I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears and Other Intriguing Idioms From Around the World

by Jag Bhalla

  Darwin knew what later scientists now understand neurobiologically, and what our legal system still refuses to acknowledge, that “memory is so deceptive that it ought not to be trusted.”2 That’s something we should all know. Even though we might need artists to bring it to our attention. A task done admirably by Jonah Lehrer in Proust Was a Neuroscientist, in which he quotes Proust: “It is a labor in vain to try to recapture memory” and “The only paradise is paradise lost.” Lehrer elaborates: “Every memory is full of errors”; indeed, the act of remembering changes the memory (a process called reconsolidation). He continues: “Memories are not like fiction. They are fiction.”3 We are built to remember relatively little and to creatively fill in the holes so that we seem to have a complete picture.

  Another remarkable example of how differently time can be thought of comes from Stephen Pinker’s exhilarating book, The Stuff of Thought. In it he tells of the Aymara, a people whose metaphor for time is spatially the opposite of ours. Their culture views the past as being physically ahead of them and the future as being physically behind them.4 The logic is that we can know the past, just as we can know what is in front of us. But the future is not so easily seen, like what’s physically behind us.

  All languages are constantly changing (even discounting the effects of cultural chafing). John McWhorter, in his excellent book Word on the Street, describes how linguists look at this inevitable process. He means not just drift in word meanings (see below) or in the use of metaphors or idioms, but also in more fundamental ways like changes in rules of grammar and syntax. McWhorter’s position is that language is just a communication system “that is at all times in the process of becoming a different one.” This is more evident in speech than in text, because when writing we edit and consciously revise, rather than just communicate. This sort of change doesn’t compromise the fundamental ability to communicate.

  One of McWhorter’s compelling examples is how the language of Shakespeare, in just 400 years, has become noticeably less understandable. Many readers will know that when Juliet stands upon her balcony, in what the Spanish might call the “pluck the turkey” scene, and pleads, “Wherefore art thou Romeo?”, she is asking “Why?”, which is what “wherefore” meant. Fewer readers, however, will likely understand the intended meaning in Love’s Labor Lost of: “with his royal finger thus dally with my excrement.” It’s not nearly as repulsively scatological or Freudian as it sounds to us today. Back then, excrement could mean any outgrowth, like hair, nails, or feathers. As McWhorter points out, someone fluent in Middle English, as spoken in Chaucer’s day, would have to learn modern English as if it were a completely foreign language.

  Sol Steinmetz, in his lovely book on etymological drift, Semantics Antics, explains why long ago (as the Mexicans say, “when dogs were tied with sausages”) you wouldn’t have wanted to be nice, smart, or handsome but would rather have been a bully, or silly, or sad, and why you would have wanted to be insulted but not to have too many hobbies. Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom smart as a whip but is now used differently in “whip smart.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. Bully originally meant “darling or sweetheart” and is often found in this sense in Shakespeare. For example, in Henry V, “I love the lovely bully” wasn’t a confession of masochism. Silly in early Middle English meant “happy,” “blissful,” “blessed,” or “fortunate.” Sad in Olde Englishe meant “full,” “satiated,” or “satisfied.” Insult in the 1500s meant the same as exult, which is to “boast,” “brag,” “triumph” in a insolent way. Exult still has a related meaning, but insult has changed substantially. Hobbies in 1375 were ponies, or small horses—a sense that survives in the expression “hobby horse”; it’s via a contraction of this sense that the present-day usage meaning “pastime” developed.

  When dogs were tied with sausages

  Spanish (Uruguay): very long ago

  Words can also be entirely lost in the mists of time. They get relegated to larger and less frequently consulted dictionaries,* and finally suffer the ultimate insult of being delisted. Ammon Shea, in his wonderfully entertaining book Reading the OED, notes some excellent dying words that could be beneficially resuscitated.5 My favorite candidate for revival is gymnologize. It means “to dispute naked, like an Indian philosopher.” Shea’s book is highly recommended. The following are a small sample of its delights:

  Vocabularian: one who pays too much attention to words

  Unlove: to cease to love a person

  Tardiloquent: talking slowly

  Somnificator: one who induces sleep in others

  Sarcast: a writer or speaker who is sarcastic*

  Natiform: buttock-shaped

  Mythistory: a mythologized account of history

  Mislove: to hate, to love in a sinful manner

  Lant: to add urine to ale to make it stronger

  Kakistocracy: government by the worst citizens

  Idiorepulsive: self-repellent

  Gulchin: a little glutton!

  Finifugal: shunning the end of anything

  Eumorphous: well formed

  Debag: to strip the pants from a person; punishment or joke

  Bowelless: lacking mercy

  Bedinner: to treat to dinner

  Anonymuncle: an anonymous, small-time writer

  I’ve previously used the thought image of idioms being frozen metaphors. The occurrence of words no longer in use except in certain idioms is a wonderful flea in the amber demonstration of this fossilization. For example, we no longer say kith, shrift, haw, raring, kilter, fangled, fro, spick, boggle, and hither, though we still say “kith and kin,” “short shrift,” “hem and haw,” “raring to go,” “off-kilter,” “newfangled,” “to and fro,” “spic and span,” “mind-boggling,” and “come hither.” And while we still say hue, fell, and neck, their petrified* meanings in “hue and cry,” “one fell swoop,” and “neck of the woods” aren’t what they seem. Hue in this usage has nothing to do with color—it’s from the Latin for a horn; the expression literally means “horn and shouting.” Fell meant something terrible—evil, or deadly ferocity (our word felon comes from the same root). Neck used to mean a parcel of land.

  Okay, enough bush beating. Let’s spend some time looking at the use of time in idioms (before their meanings change).

  Ever wondered how frequent once in a blue moon is? For a Yiddish speaker it’s “a year and a Wednesday.” To a Hindi speaker it’s three years; their equivalent expression is “every six six months.” To an Italian the concept is less precise, but the interval seems much longer: “every death of a pope.” Colombians are less concerned with the rank of the deceased: “each time a bishop dies.” For Americans a month of Sundays indicates a very long time. For a Frenchman, “the week with four Thursdays” or “every 36th of the month” is when hell freezes over. And for a Spaniard Friday the 13th is nothing to worry about; they fear the unlucky Sunday the 7th.

  QUICK/FAST/YOUNG

  Like a poor person’s funeral: quickly (Spanish, Costa Rica)

  A white colt passing over a crevice: time flies, life is short (Chinese)

  Urgent, like eyebrows on fire: critical, extremely urgent (Chinese)

  Are you standing on one leg?: Are you in a hurry? (Yiddish)

  With a monkey’s tooth: extremely fast (German)

  Has eaten little kasha: is inexperienced (Russian)

  SLOW/LATE

  He creeps like a bedbug: as slow as molasses (Yiddish)

  To do the leek: to hang around waiting (French)

  To be slow as hunger: to be as slow as molasses (Italian)

  Angel is passing by: pause in the conversation (French)

  To come late to a place: to get nervous (Japanese)<
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  LONG/OLD/PAST

  The days of cherries: the good old days (French)

  To smoke once every death of a pope: once in a blue moon, rarely (Italian)

  When snakes wore vests

  Spanish: very long ago

  Each time a bishop dies: once in a blue moon, rarely (Spanish, Colombia)

  Older than pinol [toasted corn drink]: as old as the hills (Spanish, Nicaragua)

  To be for light soup and good wine: to be old (Spanish)

  When snakes wore vests: a long time ago (Spanish, Chile)

  When dogs were tied with sausages: very long ago (Spanish, Uruguay)

  In the year of the pear: a long time ago (Spanish)

  Day when the firemen get paid: when hell freezes over, never (Spanish, Chile)

  To be ancient lavender: to be old hat (German)

  Every sixth six months: once in a blue moon (Hindi)

  A year and a Wednesday: it will take a long, long time (Yiddish)

  Every 36th of the month: once in a blue moon, rarely (French)

  When frogs grow hair: never (Spanish, Latin America)

  When frogs grow hair

  Spanish (Latin America): never

  Until the seas dry up and the rocks crumble: forever (Chinese)

  From birth to birth: forever (Hindi)

  When the crayfish sings on the mountain: when hell freezes over, never (Russian)

  CLOCK

  In all sir God’s earliness: at the crack of dawn (German)

  To have the midday devil: midlife crisis (French)

  The sun is as high as three poles: about 9 a.m. (Chinese)

  Praise day before evening: don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched (German)

  Five minutes to twelve: the eleventh hour, the last minute (German)

  CALENDAR

  Warmed soup: old hat, yesterday’s news (Italian)

  A daughter of yesterday: something unexpected and not welcome (Arabic)

  Don’t look for yesterday’s fish in a house of the otter: proverb (Hindi)

  To have Aprils: to have a certain age (Spanish)

  To turn out with her Sunday the 7th: to have bad luck (Spanish, Costa Rica)

  To make one’s August: to make hay while the sun shines (Spanish)

  Seven Fridays in one week: keep changing one’s mind (Russian)

  October’s cold penetrates the intestines: proverb (Arabic)

  Look like September: have a long face, look sad (Russian)

  The month of passion: February (Hindi)

  The six seasons of the year: (Hindi)

  In July the water boils in the water skin [container made of skin]: proverb (Arabic)

  TIME–GENERAL

  To give time: to fire someone (Japanese)

  To steal time: to make good use of one’s free time (Japanese)

  Each vegetable has its own time: every dog has its day (Russian)

  To have no time to die: to be overwhelmed with work (Hindi)

  If you want one year of prosperity, grow grain; if ten years, grow trees; if a hundred years, grow people: proverb (Chinese)

  One generation plants the tree, another gets the shade: proverb (China)

  Thought expeller: pastime, distraction (Italian)

  The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, the second best time is now: proverb (China)

  What greater crime than loss of time: proverb (German)

  Time is anger’s medicine: time heals all wounds (German)

  A day of sorrow is longer than a month of joy: proverb (China)

  The most wasted of days is one with no laughter: proverb (French)

  Gossip lasts seventy-five days: proverb (Japanese)

  Rhubarb and patience work wonders: proverb (German)

  A dark year: a curse on you (Yiddish)

  Seas change into mulberry fields: time brings great changes (Chinese)

  Time heals old pains, while it creates new ones: proverb (Hebrew)

  White clouds change into gray dogs

  Chinese: human affairs are unpredictable

  chapter nine

  COLORS

  Sighing with blue breath

  WE’VE SEEN HOW DIFFERENTLY different cultures can see the world. But surely since we all have the same visual equipment, we all see something as basic as color in the same way? Wrong…. It turns out that color vision isn’t a black-and-white issue. It’s not nearly that simple. Language has a significant effect on how we “see” colors—more precisely, on how we divide up and label different parts of the visible spectrum. Our eyes register roughly the same range of light (between the aptly named infra-red and ultra-violet). However, the number of differently labeled segments we use varies. Some languages only distinguish between two basic colors, black and white (dark and light). Others add extra colors, typically in the following sequence: red, green, yellow, blue, and brown.1 This sort of different color categorization is nicely illustrated by the word “grue.” Psycholinguists use it to describe languages that make no distinction between blue and green (e.g., Welsh Gaelic).

  Apparently, English is unusual in making this distinction; most other languages are grue languages.* Before English speakers swell too much with pride (or, as the Japanese might say, “flap their nose wings”), there are other languages that have single word labels for finer color gradations. Russians have no single word for what we call blue but have different basic color words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). And that makes Russians faster at distinguishing their blues, their goluboy from their siniy.2

  It’s not only language that affects the way you “see” color. So does your age. Researchers have shown that adults filter color perception through the prism of their language, whereas infants don’t. This has been tested on babies as young as four months old. Infant-ologists do this by flashing targets of the same and different color categories in the right and left visual fields of subjects. They measure how quickly eye movements are initiated. It turns out that the speed at which we discriminate color categories is lateralized. Adults are faster with targets in the right visual field (processed by the brain’s left hemisphere). Infants, on the other hand, are faster in the left visual field. From this finding, researchers have concluded that, as we get older, an unfiltered perception of color gives way to one that is mediated by language. The difference in adults is caused by the influence of lexical color codes in the left hemisphere.3

  One of the functions of idioms is to make our language more colorful, more interesting. We saw in Chapter 5 how incongruity, the “Shakespeared Brain” mechanism, can add color to a turn of phrase. Humor can serve a similar function, of adding color and interest. As Jim Holt points out in his hilarious history Stop Me If You’ve Heard This, many jokes depend on the juxtaposition of strange bedfellows.4 A punchline’s dramatic resolution of conflicting elements and the resulting sudden shift of meaning reconciles strange head-fellows.

  My favorite of Holt’s examples is the old Jewish joke: “Have you taken a bath?” “What. Is there one missing?” Holt notes that Jewish humor is particularly language oriented. A couple of particularly charming examples are from Groucho Marx: to a hostess, “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it,” and “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I’ll never know.” Idioms must operate somewhat similarly—they also need a sudden shift in meaning. Though, of course, they suffer from too much old-chestnut-iness, to cause the mental fireworks set off by a good semantically twisty joke. The shift in a good joke must happen consciously, but idioms are resolved non-consciously.

  Speaking of twisty semantics, let’s take a look at how colors are used in idioms. As already noted, all languages make the distinction between black and white (dark and light). The Chinese and the Russians both have relevant Orwellian expressions. The Chinese say to “make no difference between black and white,” which means to do something indiscriminately. And the Russians say “to take black for white,” meaning to
be easily fooled.

  It’s ironic that George Orwell’s name has come to signify the worst abuses of language that power can perpetrate. As Clive James notes in his excellent review of Orwell’s writings,5 the same fate has also befallen Franz Kafka. Both their names are now used to describe something they decried and stood against.* James also notes that Orwell, in his journalism during World War II, usually got his guesses about the truth correct by working back from the lies people on the other side were telling.

  In his insightful guide Why Orwell Matters, Christopher Hitchens points out, “It’s likely Orwell would have been appalled by the rise of political correctness.6 Even in its mildest forms, it can be an insidious self-thought-policing. And he would no doubt turn in his grave at the ever increasingly doublethinking, doublespeaking, and doubledoing exploits of today’s politicians.

  Orwell also wrote damningly on idioms, and on the overuse of pre-fabricated figures of speech and canned thoughts. In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” he rails against “staleness of imagery,” “worn-out metaphors,” “accumulation of stale phrases,” and the “invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases.” 7 Orwell’s prescription for curing this includes as its first rule the admonishment to “never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” Though he doesn’t mention idioms specifically in that list, he does include them in an earlier enumeration of suspects. “By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort.” Here he also indicates his understanding of the enduring value and popularity of idioms and stock phrases. He is correct that such a saving is penny wise and pound foolish when trying to write well. We expect our writers to have exerted themselves intellectually, to not have spared any mental effort. That’s one of the things that makes it worth our while reading them. However, such penny wisdom can be very useful when speaking. Usually we are mainly interested in getting our point across, and idioms and stock phrases, with their economy of mental effort, can do that quite effectively. Particularly when, for some reason, we don’t want to do it entirely literally.