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Reader question: What does it mean when they say someone is all hat and no cattle? My comments: It means that if this someone says he can do something big and grandiose, take it with a large pinch of salt. In other words, don’t believe him. He’s bluffing. He probably can do nothing of the sort. “All hat and no cattle” is, yes, you guessed it, an American idiom, hat referring to the hard-rim hat a cowboy wears, cattle referring to all the oxen and cows and horses the cowboy owns. See in your mind’s eye a cowboy riding a horse roaming on a farm in Texas herding hundreds of oxen and cows. Right. That’s someone who is all hat and cattle, someone who looks like a cowboy and lives like one. In other words, he is real. If someone is all hat but no cattle? Well, he has the appearance of a cowboy, all right but he has no substance – he has no oxen, no cows and no horses. To use a boxing analogy, it’s like saying that he is all talk and no walk – he can talk the talk but cannot walk the walk, i.e. he cannot dance and box. To use a bar room analogy, it’s like saying the bartender pours you a mug that’s all foam and no beer. To use yet another analogy, it’s like saying they give you a bag of grain that’s all chaff and no wheat. All hat and no cattle, in short, is descriptive of someone who talks big but doesn’t act on his words. | 
