a dog’s life

Miserable circumstances. The term has been traced to Erasmus, who pointed out the wretched subservient existence of dogs in the mid- sixteenth century, as well as to the seventeenth-century proverb, “It’s a dog’s life, hunger and ease.” It was certainly a cliché by the time Rudyard Kipling (A Diversity of Creatures, 1899) wrote, “Politics are not my concern. . . . They impressed me as a dog’s life without a dog’s decencies.” See also DIE LIKE A DOG.