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Jodie44
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This is from The Phrase Finder Web site. "The pot calling the kettle black Meaning The notion of a criticism a person is making of another could equally well apply to themself. Origin This phrase originates in Cervantes' Don Quixote, or at least in Thomas Shelton's 1620 translation - Cervantes Saavedra's History of Don Quixote: "You are like what is said that the frying-pan said to the kettle, 'Avant, black-browes'." The first person who is recorded as using the phrase in English was William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, in his Some fruits of solitude, 1693: "For a Covetous Man to inveigh against Prodigality... is for the Pot to call the Kettle black." Shakespeare had previously expressed a similar notion in a line in Troilus and Cressida, 1601- "The raven chides blackness."" http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/287950.html
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The phrase "Pot calling the kettle black" is an idiom, used to accuse another speaker of hypocrisy, in that the speaker disparages the subject in a way that could equally be applied to him or her. In former times cast iron pots and kettles were quickly blackened from the soot of the fire. If personified into animate objects, the pot would then be hypocritical to insult the kettle's colour.
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