Surfaces and Essences

by Douglas Hofstadter

  Expressions of this type (long phrases that superficially seem very narrowly focused but that in fact have a very broad coverage) pervade spoken and written language, and one gains mastery of them much as one masters individual words. One gradually extends the category boundaries in just the same way as one does for shorter linguistic expressions — by noticing analogies between a new situation and the existing category. The actual words constituting the category’s name — “a sword of Damocles” or “to jump on the bandwagon”, for instance — merely hint at the full richness of the associated category, often revealing little if anything about its nature.

  Did I Spill the Beans or Let the Cat out of the Bag?

  Colorful expressions often denote categories that are quite different from what a literal reading would suggest. Indeed, a literal reading often has nothing at all to do with the expression’s meaning. Thus who can explain why the phrase “to spill the beans” involves the action of spilling and, in particular, the spilling of beans? Why should beans, of all things, symbolize hidden secrets? And why would the act of dumping them out onto some surface be synonymous with revelation? Why couldn’t the phrase have been “to tip over the broccoli”, “to pour out the peas”, “to flip the Brussels sprouts”, “to drop the apricots”, “to release the acorns”, “to liberate the peanuts”, “to free the fleas”, or even (really stretching things to the limits of plausibility) “to let the cat out of the bag”? Of course there is a good etymological reason behind the real phrase, but that doesn’t make it psychologically more convincing.

  And yet every adult native speaker of English takes this phrase for granted. We all know that it means that a small group of people were sharing some secret and one of them, perhaps deliberately, perhaps accidentally, couldn’t resist the temptation of revealing the secret to a non-member of the cabal (most probably by simply blurting it out without any forethought), and suddenly the secret was no longer a secret, to the regret of all its members. When it is spelled out explicitly this way, one sees how complex and subtle the category really is, and yet there is no hint whatsoever of all this complexity and subtlety in the few words that constitute its concise name.

  And then there is another phrase — a cousin phrase — that might at times be considered synonymous with “to spill the beans” — namely, “to let the cat out of the bag”. The two expressions both stand for situations in which once-secret information has, to the regret of certain parties, been revealed to a larger public. And yet the two phrases, for all their similarity of meaning, don’t apply to exactly the same set of situations. That is, they are names of slightly different categories (whose members have a considerable degree of overlap). Thus when a member of a criminal gang reveals (whether to the police or just to an outsider) the gang’s plans for wrongdoing, it’s a case of spilling the beans (and probably not of letting the cat out of the bag), whereas when a married couple tells a few of their close friends very early on that the wife is pregnant, despite having earlier resolved that they would wait a few more weeks before telling anyone, they are letting the cat out of the bag (and probably not spilling the beans.) These are close calls, and some native speakers might disagree (actually, in an informal poll of native speakers of English that we took, almost all fully agreed with our judgment), but what is undeniable is that most of the time, just one of these phrases will pop to mind while the other remains dormant, and the reason is that the evoking situation fits one of the two cases more than it fits the other. The subtle difference in flavor between the categories denoted by the two phrases is certainly not a standard piece of conscious knowledge on the part of native speakers (most of whom would be hard put to spell it out), but is simply something that is acquired over time as the phrase is encountered in a wide range of contexts. There is nothing in the phrases themselves that reveals these subtleties in even the slightest degree.

  To convince oneself that idioms are often arbitrary, one need only take a look at a few foreign-language idioms, as they are frequently resistant to literal interpretation. Who would have guessed that “to let go of the piece” (“lâcher le morceau”) and “to sell the wick” (“vendre la mèche”) are the closest French expressions to “to spill the beans” and “to let the cat out of the bag”? And how do French people feel who have the peach (“qui ont la pêche”)? Well, they are full of beans (that is, energy and good health). And what is a French mother doing when she passes a soap to her child (“elle lui passe un savon”)? Why, she’s giving him what-for, of course! And French people who proclaim that they’ll see the mason at the foot of the wall (“c’est au pied du mur qu’on voit le maçon”), well, what they mean is that the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. All of this is clear like some water of rock (“clair comme de l’eau de roche”).

  The writer Jean-Loup Chiflet has played with English and French idioms in his books, taking English idioms and translating them “at the foot of the letter” (that is, literally) into French, and vice versa. The results are often very amusing, because as we’ve just seen, most idioms, if translated literally, make no sense. Thus “Our goose is cooked”, familiar to any native anglophone, if rendered as “Notre oie est cuite”, will bring a puzzled look to a French face. Likewise, “Il a vu des étoiles” (“He saw stars”) and “Personne n’osa faire allusion à l’éléphant dans la pièce” (“No one dared mention the elephant in the room”) will cause brows to be scratched. Conversely, literal translations into French of the English sentences “The carrots are cooked” and “He fell into the apples” will be colorful eye-openers (“seront des ouvre-œil colorés”).

  If our idioms sound opaque to people from other cultures but clear to us, it’s because they have, over time, lost their evocative power for us and become dead metaphors — labels whose literal meanings are no longer heard by us but that jump out at foreign speakers. To them, such expressions appear at first to be live metaphors, and thus, quite understandably, they hope that a sufficiently dogged effort at making sense of the stream of words will, in the end, result in a flash of illumination.

  Indeed, looking at the component words in an idiomatic expression might help someone who is unfamiliar with it, though it’s always a bit risky; however, that method is bypassed by native speakers, who retrieve the appropriate abstract category directly from their memory, without proceeding via a literal, piece-by-piece understanding. If it were necessary to figure out every idiom’s meaning from the words that make it up, then our understanding of speech, normally very rapid and seemingly effortless, would turn into a complex problem-solving session with no guaranteed results.

  Behind the Scenes of Mundane Sentences

  As we have seen, mental categories don’t limit themselves to what nouns denote; verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, and interjections are every bit as much the names of categories as are nouns. So are longer phrases. And for that matter, full sentences (or sentence fragments) that do not seem at all like opaque idiomatic phrases can constitute the names of categories as well. For instance:

  What’s up? What’s new? Just barely made it. Why does it always happen to me? It’s your bedtime. Are you out of your mind? Who do you think you are? Just what do you think you’re doing? And don’t come back. I’ll be right with you. Can I help you? How’s your meal? The check, please. Will that be all? Anything else? You’re more than welcome. Oh, great… that’s all I needed. I told you so! Spare me the details. That’s a likely story! I wasn’t born yesterday! Don’t give me that. Don’t make me laugh. I’ve really had it. Well, what have we here? And who would this be? That’s beside the point. There you go again! I’ve heard that one before. You can say that again! Tell me about it! Get to the point, would you? Give me a break! I’m no fool. I hope I’ve made myself clear. So now you tell me! Don’t get me wrong! Well, I’ll be damned! How was I supposed to know? Now why didn’t I think of that? You want it when? Go jump in a lake! Have it your way. See if I care! Take my word for it. That’s putting it mildly! That’s no e
xcuse. I wouldn’t know. What makes you say that? You’ve got to be kidding! There’s nothing to do about it now. Might as well make the best of it. It’s not worth the trouble. Keep it to yourself. Mind your own business. You think you’re so smart. So where do we go from here? Don’t worry about it. Don’t give it a second thought. Oh, you really shouldn’t have! It could be worse! What won’t they think of next? Shame on you! I don’t know what I was thinking. That’ll be a hard act to follow. No harm trying! So what? What do you want me to do? So what am I — chopped liver? Is that all you wanted? All right, are you done now? Haven’t I seen you somewhere before? We can’t keep on meeting this way.

  Each of these sentences (or fragments) names a familiar category — not because it is an idiomatic expression, but simply because it is so commonly used in certain contexts that it has acquired a rich set of implications. These useful little formulas, built from simple words and utterly bland-looking, are in fact the names of important categories, as they pithily encapsulate certain notions that crop up all the time in everyday exchanges. What appears to be a freshly manufactured sentence is in fact a stored phrase that can be called up as a whole by a situation that a speaker is in, and the phrase carries standard connotations that go well beyond the literal sense of the words making it up, in the same way as, for a dog, its master’s retrieval of the leash goes far beyond the mere prospect of having the leash imminently attached to its collar — it connotes going outside, taking a walk, smelling things everywhere, encountering other people and dogs, marking one’s territory, and eventually returning home.

  For instance, the sentence-level categories It’s your bedtime and So what’s new? and Are you out of your mind? are as crisp, clear, and rich with layers of implicit meanings as, for a dog, is the retrieval of its leash, and as are categories designated by idiomatic phrases.

  The category It’s your bedtime involves, to be sure, the idea that the child being addressed needs to go to bed very soon, but it also involves the idea that one has to sleep well to be alert in school tomorrow, the higher priority of school than of playing video games, the importance in life of good grades, the fact that in family life, parents are the bosses, and the fact that children need more sleep than adults do.

  So what’s new? conveys much more than just the desire to be informed about recent events. It says that one cares about the life of the other person, that one would like to have a chat, that one is concerned about how the other person is currently doing. When this category has been activated, the range of possible answers is fairly well defined: family, personal projects, professional activities. If someone answered “My shirt” when asked “So what’s new?”, it would be totally out of line with expectations, and would constitute a joke rather than an answer.

  As for Are you out of your mind?, this rhetorical question reveals not just a sharp disagreement but a sense of surprise and shock, a fair degree of familiarity with the person addressed, and an aggravation, and it also implicitly asks for some kind of explanation or else a sudden turnaround on the part of the person addressed, and lastly, it warns that there is a potential fight brewing.

  Just as a non-native speaker can gradually master the subtle art of choosing different flavors of greetings or thank-you’s in another language, so a native speaker slowly acquires the mental categories that are designated by short everyday sentences or fragments like those exhibited above, whose subtlety and complexity are masked by the bland appearance of their constituent words.

  Truths Lurking in Proverbs

  Sentences of the sort we’ve just considered fit into daily life in a very frequent fashion, because they involve extremely common categories of experience, some of which are encountered multiple times in a single day: asking others how they are doing, saying how one is doing oneself, expressing disagreement, trying to figure out how much one disagrees with someone else, dealing cordially with people in a business role, suggesting that a conversation is approaching its end, and so forth. On the other hand, proverbs and sayings, although they are also frozen sentences, allude to situations that one may never have personally experienced but that nonetheless allow one to see events in one’s own life from a novel and useful slant.

  Proverbs are ideal illustrations of our book’s thesis — that analogy-making and categorization are just two names of the same phenomenon. When, in a real-life situation, one finds oneself spontaneously coming out with “Once bitten, twice shy”, “You can’t judge a book by its cover”, “A rolling stone gathers no moss”, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, “The early bird catches the worm”, “Better late than never”, “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence”, “When it rains, it pours”, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”, and so forth, the two sides of the coin of categorization through analogy-making are equally visible. Let’s take a look at a particular example.

  Lucy, aged three, has just built a fence with her wooden blocks on the living-room floor. Jim, a family friend, accidentally bumps into her fence as he crosses the room and knocks over a couple of blocks with his foot. Lucy bursts into tears. A few minutes later, Jim is crossing the living room again, and as he approaches the same area, he conspicuously veers away from Lucy’s fence and blurts out, “Once bitten, twice shy.”

  Now everyone will grant that Jim has come out with an analogy : he has implicitly mapped what just transpired in the living room onto a mythical situation in which an anonymous person, having been bitten one time by one dog (or some other animal), makes extra-sure never to go anywhere near any dog ever again. Obviously, the person is Jim, and the traumatizing bite is (i.e., maps onto) Lucy’s tears after the toppling of a block or two. The avoidance of all dogs henceforth maps onto Jim’s pointed gesture of going far out of his way in order not to knock anything down the second time. What maps onto the fear of the bitten person? Clearly it’s a more abstract concern than that of being hurt by a dog’s teeth — it’s the empathetic desire not to see Lucy in tears again. Voilà — there’s the analogy, spelled out in full.

  And yet we can just as easily characterize Jim’s quoting of the proverb as an act of categorization, because he sees what has just transpired as a member of the public category Once bitten, twice shy. In quoting these four words, Jim has declared that this event belongs to that standard category. The very existence of the proverb in the mental lexicon of an English-speaking person amounts to the existence of such a category in their mind, and the triggering of the proverb by a particular situation reveals that at least for them (and hopefully for others), the situation is a member of that category. No less than public-category labels like “chair”, “gentleman”, “pacifier”, “spill the beans”, “go up in smoke”, and “take matters into one’s own hands”, proverbs and sayings are the public labels of public categories — categories that most adult speakers know and share.

  The act of recognizing in a given situation a case of a familiar proverb can cast new light on the situation. It provides a fresh, abstract, and non-obvious viewpoint, going well beyond the situation’s superficial details. Since proverbs are the labels of rather subtle and complicated categories, slapping a proverb onto a situation is a way of bringing out aspects that otherwise might remain hidden. The use of a proverb as a label is a way of making sense — albeit perhaps a biased type of sense — of what one is seeing. Applying a proverb to a freshly-encountered situation results in a kind of insight that comes from filtering what one sees through the lens of the proverb, rather than from a purely logical analysis. In summary, a proverb is a convenient, concise label for a vast set of highly different situations — past, present, future, hypothetical — that are all linked to each other by analogy.

  The experience-based (rather than purely logical) character of proverbs means that different people will see different proverbs (and hence will take different perspectives) in a given situation. For example, in France they say “L’habit ne fait pas le moine” (“Clothes do not make a monk”), while in E
ngland they say “Clothes make the man.” Indeed, as Blaise Pascal once observed, “A truth becomes a falsity once it crosses the Pyrenees” (and probably he should have added “or the Channel”). As they say, “One man’s meat is another man’s poison”, and this is certainly the case for proverbs. Thus, the sad tale of a nonconformist youth who was exiled and went on to become a famous poet but could never return home again (it could be the story of Dante) might be perceived by person A as teaching the important life lesson “To thine own self be true”, while person B might see the selfsame story as exemplifying the wisdom of “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” A’s selected proverb thus casts the story of the banished poet as a generic lesson that one should blithely ignore the masses and fearlessly step over the line in the sand, while B’s selected proverb casts the same story as a lesson that one should respectfully follow the majority and cautiously toe the line.

  The preceding examples are not in the least exceptional; there are enough pairs of mutually contradictory proverbs to make one’s head spin:

  Strike while the iron is hot…

  but then again,

  Look before you leap.