe in the reign of St. Louis of France. Cf., TARTAR, a person of irritable temper.] An American variant is TO CATCH ON A SNAG (q.v.).
1682. DRYDEN, Prologue to the King and Queen, in wks., p. 456 (Globe).
| When men will needlessly their freedom barter | |
| For lawless power, sometimes they CATCH A TARTER. |
1748. SMOLLETT, Roderick Random, ch. xxx. Who, looking at me with a contemptuous sneer, exclaimed, ‘Ah! ah! have you CAUGHT A TARTER?’
1778. BURNEY, Diary, 23 Aug. ‘Ah,’ he (Johnson) added, ‘they will little think what a TARTAR you carry to them.’
1857. O. W. HOLMES, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, ch. v. When the Danish pirates made descents upon the English coast, they CAUGHT A FEW TARTARS occasionally, in the shape of Saxons.
c. 1880. Broadside Ballad, ‘Unhappy Because it Can’t Last.’ They say two heads are better than one, so I took a wife and CAUGHT A TARTAR, and found two of a trade could never agree, and proved the proverb that marry in haste repent at leisure.
