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Reader question: Please explain “big hat, no cattle” in this sentence: “I can only say the results so far are Big Hat, No Cattle.” My comments: Here, the speaker means to say that he/she is very disappointed with the results, whatever they are. If they are talking about an election, expectations of winning must have been widely anticipated because, for example, they’ve spent a lot of money campaigning and advertising and for weeks before voting day, ballot polls had suggested they’d win by a large margin. Now, the real results are in and their party lost heavily. They’ve got their collective butt kicked, so to speak. In that case, some time during the long lasting campaign process, we very well may hear the speaker make such a lament – that “the results so far are big hat, no cattle.” “Big hat, no cattle”, you see, is a variation from the American expression “all hat and no cattle”. Hat refers to the cowboy hat herders wear in the American west. The cowboy hats are big and showy hats with a wide circular edge. They make the cowboys, who also wear tough jeans and trousers, look very impressive. They ride horses and herd cows (cattle) – hence cowboy, the name. The fact that they have cattle to care and fend for suggests that they’re wealthy to some degree, or at least they were in the frontier days. And in those days, and if people wore cowboy hats but were not seen riding horses and had no cattle to own and herd, they were described negatively as all hat and no cattle. | 
