Also:
Save someone’s skin
Save someone’s neck
Meaning of Idiom ‘Save Someone’s Bacon’
To save someone’s bacon means to rescue them from a difficult or dangerous situation; to cause someone to escape from being harmed; to save someone from disaster or danger. 1Ayto, John. [http://amzn.to/2vdGvI7 Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms]. Oxford: Oxford U, 2010.,2Ammer, Christine. American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.,3Kirkpatrick, Elizabeth M. The Wordsworth Dictionary of Idioms. Ware: Wordsworth, 1995.,4Heacock, Paul. Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms]. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.
Examples Of Use
“You really saved my bacon. I won’t forget it.”
“Thanks for covering for me at work. You saved my bacon for sure.”
“You saved my skin during the war. It’s my turn to pay you back.”
“Rich saved my neck once. If it wasn’t for him I would have been hit by a car.”
“My car broke down today on the side of the road but some random guy came along and got it running again. He really saved my bacon!”
“You’re going to need a heavy arctic coat if you go there. Trust me, it will save your bacon.”
Origin
Save one’s bacon and one’s skin has been used since the 1600s while the ‘skin’ variation has been used since the 1500s.
The word bacon refers to the meat from the back and sides of a hog, usually, today, in a cured state. Bacon may simply mean ‘back’ in this idiom as in ‘save one’s back.’ Back, therefore, would be analogous to one’s body or life.
It is claimed that the word bacon has been used as slang to mean the body since the 1600s but it is not clear that this claim is not related to its use in this idiom rather than any independent use.
Since bacon was a valuable commodity, the idiom may simply use bacon to refer to something precious and essential, similar to ‘bring home the bacon.’
