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

by Jag Bhalla

  On Awareness of the Incorrectness of Some Scientific Language

  I’ve tried wherever possible to prune away the complexities of scientific language. See if you can guess what the following tongue-&-thought-twisting language might mean. Firstly “mutually regulating psychobiological units”6 and secondly “the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of amorance.” Extra points for those who guessed that the former means any emotionally close pair, e.g., friends or a couple. The latter, in 127 fewer letters, means love. Points deducted for anyone who knew already—since this implies complicity in these language crimes. Clearly, whatever other qualifications these folks have, scientists should not be left in charge of their own language. Less opaque scientists are trying to come up with much more easily understood terms. For example, in the area of the origin of language theories, folksy scientists have devised names like “bow-wow” theory, “poo-poo” theory, and “la-la” theory. We’ll be looking at some of these in the following chapters.

  On Clarifying Terms Used for Sciencey Lack of Awareness

  States of lack of awareness are important throughout this book. Idioms in a sense require us to ignore our awareness of the meanings of their constituent words. Something we do without giving it a second (or first conscious) thought. Beyond just idioms, as Stephen Pinker, a leading psycholinguist and science writer, notes, “Most information processing in the brain is unconscious.”7 I have become aware that the terms used to describe such states of lack of awareness in scientific, and particularly in sciencey, literature are confusing. They carry so much old baggage, so many unintended undercurrents, that additional clarity is required. Hence, to describe the state of the information processing that we are not aware of, rather than using the subconscious, which too often slips into Freudian territory, or the unconscious, which too often implies complete insensibility, I prefer to use the easier to keep distinct term “non-conscious.” By non-conscious I mean fully awake but below the level of conscious awareness. Non-conscious does not necessarily mean irrational, nor does it necessarily mean only emotional. It seems we are built to have our conscious minds operate on a need-to-know basis. They are meant to be kept mostly in the dark. And they need only be interrupted when it’s really essential or when it’s already safe. They aren’t so useful for anything that’s fast, or dangerous.

  On Listfulness Herein

  I’ve only loosely organized these idioms into chapters, by theme. To these I’ve added a little light-minded commentary on mostly related topics with some tangential excursions. Thus the bulk of this book consists of lists of idioms. Rather than lead you by the nose through this maze of intentionally mis-understandable metaphors, I’d prefer to provide unmediated access to the lists, thereby leaving you the joy of discovering your own connections and resonances. It’s a wonderful thought that you and the lists can make your own sweet, beautiful meaning together.

  PREBUTTALS—ASSORTED APOLOGIES IN ADVANCE

  To Aspiring Multilinguals

  The source language forms of the selected idioms have not been included. This is for reasons of space and economy (of my effort). This book isn’t intended to be a language reference. I’m assuming it’s unlikely that many readers will go to places where the Russian words for “I’m not hanging noodles on your ears” would be useful. If you find yourself needing such words, I’m afraid you will need a more educationally oriented book.

  To Aspired Multilinguals Who May Be Surprised or Offended

  For speakers of any of these languages who have never heard of some of these idioms, or who might disagree with a translation, or who might be offended at a misrepresentation or a lost nuance—I apologize almost wholeheartedly. I can’t vouch for every one of these idioms; some may no longer be in common active use. All I can say for sure is that each was considered, by the compilers of my sources, as being worthy of inclusion in their books. We are all at the mercy of various translators, upon whose good faith we must rely.

  To Etymologists and Vocabularians

  I haven’t even tried to explain or trace the origins of these many idioms. That would have taken far too long. I was also dissuaded by the challenges intrinsic to lexical archaeology. Too much of the relevant detail is entombed forever in the substrata of our cultural history. Even that mighty word-watcher extraordinaire William Safire bows to the difficulties. As he says in his excellent collection of “On Language” columns published in book form as The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time, “The source of the expression ‘to pull the wool over your eyes’ is a mystery.”8 Though he finds a first usage (Jamestown Journal, 1839) and posits a theory, he concedes that “no etymologist has yet come up with the specific item made of wool.” And I can be no match. As any good laissez-fairer would, I pre-capitulate.

  However, if it turns out that enough people are interested, perhaps a wonderfully wikied* (and laissez-fairy) way of dealing with the enormity of this challenge might be the establishment of a new sport: WWWF (Worldwide Word Watching Federation) Competitive Etymology, in which volunteer vocabularians with sufficient stamina can engage in a WWWF Track-Down.

  PREFACE, PREAMBLE, & PRELIMINARIES

  Here are five reasons to be curious** about languages:

  • First, languages provide a wonderful window into other peoples and how they see the world. You’ve probably heard the not-so-urban legend about the Inuit having many words for snow. The validity of that claim is disputed by linguists, who say many of those snowy words are just modifications of a small number of root words.9 You might, however, raise an eyebrow at the less well-known fact that Albanians, also presumably confronted with environmental excesses, have an excess of words for facial hair. These include “long broom-like moustache with bushy ends” and eyebrows that are “arched like the crescent moon.” While we are on the subject: Italians have an expression for a “woman with a moustache who is attractive” and Arabs have a contrariwise proverb that pleads “may God protect us from hairy women and beardless men.” The Danish recognize the limitations of facial hair in their proverb “if a beard were all, the goat would be the winner.” Whilst I’m in no position to adjudicate the worthiness of urban language legends, it does make intuitive sense that languages are exquisitely attuned to the environments and predilections of their speakers. For example, the Marovo speakers of the Solomon Islands have a single word to describe “the behavior of groups of fish when individuals drift, circle, and float as if drunk.” There’s nothing fishy (or, as a similarly suspicious German might say, nothing “totally pure rabbit” or the Chinese “under a plum tree”) about these people’s being keenly interested in which side their bread is buttered on.

  • Second, language provides a wonderful window into other people, i.e., other specific individuals. A sentiment wonderfully and briefly encapsulated in a quotation from Ben Jonson, one of Shakespeare’s rivals: “Language most shows a man. Speak that I might see thee.”

  • Third, language provides a wonderful window that also works the other way. Looking in that direction provides entrée into another exotic and intriguing world, the insides of our own heads. For example, analyzing the associations implicit in our understanding of words can show how quickly we judge people by their appearances. Careful measurements, down to the millisecond level, show that we are hard-wired to notice race and gender. The average person registers the race of another human face in less than a hundred milliseconds, and gender in another 50 milliseconds.10 There will be more details on this, and much else in language that can be used to shed light on our insides, in the following chapters.

  • Fourth, we should all pay close attention to language because it can have such powerful conscious effects. Benjamin Disraeli, twice the British Prime Minister in the 19th century, is famous for having said, “with words we govern men.” I’m not so well read that I knew that. I’m indebted to William Safire, the American English–speaking world’s m
ost prominent self-confessed word maven. He uses it as inspiration for his own extension “by proverbs we enliven copy.”11 Which I can stretch further to say “by idioms we enliven speech.” The original quotation describes the conscious use of language as an instrument of power in the public arena. Something Americans in particular understand and respect. Their constitution is considered their founding sacred text.

  • Fifth, the power and influence of language also operates at much more personal levels and in much less explicit ways. To quote George Lakoff, the prominent cognitive linguist: “Language usually works through the cognitive unconscious, so we are mostly unaware of the effects it’s having.”12 We’ll return to more of his views later, when we summarize his call for a New Enlightenment to address the increasingly apparent shortcomings of the First. An experiment conducted at New York University shows how language exposure, even if inadvertent, can have very measurable effects on behavoir. Researchers asked students to volunteer for an experiment in which they completed a word-based task (constructing grammatically correct sentences from lists of words). However, unbeknownst to the students, the experiment hadn’t ended when they left. The time it took them to walk down the exit corridor was measured surreptitiously. Students whose lists had contained words associated with old age (like retired or wrinkled) walked more slowly, by 13 percent, than those whose word lists were neutral. The words they had been exposed to measurably changed the speed at which they walked.13 That’s staggering. And alarming.

  OK, enough preamble. Please join me on a trip of the tongues, through the world’s idioms…and along the way, into the inside of heads…of others and of our own selves.

  Dry firewood meets a flame

  Chinese: instant attraction

  chapter one

  THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE

  Swallowed like a postman’s sock

  LANGUAGES MAKE VISIBLE what’s important to their users. And what could be more important than love? Some paleolinguists have proposed that language developed for romantic purposes. Though, to be more precise, they mean for mating, not dating. Dating is an evolutionarily recent phenomenon that we aren’t well adapted to. Speaking of evolution, Darwin proposed an early version of this theory. In The Descent of Man he wrote, “Some early progenitor of man probably first used his voice in producing true musical cadences, that is in singing…and…this power would have been especially exerted during the courtship of the sexes.”1 Music may have been the audition, as well as the food of love. This view of language-origin-ology is known as “la-la” theory.

  La-la theory has languished unloved since Darwin’s time. Its old flame has only recently been rekindled (as the Italians would say, like “reheated cabbage”), for example in Geoffrey Miller’s Mating Mind Theory.2 The modern version has expanded far beyond the analogy with the songs of courting animals to include many aspects of complex evolutionary psychology. So perhaps “la-la” as a folksy name is no longer satisfying. I propose “woo-woo” theory as a better nickname to encompass its increased scope. Ardent woo-woo theorists believe language (and other sophisticated mental and behavioral traits) gained considerable complexity in the competition to impress the opposite sex. Their theory leads them to the deliciously seductive point of view that the human brain fits the profile of a “sexually selected ornament.”

  The peacock tail* is one of nature’s most flagrant sexually selected ornaments. It clearly doesn’t fit the survival of the fittest model, in which animals are ruthlessly honed to be lean, mean, survival machines. Instead, peacock tails became ostentatious, so much bigger and unfit compared to peahen tails (which are a drab gray), in hot pursuit of the survival of the sexiest scenario—i.e., animals are not so lean, not so mean, courtship machines. Often what makes you fittest makes you sexiest, but not always. The peacock tail is a substantial survival liability. And surviving in spite of it is precisely what the peacock is advertising. Many sex selection characteristics in nature are driven by the needs of males to attract the attention of choosy females. Usually it’s that way around; Mother Nature mandates that it’s usually females who get to pick their mates. And I can confirm from my own fieldwork that human females fit this model. They are certainly very choosy (i.e., woo-woe theory). However, to be considered a catch, it’s not enough to just catch a female’s eye; males, to pass along their genes, also have to pass the females’ further selection tests (perhaps the origin of the idiomatic expression to make a pass?). And that’s where conspicuous excess in language and other higher brain functions comes in. We ornament ourselves with language to advertise our impressive brains, and our access to expensive resources like education and leisure time. Mother Nature has forced men to become blinguists.

  Speaking of Mother Nature—she is an example of one of the few remaining aspects of English that are assigned a grammatical gender. English is unusually sexless. Many other languages have much more gender specificity. Most other European languages are more sexful—having male, female, and neuter. Though languages don’t have to stop at just three genders. Bantu languages can have more than ten. Confused? Grammatical genders are more clearly referred to as noun classes, which can impose certain rules on the way other words are modified.

  Gender distinctions may not be as spurious as the politically correct might like to think. With all due disrespect, political correctness is, in my view, a particularly nonsensical expression, which makes it inadvertently idiomatic. Political views and power interests vary considerably, and we could all benefit from encouraging diversity of opinions in our politics. Efforts to avoid giving offense to any constituency can cause worse offenses against reason. Which is how this ill-formed expression can become a dangerous idea.

  Given prevailing politically correct-ed sentiments, you might be surprised to learn that the scientifically correct data show that women’s brains are smaller than men’s, by around 10 percent when adjusted for relative body size differences.3 Scientists don’t really know, and perhaps are afraid to try to find out, why. However, before the male chauvinist pigs out there start making hay with that, Neanderthal brains were larger than ours. And in relation to language, bragging rights go the other way. The relevant areas of women’s brains are denser—by 12 percent—and better connected than men’s. Women’s brains also contain more gray matter, whereas men’s have more white matter. Gender differences appear very early. Developmental psychologists have shown that babies less than two days young show clearly different preferences for what they stare at. Baby girls prefer to stare at faces, whereas baby boys prefer to stare at mechanical objects.4 Two days is too early for this to be entirely cultural.

  Scientists of either gender, whatever their innate preferences and however they were socialized, don’t yet know whether to make head or tails of all that. However, to connect the earlier point on tails with these points on heads, woo-woo theorists argue that these comparatively small differences between human male and female brains are an indication that, for us, sexual selection goes both ways. Men can also be choosy. And that has led to human females being more conspicuously ornamented than other species.

  The way other languages look at love can also shed light on distinctions that aren’t so easily made in English. Ancient Greek had four distinct words for different kinds of love: affectionate, as between family members; companionate, a dispassionate virtuous love, as between friends or those with common interests; charitable, as toward those who are not family or friends; and erotic, which was passionate and romantic and which could also but need not necessarily be sexual. English love is comparatively confusing. As the French say, it leaves you “not knowing which foot to dance on” or, as the Spanish say, it makes you feel like “mambo in the head.”

  Though theories of language origin-ology are still in hot dispute, whatever the experts finally conclude, it’s certainly true that love and language are passionately intertwined. So let’s take a look at how idioms feature in that torrid entanglement:

  When English speakers are madly in lov
e—we say we are head over heels, which is oddly the way we usually are, i.e., upright. Earlier versions of this idiom were to be “heels over head,” but that’s now been turned on its head. Similarly blessed, Germans get a little more anatomically specific; they are “neck over head,” or they say they are “in love until over both ears.” The equivalent in Colombian Spanish is the considerably less appealing “swallowed like a postman’s sock.” As English speakers, when we might sow wild oats, the French, to show off their supposed greater prowess, “strike the 400 blows.” The French have an expression that, literally translated, means “by candlelight a goat looks like a lady.” Don’t be too alarmed that it’s the equivalent of the Italian admonition not to choose “a jewel, or a woman, or linen, by candlelight.” But don’t put your worries about French romance and goats to bed just yet; they also have an expression that literally translated is “a lover of a goat whose hair is combed,” which means a man who is attracted to any woman, or a womanizer. To further emphasize the need for caution in regard to French romance, even when there are no goats involved, they have sayings that translate as “love is blind, which is why it’s usually preceded by touch” and the equally unromantic “love is blind but marriage restores sight.” The Spanish have an expression indicating that their goats are on the other end of such matters; in Spanish, “a kid goat” means a womanizer. In Italian a “male goat” means someone who has been cheated on. But getting back to the French, and by way of explanation for the success of Gérard Depardieu’s film career, the French have a proverb indicating that “a big nose never spoiled a handsome face.”