go whole hog

Example: “They didn't just paint the kitchen; they went whole hog and remodeled the house.”

Origin: American and attested from the 1820s, though the likeliest literary ancestor is English. William Cowper's poem of 1779 imagines Muslim scholars disagreeing over which portion of the pig their law forbids, each quietly exempting his own preferred cut, until between them they have consumed the whole hog — a satire on selective principle that supplies both the phrase and its sense of refusing half-measures. The plainer reading also works: buying a whole hog rather than selecting cuts meant committing to the entire animal, expense and all. What fixed the expression in American English was politics, when Jacksonian partisans of the 1830s were labeled whole hog men for backing their candidate without reservation.