I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears and Other Intriguing Idioms From Around the World (17 page)

Here the donkey falls
German: that’s the important part

The end is musk

RESTLESS GRAVE-Y TRAIN OF THOUGHT

O
RWELL WOULD THINK THIS A GRAVE
turning of affairs, but Shakespeare would have approved. And though the following sentence might prevent further page turning, I’ll ask you to grant me some platitude. I’ll
wrap things up, by tying together some loose ends.

In these concluding remarks, I’ll speak up for idioms and their enduring popularity, and start to put idiom-ology onto a less infirm footing. Finally, I’ll summarize the evidence we’ve seen, of how our minds are not what we’d like to think, and in doing so serve notice on Aristotle, Descartes, and all else who now unquestioningly serve the “hegemony of reason” that their time is up. The
scientifically correct
position is that we are not built to be dominated by the rational. It’s time for us to wholeheartedly and whole-mindedly embrace those elements of our nature that provide needed counterbalance to reason (and its cold rationality). It’s time for all of us to Enlighten up!

LANGUAGE ORIGIN-OLOGY

The Jig Is Up

We’ve encountered several theories of language origin-ology (“la-la,” “woo-woo,” “poo-poo,” “tut-tut”). The studious among you may have noticed that, although I’ve talked a lot about evolution in general, I’ve avoided using too many evolutionary terms when talking specifically about the origin and development of language. That’s not out of pious
politically correct
-ed deference to the intelligent design demographic, but in
light of the fact
that the
scientifically correct
position isn’t clear.

Very
big cheese
scientists have championed the view that language didn’t evolve as a result of natural selection. They think it a glorious accident (so perhaps we could call that the “oops-wow” theory). The founder of modern linguistics, Noam Chomsky, is a prominent proponent. He has argued that language was an accidental by-product of other evolved changes, like our increase in cognitive capacity.
¹
A good recent statement of this position is the paper Chomsky wrote with W. T. Finch and Marc Hauser, “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” The late Stephen Jay Gould, himself a leading evolution scientist and bestselling science writer, called such by-products “spandrels.”
Spandrel
is a term from architecture for a feature that isn’t explicitly designed but that arises from the way other features fit together. The archetypal example of a spandrel is the space left between arches. Another term applied to these kinds of features is
exaptive
.

Other
big cheeses,
like Ray Jackendoff and Stephen Pinker, are solidly on the other side of this issue: They challenge the exaption-ists by taking the seemingly innocuous position that language is no different from any other complex feature or capability. The battle is unresolved…and, looking at the language of its skirmishes, is illuminating. Plus it turns out that humble old idioms are proving to be not so humble after all….

Idioms Crucial in Scientific Cat Fight

A pivotal salvo in the language origin-ology battle was put forth by Jackendoff and Pinker in a paper called “The Nature of the Language Faculty and Its Implications for the Evolution of Language,”
²
published in response to the article by Finch, Hauser, and Chomsky. I don’t need to go into all the details, but check out this point: “The key phenomenon is the ubiquity of idioms…. Speakers know, alongside their knowledge of words, an enormous number of idioms!”

One of the examples that Jackendoff and Pinker use is an idiom that also happens to be a complete sentence:
The jig is up
. Perhaps not coincidentally it also captures the gleeful tone of the authors who think they have incontrovertible evidence with which to support their case. The main point they are gloating over is that idioms are not insignificant peripheral oddities in language. Instead, idioms are a central feature, and they operate outside normal language rules and, in some cases, within those rules. That’s what makes them useful in the debate. They violate the predictions of the oops-wowers. It seems that linguistics may have been too word-centric. The discipline has ignored the usefulness and popularity of idioms.

And to emphasize the
up-jig
-iness of the situation, Jackendoff and Pinker use a surprisingly (unscientific) tone: “It is only by omitting this…alternative that Chomsky can maintain that nothing distinguishes the use of language for communication from the use of hair styles for communication.” As the Japanese might say, that probably got the oops-wow-ers “anger hair pointing to heaven.” Jackendoff and Pinker go on to say, “The assertion is that all hypotheses about adaptation are ‘equally pointless’…. The argument seems to be that ‘adaptive explanations can be done badly, so no one should ever attempt to do them well’…evidently the charge of pointlessness is being wielded selectively.” A reminder that the use of the scientific method doesn’t preclude the use of unscientific and emotional language.

Leaving aside the nitty-gritty of the debate, idioms are of central importance to language!

IDIOM-OLOGY

On the Specious Origin of Idioms

Like all good evolution stories, the study of the origin of idioms depends on a careful look at the various species alive today and their relation to each other. It also depends on evidence gleaned from sifting through the remains of those long dead, i.e. on lexical archeology. Different degrees of deadness apply to the two main species of idioms described below.

Inadvertent Idioms: Debagging the Cat

Many idioms started out as
plain old
metaphors. Turns of phrase that required no turn of meaning, they were initially transparently understandable. We
let the cat out of the bag
as an example earlier. We no longer
buy pigs in pokes
—or in bags. And now we have more modern ways to
caveat emptor
. Cultural change and semantic drift loosened these expressions from their initial “moorings” and their meanings changed. Though it’s very unlikely the change happened in
one fell swoop
. Drifting entirely away from their semantic anchors would have been a slow process. For example, the first recorded use of
one fell swoop
is in Shakespeare’s
Macbeth. Fell
then meant “evil” or “ill-boding.” He uses it to describe a kite, a small member of the hawk family. His audience would have understood that the swooping bird of prey was menacing. Often now we see the idiom morphing into
one foul swoop
. This is itself an example of how even the words in dead metaphors aren’t entirely inactive.

Intentionally Opaque Idioms: Couch Potatoes

Many idioms started out opaque
from the get go
. As in-jokes that leaked out beyond the initial in-crowd. A great example of a whole
boat load
of these is Cockney rhyming slang. Cockneys, a community in the East End of London, are described by Bill Bryson in his engrossing
Mother Tongue
as among the most artful of English speakers.
³
To a Cockney
apples and pears
,
Adam and Eve,
and
trouble and strife
mean respectively “stairs,” “believe,” and “wife.” As you can see, the second word of each expression rhymes with its intended meaning. For the following sentence, “Would you believe my wife can’t get down the stairs?”, a Cockney could say: “Would you Adam and Eve it, the trouble and strife can’t get down the apples and pears?” Though they usually take it a step further to use only the first non-rhyming word, which would make that example sentence, “Would you Adam it, the trouble can’t get down the apples?” Note that Cockneys are using some of Shakespeare’s
functional shiftiness
to enliven their speech. Bryson also mentions the following as examples: loaf from loaf of bread = head; butcher from butcher’s hook = look; china from china plate = mate, and tom from tomfoolery = jewelry.

For an example closer to home, let’s look at how
couch potatoes
got so comfortably planted in our language. Alan Metcalf, in his great survey
Predicting New Words,
tells their tale, connecting a vegetative pun with an organized sect of sci-fried TV fans.
⁴
Their in-joke came from remote beginnings and has gotten entirely out of hand. Initially, a group of nine Californians religiously gathered to watch their favorite TV show, “Lost In Space.” One of them punned from his love of TV-watching the verb “tubing,” hence making them
tube
-ers. And, of course, potatoes are also tubers. The cult grew, its followers dedicated to
peace-of-mind-less-ness,
or, as they put it, “pursuit of inner peace through the prolonged viewing of television.” That quotation is from the
Official Couch Potato Handbook
. Metcalf uses it and a few other happenstances to illustrate that, for an in-joke to be successful and to
have legs
enough to escape beyond the initiating group, some help is usually required. In this case, much marketing of related joke products and books.

Cognitive Couch Potato-ness

As Orwell complained, many idioms are hackneyed
old tropes
, banal bromides, trite platitudes, or stereotyped clichés. A look at the semantic roots of each of these related expressions is revealing.

Hackneyed comes from the term for a breed of horse developed in England for routine mundane tasks. Leading to the sense of being becoming banal and trite through overuse.

A trope, most often encountered in the expression
old trope,
means a figure of speech used in a nonliteral way. Trope initially meant a word or phrase used as an embellishment in the sung parts of a medieval liturgy. It’s originally from the Latin for turn (
tropus
), and it now has a pejorative sense of a hackneyed old phrase.

A bromide has a sense that something so described is trite or banal. It comes from bromine, a pungent and poisonous gas. The gas was so called from the Greek
bromos,
meaning stench. Bromides are stereotypically stinking.

A platitude is a flat, dull, or trite remark, especially one that is uttered as if it were fresh or profound. It comes from the French for flat (
plat,
which also gives us the word plate).

A trite remark, like a hackneyed expression, is lacking in freshness or effectiveness because of constant use or excessive repetition. It comes from the Arabic “to be worn or rubbed down.”

The clinchers, however, are the
cliché
and the
stereotype.
Both are terms from the world of printing. They directly connect economies of effort in printing with Orwell’s insight into the economies of mental effort gained by the use of idioms and stock phrases.
⁵
Both a cliché and a stereotype are groups of words or letters that occurred so frequently that it was worth a printer preassembling them as one-piece blocks, rather than reconstructing them letter by letter each time. Idioms are literally clichés. And there’s no need for them to bow to the stereotypical pejorative connotations. Idioms should be proud that they are so useful, that it’s worth storing them in our brains as prepack-aged bundles of meaning. Which we do on the right side, along with our taboo curses.

SCIENTIFICALLY CORRECT MIND-SET-FREE

Reasoning Against the Old Hegemony of Reason

Our minds aren’t what we’d like to think. The way we think about the way we think is no longer
scientifically correct
. We’ve encountered lots of examples of errors in our
frame of mind.
The best short summary of the
state of the art
I’ve seen is from George Lakoff, the leading cognitive linguist (and metaphor-ician). He believes that too much of our current thinking is based on the erroneous metaphors of ancient Greeks (Aristotelian radiators), disembodied reason-ers like Descartes, and much else from the Enlightenment. The 18th-century mind-set we’ve inherited is that reason is conscious, literal, logical, universal, unemotional, disembodied, and built to serve our self-interest. Much of that now doesn’t match well with scientific data. It seems our minds are too made up. Relying on the scientific method (also a
brainchild
of the Enlightenment), we now have a substantial
body of evidence
to counter the “hegemony of reason.”

Hairy Ancestors & Unhairy Generosity

The baked-in survival lessons of the fittest and sexiest of our deep ancestors didn’t equip us to be Old Enlightenment thinkers. To take just a couple of examples: Our minds (and bodies) are built to do a lot of reasoning non-consciously. Perhaps as much as 90 percent of our information processing happens that way. The survival of the fastest-reacting early humans has ensured that we use our conscious minds only when it’s already safe, and when we can afford the extra time it takes to give something deliberate thought. The prospering of the most sensibly cooperative ancient meat sharers has predisposed us to generosity (and not always as the Italians would say–the reciprocally “hairy” kind). The thrival of our most emotionally attuned face-reading fore-parents has left us with many traits that bind us psychobiologically to the well-being of others. We aren’t built to be mainly self-interested; we have other-interest deep in our DNA. And that is one of the key reasons we should dethrone the Enlightenment mind-set. Against our nature, self-interest has been given too high a moral priority.

Our Minds Were Mostly Made Up a Long Time Ago

Our best current science tells us that we are
at least of two minds.
We do have an 18th-century Englightenment reasoning part of our brains. It is slow, operates serially (attending to one thing at a time), and is conscious, consciously controllable, effortful, and dispassionate (cold and calculating). However, our minds are made up of more than just that. We also think quickly (we often react “without thinking”), in parallel, non-consciously, in ways beyond our control, effortlessly, and emotionally. Emotions are not the polar opposite of reason. We could think of them as habits of thought (of information processing) that were so useful and so important that we have circuits for them baked into the non-conscious layers of our minds (and bodies). We are built to use our emotions to guide our conscious reasoning. David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish anti-rationalist philosopher, knew this when he wrote that reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.