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

by Jag Bhalla

Italian: a chip on the shoulder

  To roll on glowing coals: to burn with rage, envy (Hindi)

  Standing on someone’s eyebrows: very angry (Spanish)

  Gotten in the wool: had a fight (German)

  To send one’s five: to punch (French)

  To damage someone’s portrait: to bash someone’s face (French)

  To give someone a big head: to bash someone’s face (French)

  To de-testicle: to ruin, to mess up (Spanish, Mexico)

  To purée: to beat someone up (Spanish, Mexico)

  To leave with a flick of one’s sleeve: to leave upset (Chinese)

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

  CRAZY/MAD

  To have one on the waffle: to be crazy (German)

  To have a hunting license: to be a certified lunatic (German)

  To wrestle alone: to tilt at windmills (Japanese)

  To have mambo in the head: to be confused (Spanish, Argentina)

  Not knowing which foot to dance on: confused (French)

  The roof has slid off: to become crazy (Russian)

  To have a spider on the ceiling: to be crazy (French)

  To be gotten out of the little house: to be wild, excited (German)

  To have a hammer: to be around the bend (German)

  SURPRISED/ASTONISHED*

  To be left with the square face: to be very surprised (Spanish, Mexico)

  Enough to cure hiccups: astonishing (Spanish, Latin America)

  To smash one’s liver: to be flabbergasted, amazed (Japanese)

  To straighten one’s collar: to be awestruck (Japanese)

  Bite the finger between the teeth: to be utterly astonished (Hindi)

  OTHER ASSORTED EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIONS OR EXPRESSIONS OF STATES OF MIND

  To have a soap: to be afraid (Spanish, Argentina)

  Shiver though not cold: tremble with fear (Chinese)

  Have one’s testicles to zero: be very frightened (French)

  Like a crocodile in a wallet factory: very nervous (Spanish, Puerto Rico)

  Like a dog in a canoe: very nervous (Spanish, Puerto Rico)

  One’s legs don’t touch the ground: restless, excited (Japanese)

  The lips are dry: to be nervous (Hindi)

  Spittle three feet long: to crave, yearn (Chinese)

  To put a finger in one’s mouth: look enviously (Japanese)

  Throw flowers at yourself: be boastful (Spanish, Latin America)

  To kiss the sky: to show great conceit (Hindi)

  To think one is the last suck on the mango: to think one is hot stuff (Spanish, South America)

  To flap the wings of one’s nose incessantly

  Japanese: to swell with pride

  To think one is the navel of the world: * to think too highly of oneself (Spanish)

  To think one is the hole in the center of the cake: to think too highly of oneself (Spanish, Chile)

  To flap the wings of one’s nose incessantly: to swell with pride (Japanese)

  To have a face that is noseless: to be without shame (Hindi)

  Cat scratches on the soul: something gnawing at one’s heart (Russian)

  To have thick face skin: to be shameless (Japanese)

  To drink a mouthful of blood: to have a bitter or humiliating experience (Hindi)

  To break the heart’s blisters: to relieve the suffering of heart or mind (Hindi)

  A fly on the nose: a chip on the shoulder (Italian)

  To shoot at sparrows with a cannon

  German: to overkill, to overdo

  chapter eleven

  WORK & MONEY

  To have no time to die

  INCREASINGLY WORK CAUSES “time-poverty.” That’s an alarming thought, ending in an alarming expression. It’s not an idiom. Its intended meaning is quite clear. It connects work to the most essential fact of life—that time is limited. Too often we decide to minimize our money-poverty at the expense of our time-richness.

  Time-poverty is on the rise everywhere and is at epidemic proportions in the United States. Debra Satz, an associate professor at Stanford, puts it thus: “Medieval peasants worked less than you.”1 The “you” in this case being the American worker. That’s astonishing (or, in Mexican Spanish, “enough to cure hiccups”). Philosophers, economists, psychologists, futurologists, oracles, and seers of all kinds all assumed that as we got richer and as technology and gadgets reduced the amount of time and effort required to get things done, we would choose to have more leisure. Turns out they were all precisely wrong. And I still don’t have my flying car. Recent research has shown that in the U.S. the well-off have less leisure time than the less well off. That’s a perversion of human nature. The insatiable drives of modern capitalism and keeping up with the Joneses (nowadays, keeping ahead of the Chois and the Kumars) have pushed Americans to this unnatural state of affairs. I say unnatural because all stable systems in nature have balancing forces that impose limits. That’s one of the inherent instabilities in modern capitalism. It unnaturally resists limits. Its ruthless focus on short-term maximization at the expense of all else leads to many ills. It just keeps going till its input resources are exhausted.*And let’s not forget that the workers themselves are one of those resources. As the revealing expression has it, you are a human resource; you are a not-always-necessary and fungible input to the profit machine. It’s designed to keep going until you and all its other inputs are exhausted. Modern capitalism just doesn’t have enough enough-ness in it. And so, sadly, neither do our lives.

  Having overworked that thought, let’s see how overworked Americans are. On average, workers in the U.S. toil about 350 hours per year more than Europeans. Let’s do the math (or, as we would more prolifically say in England, the maths). Assuming 8-hour days (which I know is a little unrealistic), that’s more than 40 working days or 8 work weeks! While the fact that Americans work longer is well known (and even bragged about by some politicians and time-poor business types), what is less well known is that average productivity per hour in France is higher. And the French take the whole of August off every year! Speaking of vacation, more than a hundred other countries have mandatory minimum paid-leave laws. Europeans have between four and five weeks*; the Japanese two weeks. The U.S. has zero, and on average only one in seven workers gets more than two weeks vacation….

  Okay, that’s enough of a break…I feel like I need to get back to work….

  Back to my rant against the excesses of modern capitalism—and it is the unlimited excess of the modern variety that I find objectionable. I’d like to revive a connection between humanity’s essential nature (her leaky, contagious emotions, her morality, and the proper role for his rationality) and the visible handiwork of one of capitalism’s founders, Adam Smith. Smith has suffered the fate of many founders. If he found out what we were up to with his legacy, he would be dismal indeed. The Wealth of Nations is now thought of as the intellectual wellspring of laissez-faire** economic policies, which in turn is a cornerstone of modern capitalism. I’d argue his legacy has been misrepresented—perhaps beyond recognition—meaning it’s time for a re-cognition, for serious rethinking.

  I know all this only by virtue of having read secondary sources. The primary ones are just too tome-ly (900-plus pages and 500-plus pages). In these times of increasing time-poverty, timeless wisdoms must be accessible in less time. Wisdom is of no use if it’s entomb-ed in books so long that no one has time any longer to read them. Authors need to pay attention, on our behalf, to our attention deficits. Keep it short and sweet. Straying from that thought, I’m reminded of a quotation from one famously voluminous author to another: Henry James said of Marcel Proust’s style that it was “an inconceivable boredom associated with the most extreme ecstasy which it is possible to imagine.”2 These days, let’s keep it to just the ecstasy, please.

  I’ve once again relied on those more talented and dedicated to do the hard work and to summarize (and, I hope, not to lie to me): firstly, On The Wealth of Natio
ns (256 pages) by P. J. O’Rourke, that witty and cultured commentator and notorious communist sympathizer; secondly, on The Authentic Adam Smith (144 pages) by James Buchan, a former foreign correspondent for that stridently anti-capitalist rag, the Financial Times of London. Each concludes that there was much more to Smith than the cherry-picked legacy of The Wealth of Nations. Both agree that Smith gave primacy to moral matters. Smith’s first tome was called The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

  Allow me to illustrate with my favorite cherries from these secondary sources. Comrade O’Rourke says, “It is a mistake to read The Wealth of Nations as a justification of amoral greed”3 and “avarice and injustice are always short sighted.”4 Buchan declares his aims: to “restore to Smith’s biography the primacy of feeling over reason” and to “show that The Theory of Moral Sentiments…is good economics.”5 He also points out that Moral Sentiments was more economically successful. It outsold Wealth of Nations until the Victorian era (when industrialists perhaps needed more justification for their extreme practices). Buchan quotes Moral Sentiments’ opening line from the first chapter, “On the Propriety of Action”: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”6 That paragraph ends with the further observation that “for this sentiment…is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane…. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.” Smith believed that not all altruism was, or should be, reciprocally motivated, and sadly, it’s not clear whether modern capitalists would compare favorably with the greatest ruffians and most hardened violators of his time.

  Much of what is sold to us as essential to modern capitalism is not so. The problem isn’t the “invisible hand.”* It has delivered spectacular results, perhaps too effectively. The problem is the invisible face of capitalism. It face-less-ly separates the cooperating parties into emotionally isolated, inhuman, reluctant players of the game. The game wasn’t intended to be, and needn’t be, so amoral. It could be designed with more natural limits, more balance, and for greater overall benefit. Perhaps the invisible hand now needs a visible restraint to remind it of its connection to humanity.

  Tongue hanging out like a man’s tie

  Spanish: to be exhausted

  Okay, enough of my rant on the follies of modern capitalism and the dangers of the unchecked puritanical work ethic.* Let’s turn our attention to how we typically keep score in the rat race. I mean money, of course. Specifically, let’s look at what the psychology of money tells us about the workings of our own minds.

  I was overjoyed to hear that homo economicus, that paragon of rationality and utility maximization,** has been quietly put out of its, and more importantly, our, misery. Economists (though not Adam Smith) used to assume that we make our decisions hyper-rationally, driven primarily by self-interest. That assumption is baked into the modern view of capitalism. An accumulated mass of scientific evidence, however, tells us that classical economists are wrong about human nature. By nature, we are not built as cold and calculating in our reasoning; nor are we designed to be only self-interested. These are among the worst errors of the Enlightenment. But we shouldn’t have to look to the work of dismal scientists to tell us this. The primary empirical evidence of our own everyday lives should be more than enough to prove that human behavior is not rational.

  In case you aren’t convinced by your own life, here is a summary of my favorite experiment from behavioral economics that proves the point: the Ultimatum Game, which has a Proposer and a Responder. In the simplest version, each has perfect information and plays a single game. The Proposer is given a sum of money; the Responder knows how much. The Proposer then has to offer the Responder a piece of the pie. The Responder can either accept or reject it. If the Responder accepts, each of the players gets a share and they both go on their merry ways. However, if the Responder rejects, neither gets to keep any of the money. Classical economics predicts that whatever is offered should be accepted. After all, the Responder is getting something for nothing, so accepting is the “rational” choice. However, that’s not what happens. On average, the typical offer is less than half, in line with the homo economicus predictions. There is always a point, however, below which Responders behave in a way that doesn’t fit the homo economicus model (i.e., supposedly “irrationally”). If the offer is considered too low, Responders reject. The prevailing opinion as to why this occurs is that Responders are viewing a low offer as being unfair or humiliating. In any case, by rejecting, Responders incur real costs (the foregone share) to punish Proposers. This study has been replicated many times in many cultures. It seems that we humans have a built-in mechanism telling us that we should disrupt a situation in which we feel unjustly treated—and that we should incur costs to enforce our preference for being treated justly.

  Much other research has shown that evolution has equipped us to use our brains in ways that aren’t simply what would be thought of as purely logical. The logic of survival of our deep ancestors hunting and gathering on the African savannah didn’t equip us to be self-interestedly rational (to be modern-capitalist automata).

  The Ultimatum Game also has confirmed that classical economists have been trying to make monkeys of us all. Scientists are trying to present animals with the closest thing they can come up with to economic choices. For monkeys, it’s all about marshmallows or raisins. When simplified versions of the Ultimatum Game are run with chimpanzees, they always behave rationally.7 Chimpus economicus is alive and well.

  However illuminating, that isn’t going to help with my bills, or, as the Italians say, “fine words don’t feed a cat.” So let’s get back to the fine words of international idioms:

  When we are nose to the grindstone, toiling Spaniards either “give callus” or “work at pure lung.” Similarly, industrious Chinese work “with liver and brains spilled on the ground” and the equivalently conscientious Indian would have “no time to die.” The French, when not working hard, also get lazy about their love of fine cuisine: They “gulp down flies.” Italians are such a bunch of mother’s boys that they call the person in charge “Mister sainted mother.” To wield similar authority, a Spaniard requires a precise dress sense: He must “wear the pants well placed.” A Japanese boss can exercise power by “using people with their chin.”

  If we are lucky, we have deep pockets. Similarly well-off Spaniards and Japanese have pockets that are cheerful and warm, respectively. For Frenchmen, to make lots of money is all about butter, either “making one’s butter” or “putting butter in the spinach.” We know which side of our bread is buttered. Hindi speakers need more; when well-off they prefer to have their “whole hand in the ghee/butter.” Conversely, a poor English speaker might not have two sticks to rub together. An impoverished Hindi speaker doesn’t “have a straw to use as a toothpick,” which might not matter since the very poor also “have no tartar on their teeth.” Meanwhile, a similarly strapped Japanese doesn’t have any saliva—his “mouth dries up.” Alternatively, an impecunious Japanese can be shameless; to be poor is to “become naked.” Meanwhile, a needy Spaniard is worried about hygiene, being “cleaner than a frog’s armpit.”

  INVOLVING WORK, WORKERS, MAKING AN HONEST LIVING

  A stink-of-sweat: a workman (French)

  A lead ass: an office worker (French)

  An ink sucker: one who has a menial office job (Spanish)

  Ink pisser: an office worker (German)

  A soup seller: owner of a cheap restaurant (French)

  A cow on casters or skates: a traffic cop (French)

  An art historian in civilian clothes: a plainclothes agent (Russian)

  A soul plumber: a psychiatrist* (German)

  Before God and the bus conductor we are all equal: proverb (German)

  No doctor is better than three: proverb (G
erman)

  A young doctor makes a full graveyard: proverb (China)

  One who can be trusted: a cook (Hindi)

  The water business: the entertainment business (Japanese)

  Better to be a mouse in a cat’s mouth than in a lawyer’s hands: proverb (Spanish)

  A NOT-SO-HONEST LIVING

  The gentleman on the roof beams: thief (Chinese)

  Shroud snatcher: shameless thief (Hindi)

  To hide between the fingers: to steal (Hindi)

  Not pure flour in the sack: crook (Swedish)

  One whose bow is drawn: dangerous criminal (Hindi)

  Steals the kohl [eyeliner] from the eye: thief (Arabic)

  To make long fingers: to steal (German)

  A hat burns on a thief: a guilty conscience (Russian and Yiddish)

  Word thief: plagiarist (Hindi)

  To connect one’s blood vessels: to conspire with (Japanese)

  To crow

  Spanish: to take advantage of financially

  A miller with hair on his teeth is honest: proverb (German)

  To suck juice: to benefit at the expense of others (Japanese)

  Criminal: intelligent, well-done (Spanish, Puerto Rico)

  To roll over while sleeping: to dupe (Japanese)

  TO WORK HARD

  Sweat seven shirts: work hard (Italian)

  Too much meat on the fire: overly busy (Italian)

  Give callus: work hard (Spanish)

  Put a candle to it: put some effort in (Spanish, Nicaragua)

  Peel the garlic: work like a dog (Spanish, Chile)

  To a broken arm: pushed to the limit (Spanish, Latin America)