I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears and Other Intriguing Idioms From Around the World (11 page)

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

Sighing with blue breath

W
E’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.

SPEAKING OF BLACK

• To grind the black:
  to be depressed (French)
  
• Black-bellied:
  wicked or deceitful (Japanese)
  
• Drive black:
  ride for free (German)
  
• Place a black pot on the head:
  bring disgrace on (Hindi)
  
• Makes my wedding day black:
  causes trouble (Yiddish)
  
• Black one:
  term of endearment, sweetheart (Spanish)
  
• Black butter eye:
  bruise, black eye (French)
  
• Black-eyed:
  unkind, cruel (Hindi)
  
• To make eyes black and white:
  to roll one’s eyes in bewilderment (Japanese)
  
• A black cat ran between them:
  at an impasse (Russian)
  
• A black bee:
  A woman’s female friend (Hindi)
  
• Something black in the lentils:
  suspicious (Hindi)
  

WHITE

• Make your day white:
  have a good day (Arabic)
  
• Whitened our faces:
  did us great credit (Arabic)
  
• White bone:
  high born (Italian)
  
• White island:
  an imaginary home of the blessed (Hindi)
  
• The blood to turn white:
  to be indifferent (Hindi)
  
• Have a white face mask:
  look bad due to worry (Spanish)
  
• To make an occasion white:
  to spoil it (Italian)
  
• White night:
  sleepless night (Italian)
  
• White soot:
  an awful mess (Russian)
  
• To look with white eyes:
  to show disdain (Japanese)
  
• White like a nun’s butt cheek:
  pale (Spanish)
  
• Till the white flies:
  till the snow falls (Russian)
  
• White beak:
  inexperienced (French)
  
• To see a white mouse:
  to see something rare (German)
  

RED

• Red movie:
  adult entertainment, blue movie (Italian)
  
• Red joke:
  a rude or off-color joke (Spanish)
  
• Deep red lie:
  worst kind of lie (Japanese)
  
• A red light comes on:
  become precarious (Japanese)
  
• To stand on the red list:
  to be endangered (German)
  
• One red spot:
  only woman among men (Japanese)
  
• The height of a red face:
  ashamed of oneself (Japanese)
  
• Red coal:
  one flushed with anger (Hindi)
  
• Red toga:
  magistrate (Italian)
  
• The red-haired one:
  red wine with more body (French)
  
• To see everything pink:
  to look through rose-colored glasses (French)
  
• Today red, tomorrow dead:
  here today, gone tomorrow (German)
  
• Burn in a poppy
  *
  color:
  blush (Russian)
  
• Paint it pink:
  decorate, gild the lily (Spanish)
  

GREEN

• Green years:
  the best of times (Italian)
  
• Be in/at the green:
  poor (Italian)
  
• Leave as God painted the parakeet:
  make someone mad (Spanish, Nicaragua)
  
• Green joke, movie, woman, widow, man, or tail:
  off-color or dirty (Spanish)
  
• Wearing a green hat:
  having an unfaithful wife (Chinese)
  
• To have a green hand:
  to have a green thumb (French)
  
• A green number:
  a toll-free number (Italian)
  
• The last of the green beans:
  it’s all over (French)
  
• Cabbage green and green cabbage:
  six of one, a half dozen of the other (French)
  
• The green goddess:
  marijuana (Spanish)
  
• Because of pure green peas:
  for no reason (Spanish, Peru)
  
• Green sky!:
  an expression of surprise (Spanish, Puerto Rico)
  

YELLOW

• Yellow:
  with envy (German)
  
• Yellow colored:
  bashful (Hindi)
  
• Yellow book:
  detective novel (Italian)
  
• To smile yellow:
  sickly smile (French)
  
• Yellow beak:
  inexperienced, a greenhorn (Japanese)
  
• To see yellow:
  the glass is half empty (French)
  

BLUE

• See nothing but blue:
  be in the dark (French)
  
• Blue fury:
  in a rage, seeing red (French)
  
• Blue prince:
  a wonderful man (Spanish)
  
• Sighing with blue breath:
  suffering (Japanese)
  
• To show blue veins:
  to be enraged (Japanese)
  
• To be blue:
  to be plastered (Russian)
  
• To lie the blue out of the sky:
  to be completely dishonest (German)
  
• To make blue:
  to take the day off (German)
  
• Blue eye:
  black eye, bruise on face (German)
  
• Blue hour:
  time before dusk, especially in winter (German)
  
• To have blue nails:
  to be near death (Hindi)
  
• To rise sharply like blue clouds:
  meteoric rise (Chinese)
  
• To experience a blue wonder:
  to get a nasty surprise (German)
  
• Blue haze:
  rubbish (German)
  

COLOR IN GENERAL

• Change one’s eye color:
  a serious look (Japanese)
  
• A trick of color:
  a pretense of love (Japanese)
  
• To turn color:
  to turn red with anger (Japanese)
  
• Paint yourself [in color]:
  to go away (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• Laugh at colored fish:
  not worry (Spanish, Cuba)
  
• To observe the color of the banner:
  to sit on the fence (Japanese)
  
• To show a difficult color:
  to express disapproval (Japanese)
  
• Under the one color:
  birds of a feather (Russian)
  
• Known like a colorful dog:
  to be a well-known figure (German)
  
• To change color like a chameleon:
  to flush or turn pale [with anger] (Hindi)
  
• At night all cats are dark-colored:
  proverb (Spanish)
  

Stop climbing on my head
Arabic: stop annoying me