I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears and Other Intriguing Idioms From Around the World (3 page)

WHICH MIGHT LEAD TO A DATE. BUT THE OBJECT OF YOUR AFFECTIONS MIGHT NOT SHOW UP

• To give the package:
  to stand someone up (Italian)
  
• To lay a rabbit:
  to stand someone up (French)
  
• To take a jacket:
  to stand someone up (French)
  
• To wind up like a traffic light:
  to be stood up, left hanging (Spanish, Nicaragua)
  

OR IF HE DOES, HE MIGHT NOT TURN OUT TO BE IDEAL

• Heart thief:
  heart breaker (Italian)
  
• To give squash or pumpkins:
  to stand someone up (Spanish, Latin America)
  
• Autumn sky:
  to be fickle (Japanese)
  
• The space below a nose is long:
  to be lewd toward women (Japanese)
  
• A trick of color:
  a pretense of love (Japanese)
  
• To have fast hands:
  to be a womanizer (Japanese)
  
• To drain one’s horns:
  to sow one’s wild oats (German)
  

To give squash / pumpkins
Spanish (Latin America): to stand someone up

• To strike the 400 blows:
  to sow one’s wild oats (French)
  
• A pigeon fancier:
  a lady’s man (Hindi)
  
• Bitten by the spider:
  fickle or flirtatious (Spanish, Chile)
  
• Having seven husbands:
  loose woman (Hindi)
  
• A wild gourd:
  a beautiful but worthless person (Hindi)
  
• Unable to stop being the owl:
  can’t stop flirting (Italian)
  
• To burn grilled rice cakes:
  to be jealous (Japanese)
  
• Hole filler:
  someone to date between relationships (German)
  
• An apron hunter:
  a womanizer (German)
  
• A kid goat:
  a womanizer or man who lives off women (Spanish, Central America)
  

HOWEVER, IF IT DOES GO WELL…YOU MIGHT

• Flannel:
  make out (Spanish, Uruguay & Argentina)
  
• Drinking the lip:
  kiss (Hindi)
  
• Tooth-gift:
  a love bite (Hindi)
  
• Ham:
  French kiss (Spanish, Venezuela)
  
• Have one’s atoms hooked together:
  really hit it off (French)
  
• Buckle polish:
  slow dance (Spanish, Venezuela)
  
• Shake the skeleton:
  dance (Spanish, Latin America)
  
• Wiggle your bucket:
  dance (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• Throw a foot:
  shake a leg, dance (Spanish, Cuba)
  
• Get the moths off:
  dance (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• Pluck the turkey:
  make love at a window (Spanish)
  

WHICH MIGHT LEAD TO BECOMING YOUR BELOVED’S…

• Half orange:
  sweetheart, spouse, soul mate (Spanish, Latin America)
  
• To be sweet potato with:
  to be madly in love with (Spanish, Costa Rica)
  
• To be in love until over both ears:
  to be madly in love (German)
  
• To be someone’s leg:
  to be a main squeeze (Spanish, Chile)
  
• Goat:
  partner, boyfriend, girlfriend (Spanish, Costa Rica)
  
• Bumblebee:
  sweetheart (Spanish, Chile)
  

AND THINGS MIGHT GET SERIOUS

• Swallowed like a postman’s sock:
  hopelessly in love (Spanish, Colombia)
  
• Like water for chocolate:
  the boiling point of one’s passion (or anger) (Spanish)
  
• To fall neck over head in love:
  to be madly in love, head over heels in love (German)
  
• To scorch one’s own body:
  to be consumed with love (Japanese)
  
• Love without memory:
  to be madly in love (Russian)
  
• To have eaten a monkey:
  to be nuts about (German)
  
• To be asphyxiated:
  to be in love (Spanish, Dominican Republic)
  

AND IT COULD GET VERY SERIOUS

Apologies in advance if much of the following seems negative and sexist. Please don’t shoot the messenger; I’m constrained by my source material.

• To solidify one’s body:
  to get married (Japanese)
  
• Blooming flowers and a full moon:
  ideal time for a wedding (Chinese)
  
• As happy as a fiancée:
  happy as a lark, the highest happiness (Russian)
  
• To distribute cardamoms:
  to invite to a marriage (Hindi)
  
• Matricide:
  marriage (Spanish, Costa Rica)
  
• To hang oneself:
  to get married (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• To stain [a girl’s] hands with turmeric:
  to marry (Hindi)
  
• Handcuffs:
  the wife (Spanish, Latin America)
  
• War Department:
  ironic term for wife (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• The Holy Inquisition:
  an inquisitive wife (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• To be under a bonnet:
  to be married (German)
  
• She who sits at [one’s] side:
  a wife (Hindi)
  
• Life-lord, the support of life:
  husband (Hindi)
  
• Has him in her fist:
  has him under her thumb, under her control (Spanish)
  
• The seven utterances:
  the marriage vows (Hindi)
  
• To be under the wife’s buttocks:
  to be henpecked (Japanese)
  

To hang oneself
Spanish (Mexico): to get married

• To stand under the slipper
  *
  :
  to be henpecked (German)
  
• To be under his wife’s shoe:
  to be henpecked (Russian)
  
• The cricket on the stove:
  a submissive wife (German)
  
• The wind from a woman’s shawl strikes:
  under female influence (Hindi)
  
• Oversized pants:
  a man pushed around by his wife or girlfriend (Spanish)
  
• Love is blind, but marriage restores your sight:
  unromantic proverb (French)
  

HOWEVER, IT MIGHT NOT ALL BE ROSY. THERE MIGHT BE SOME PROBLEMS

• An autumn breeze begins to blow:
  a mutual cooling of love (Japanese)
  
• The tomatoes have faded:
  the love is gone (Russian)
  
• To do the horns to someone:
  to be unfaithful (Italian, Russian)
  
• To have horns:
  to have been cheated on (Italian)
  
• Decorated one:
  someone whose wife has been unfaithful (Spanish, Chile)
  
• A red apricot goes over the wall:
  a married woman takes a lover (Chinese)
  
• To take a rake:
  to be dumped (French)
  
• To be laid flat:
  to be dumped (French)
  
• To hit someone in the back of the neck:
  to have an affair with someone’s partner (Spanish, Chile)
  
• To leave someone nailed:
  to dump someone (Spanish)
  
• Wearing a green hat:
  having an unfaithful wife (Chinese)
  
• You have a pretty green hat:
  your wife is cheating on you (Chinese)
  
• In buying horses and taking a wife, shut your eyes and pray to God:
  proverb (Italian)
  
• Eggs and vows are easily broken:
  proverb (Japanese)
  
• Never rely on love or the weather:
  proverb (German)
  
• To split a sleeve:
  to break it off with someone (Japanese)
  
• A male goat:
  someone who has been cheated on (Italian)
  

OTHER ROMANCE-RELATED IDIOMS

• There are no ugly 15-year-olds:
  proverb (Spanish)
  
• To live like an old farm rifle:
  to be always pregnant (Spanish, Nicaragua)
  
• Like hedgehogs:
  very frisky (Italian)
  
• To throw a gray hair:
  to have a fling (Italian)
  
• Reheated cabbage:
  an attempt to revive a lapsed love affair (Italian)
  
• Separation agent:
  someone who breaks up a relationship for you (German)
  
• Aunt seducer:
  a young man whose manners are too good (German)
  
• Leftover Christmas cake:
  an unmarried woman over 25 (Japanese)
  
• Green widow:
  dirty or lewd old woman (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• Woman with a green tail:
  dirty or lewd old woman (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• A yawning mussel:
  to be amorous, horny (French)
  
• An old schoolboy:
  bachelor (Yiddish)
  
• The bodiless one:
  way of referring to Kamdev the god of love (Hindi)
  
• By candlelight a goat looks like a lady:
  proverb (French)
  
• To stay behind to dress [statues of ] saints:
  to be an old maid (Spanish)
  
• Shrimp:
  man with nice body but ugly head (Spanish)
  

An old schoolboy
Yiddish: a bachelor

Seventh water on a starchy jelly

A
S THE
politically correct
ed proverbial idiom goes: No (hu)man is an island. That seems to be biologically true. We are evolved to live enmeshed in a network of social relationships, including as emotionally leaky and contagious “mutually regulating psychobiological units.” Our identities are defined by our relationships, and language plays a role in all our identities.

At the closer and earlier
end of
our relationship
spectrum
—babies can distinguish at a very early age the sounds that are unique to their
mother tongues
(or should that be their mother’s tongue?
*
). They develop a sense of the sound structure of their native language surprisingly early. Infant-ologists have demonstrated this by measuring the electrical activity of the brains of French and German babies. Each language puts different emphasis on the syllables of two-syllable words. German puts it on the first, French on the second. Infants showed a processing advantage for the rhythmic structure typical in their native language. The researchers concluded that language-specific neural representations of word forms are present in the infant brain as early as four months of age.
²

Many families develop their own “familese.” Children in particular have a strong inclination to fill holes in their language. As Barbara Wallraff notes in the introduction to her excellently amusing book on language holes,
Word Fugitives,
³
we all have this urge. As she puts it, “The impulse to coin words today may well be a vestige of the impulse that gave mankind language in the first place.” She also points out that around 40 percent of twins develop varying degrees of a private language. Paul Dickson has collected such familese in his great little book called
Family Words
. My favorites are:
condo-mini-home
for a small apartment;
menuitis
*
for having too many choices; and
nagrivation,
for arguments caused by attempts to get unlost. From my own family: When we were kids, my siblings would say “yemember?” as a contraction for “do you remember?”

Roy Blunt, Jr., that most astutely and acutely attuned word fancier, in his gemful
**
book
Alphabet Juice,
has an entry on familese. In it he discloses how the pronunciation of the name of the recent leader of Russia sounded to him like a typical familese word for an intimate body part.
⁴

Finally, on the subject of kin, a wonderfully unkind, intentional mis-parsing, and repurposing (hyphenated here for clarity), is
kin-dred:
“fear of family gatherings.”
⁵

Beyond our closest unchosen ties, couples often develop private new words, an idiolect, that are often childlike or childish.
*
The most embarrassing and alarming example I’ve ever come across is from one of America’s most beloved presidents, Ronald Reagan. I must warn you that the following might permanently change your view of him. In a preemptive Valentine’s Day note to his wife (on White House letterhead), dated February 4, he addresses her as “Mommie, Poo Pants, 1st Lady, Nancy” and signs himself as “Pappa, Poo Pants, 1st Guy, Ronnie.”
⁶
I know…I know…That’s shocking, revolting, and enough to make you want to curse. An unexpected collision of poo-poo and woo-woo theories.

Groups of friends, gangs, and whole communities develop slang as a way to establish and reinforce the in-group vs. out-group distinction. Professional communities do the same; they develop exclusive technical lingo to enshroud their specialized knowledge, which is why to a doctor a “heart attack” is a “myocardial infarction.”

Another way that we use language to make finer-grained social distinctions is by gossiping. Evolutionary psychologists have proposed that the need for greater social coordination, bonding, and reputation management were all critical to language origin-ology. Our near-relative apes can tell us a thing or two about this. They use social grooming, actual nit-picking (painstaking combing through each other’s fur), in the same way that we use language to gossip. Perhaps that might help explain why language teachers are so nit-picky about the rules of language? Continuing our effort to improve “sciencey” language, perhaps we could call this the “tut-tut” theory. Negative gossip is nine times more likely than positive gossip to be repeated and spread.
⁷

Taking gossip to a national level, it’s said that Italians are mama’s boys, explaining why their related insult is “papa’s boy.” Italians call a high-ranking boss “mister sainted mother,” combining the veneration of both mothers and religion. Children can be the
apple of our eye
; in China they are the “pearl in the palm.” The Japanese extend similar imagery to extremes: “Even if one puts a child in one’s eye, it doesn’t hurt.”

Where we can have friends who are like
two peas in a pod,
the Mexicans are much less appealingly like “fingernail and dirt.” A similar Hindi-speaking pair could be described as the puzzlingly self-defeating “union of fire and water.” Whereas for a Japanese to “smell of water” means to be distant and unfriendly.

MOTHER

• Mister sainted mother:
  the big boss (Italian)
  
• Co-mother of one’s child:
  close female friend (Spanish, Puerto Rico)
  
• To throw mothers:
  to curse, swear at (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• The mother of the lamb:
  the real reason for something (Spanish)
  
• To dis-mother:
  to beat up (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• God cannot be everywhere, so he created mothers
  *
  :
  proverb (Hebrew)
  

FATHER

• Oh, you fat father:
  good heavens (German)
  
• A father is a banker provided by nature:
  proverb (French)
  
• Father of two tongues:
  hypocritical, two-faced (Arabic)
  
• Father of moustaches:
  friendly, slightly mocking way of describing (Arabic)
  
• A devil [curse] should enter your father’s father:
  insult (Yiddish)
  
• Without father, mother, or dog that barks for me:
  alone (Spanish)
  Neither father or a son-in-law, nor a brother:
  no relation (Russian)
  

HUSBANDS & WIVES

• Life lord:
  husband (Hindi)
  
• Sister-in-law’s brother:
  husband (auspicious form) (Hindi)
  
• She who sits at [one’s] side:
  wife (Hindi)
  

Giraffe child
Japanese: a prodigy

• Who sits at [her] husband’s left:
  wife (Hindi)
  
• The Holy Inquisition:
  your [inquiring] wife (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• The cricket on the stove:
  a submissive little wife, homebody (German)
  
• Handcuffs:
  the wife (Spanish, Latin America)
  
• War Department:
  ironic term for wife (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• The rabbi’s wife:
  a pompous woman (Yiddish)
  

CHILDREN

• Fruit of heaven:
  offspring (Hindi)
  
• Crystallization of love:
  child (Japanese)
  
• A giraffe child:
  a prodigy (Japanese)
  
• A grain of seed:
  an only child (Japanese)
  
• To eat like a child of God (an orphan):
  to eat fast (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• Even if one puts a child in one’s eye, it doesn’t hurt:
  apple of one’s eye (Japanese)
  
• A daughter of yesterday:
  unexpected, not altogether welcome (Arabic)
  
• A pearl in the palm:
  a beloved daughter (Chinese)
  
• A pearl from an old oyster:
  the birth of a son in later years (Chinese)
  
• The son of a duck is a floater:
  like father like son (Arabic)
  
• Children of well-fed families:
  good-for-nothing sons of the idle rich (Chinese)
  
• An eye of tea:
  playful, mischievous child (Japanese)
  
• The light of a dark house:
  an only son, a beautiful child or person (Hindi)
  
• It is easier to rule a nation than a son:
  proverb (China)
  
• The light of a dark house:
  an only son (Hindi)
  

GRANDKIN

• There’s Grandma for you:
  a fine kettle of fish (Russian)
  
• Tell this to your grandmother:
  I was not born yesterday (Russian)
  
• My grandmother’s taste:
  bad taste (Yiddish)
  
• Grandma’s summer:
  Indian summer (Russian)
  
• Grandmother story:
  fairy tale, unbelievable story (Yiddish)
  
• Grandmother was ambiguous:
  it remains to be seen (Russian)
  
• Because his grandmother smokes:
  for no good reason (Spanish)
  
• Don’t push Grandma into the nettles; she’s not wearing her knickers:
  proverb (French)
  
• A house with an old grandparent harbors a jewel:
  proverb (China)
  
• Eat sweets and play with grandchildren:
  a carefree life in old age (Chinese)
  
• A piece of pleasure:
  grandchild (Yiddish)
  

OTHER KIN

• Burn beanstalks to cook beans:
  fight among brothers (Chinese)
  
• Of the same milk:
  a sister (Hindi)
  
• By a different belly:
  half-siblings with different mothers (Japanese)
  
• Seventh (or tenth) water on a starchy jelly:
  a kissing cousin (Russian)
  
• What the mother-in-law sees:
  superficially clean part of the house (Spanish)
  
• To treat like a stepmother:
  to treat shabbily (German)
  
• A stepmother’s face:
  an unsmiling face (Chinese)
  

An onion shared with a friend tastes like roast lamb
Arabic (Egypt): proverb

• Revenge for the daughter-in-law:
  even the score (Russian)
  
• Bare branches:
  a man without a bride, due to one child policy (Chinese)
  
• An un-housed spirit:
  a man who dies childless (Hindi)
  
• An old schoolboy:
  a bachelor (Yiddish)
  

To fix the cake
Spanish: to patch things up

FRIENDS

• To be made syrup:
  to be friendly and affable (Spanish)
  
• Be on a short leg:
  on friendly terms (Russian)
  
• My crazy one:
  my friend (Spanish, Dominican Republic)
  
• Honeycomb:
  long-term group of friends (Spanish, Dominican Republic)
  
• To be fingernail and flesh:
  to be very close (Spanish)
  
• To eat out of the same plate:
  to be on friendly terms (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• To be fingernail and dirt:
  on friendly terms (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• Carry on bread and salt:
  to be good friends (Russian)
  
• The union of fire and water:
  close friendship (Hindi)
  
• To exchange turbans:
  close friends (Hindi)
  
• Two halves of a gram seed:
  blood brothers (Hindi)
  
• To compare each other’s liver and gall:
  close friends (Japanese)
  
• To get along like buttocks and shirt:
  great friends (French)
  
• The skin matches:
  to get along well (Japanese)
  
• A hair of the moustache:
  an intimate friend (Hindi)
  
• An onion shared with a friend tastes like roast lamb:
  proverb (Arabic, Egypt)
  
• To come for fire:
  to pay a brief visit (Hindi)
  
• Visit rarely, and you will be more loved:
  proverb (Arabic)
  
• He who lends to a friend loses twice:
  proverb (French)
  
• Guests always give pleasure—when they arrive or when they leave:
  proverb (Portuguese)