I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears and Other Intriguing Idioms From Around the World (12 page)

Bang your butt on the ground

S
ADNESS AND HAPPINESS
are emotional states. So are Spain and Italy. Some expressions vividly illustrate differences between cultures. But all cultures also share some. I’m not talking about verbal expressions; I mean facial expressions. As we say in English, what we are feeling is often
written all over our faces,
while Russians are more specific; for them “it is written on the forehead.” Yiddish and Hindi have similar expressions, though in both these cases it’s not your feelings, it’s your fate, that’s on display.

Facial expressions are a key way in which we send information about our emotional states. Though we don’t think of them in quite this way now, Charles Darwin included facial expressions in his definition of language. And he didn’t limit the ability to read them consistently to just humans. He wrote a whole book to record his feelings on the subject,
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal,
*
in which he says, “The young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements.” Idioms capture some of the universality of this connection between faces and feelings. For example, when a Puerto Rican says that someone had “a face like a busy telephone,” it’s not hard to guess that she means that person was angry.

Our ability to non-consciously and rapidly identify other people’s emotional state from their facial expressions can wonderfully be thought of as a form of mind reading. Another way to think of it is that our faces are neuro-transmitters. This sort of neuro-transmitting is one of our earliest pre-linguistic forms of communication. By earliest I mean not just in terms of ancient history. We all still do this pre-linguistic mind-sharing today. As babies we communicate this way. And as Darwin indicated, all of us use a core set of basic facial expressions that convey universal meaning. These have been exhaustively (and painfully
*
) catalogued by Paul Ekman and his colleagues at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF). They developed the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Some of this newly rediscovered facial wisdom can also be found in the timeless wisdom of idioms—for example, the Japanese idiom “one’s cheek gets loose” means to smile, and “to make one’s eyes triangular” means to look angrily at someone.

FACS
¹
breaks all possible facial expressions into 40 or so action units, each of which corresponds to the tightening or relaxation of particular muscles (my favorite is called the “nostril dilator”—which Japanese pay attention to in their idiom “to move the wings of one’s nose incessantly,” meaning to brag or to have a swelled head). The thousands of possible combinations of facial contortions can be
boiled down
into seven categories that are shared by all of us—happiness, sadness,
*
anger, disgust, neutral, fear, and surprise. There is less certainty about the reliable interpretation of indicators of other emotions like shame and contempt. However, the core set are thought to be innate—though they’ve never seen them, people blind from birth still use them. As well as being innate, the core set is at least to some degree involuntary. When you feel one of those emotions, you can’t help but move the relevant facial muscles to the appropriate configuration. It seems we are built to automatically advertise certain emotional states to those around us. We are built to be emotionally “leaky,” to automatically and pre-linguistically share our state of mind.

The adaptive benefits of this emotional leaking have been shown. We are particularly attuned to quickly noticing fearful faces, which we do faster than the 40 milliseconds it takes us to notice happy or neutral ones. We quickly and non-consciously sort out whether someone looks fearful and bring the implied potential threat to the attention of our conscious minds. The effect works with just images of eyes. It seems that in addition to being emotionally leaky, we are built to be emotionally contagious.

The origins and development of human language (language origin-ology) are still an area of heated debate among the relevant experts. Some linguists get very emotional about it. They believe that language emerged from our undeniable urge to expletively express exasperation and other extreme emotions: to “eff” the ineffable. Cursing may have been the precursor of all language, polite or otherwise. Ironically for those skilled in the use of, rather than the study of, language, this view has come to be known as the “poo-poo” theory. Steven Pinker, one of our foremost psycholinguists, subscribes to this view. He politely expresses it thus: “Since swearing involves clearly more ancient parts of the brain, it could be a missing link between animal vocalization and human language.”
²
In his torrent-of-thought-provoking
The Stuff of Thought,
Pinker also notes that brain-damage-ology has been helpful. Sufferers from some brain injuries can have difficulty with language, while their ability to
swear like sailors
can be left entirely intact. That establishes a neuro-anatomical connection between curses and idioms. Pinker says the “survival of swearing in aphasia suggests that taboo epithets are stored prefabricated in the right hemisphere…[which] also can sometimes store idiosyncratic [language elements]”
³
(most of our language processing is done by our left brains).

While some idioms highlight cultural differences and some illustrate similarities, others are just plain bizarre. For example, when English speakers might
die laughing,
a similarly amused Frenchman would “bang his butt on the ground” and an equally tickled Japanese would be at least as uncomfortable in having his “stomach skin distorted” or, worse, might get her “jaw dislocated.” More astoundingly, an equivalently entertained Japanese might “make tea with his navel.” There will be more on talented navel maneuvers in following chapters.

Speaking of bizarre, though we all share a core set of facial expressions—it seems some folks have particularly talented faces. When an English speaker might
fly off the handle,
a similarly aggravated Chinese might display an astonishing ability to “belch smoke from the seven orifices of the head.”

Let’s see what else expressions that demonstrate emotions or states of mind reveal about the minds of people from other states:

Making tea with your navel
Japanese: laughable

from other states:

HAPPY/CONTENT

• A face full of spring air:
  radiant with happiness (Chinese)
  
• With dancing eyebrows and a radiant face:
  enraptured (Chinese)
  
• To be happy as castanets:
  ecstatic (Spanish)
  
• To hang heaven full of violins:
  to be ecstatic (German)
  
• Live like a maggot in bacon:
  be very happy (German)
  
• To fart in silk:
  to be very happy (French)
  
• As happy as a fiancé:
  highest happiness (Russian)
  
• Lamps to burn with ghee/butter:
  living in high style (Hindi)
  
• The end is musk:
  a happy ending (Arabic)
  
• To feel poodle-well:
  to be on top of the world, ecstatic (German)
  
• To lower the outside corners of one’s eyes:
  to be pleased (Japanese)
  

SMILING/LAUGHING

• To peel the teeth:
  to smile (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• Peeled as a banana:
  dying of laughter (Spanish, Puerto Rico)
  
• Bang your butt on the ground:
  die laughing (French)
  
• Makes the chickens laugh:
  hilarious (Russian)
  
• To distort one’s stomach skin:
  to die laughing (Japanese)
  
• To loosen one’s cheek:
  to smile (Japanese)
  
• Making tea with your navel:
  being laughable (Japanese)
  
• To embrace one’s own belly:
  to laugh one’s head off (Japanese)
  
• To dislocate one’s jaw:
  to die laughing (Japanese)
  
• One side painful:
  laugh so hard it hurts (Japanese)
  
• Lizard’s laughter:
  false or forced laughter (Yiddish)
  

SAD/UNHAPPY/SULKY

• To have the cockroach:
  to have the blues (French)
  
• To have tears in your pocket:
  to be easily moved to tears (Italian)
  
• To have fallen ears:
  to be crestfallen (Spanish)
  
• To look like September:
  to have a long face (Russian)
  
• A stepmother’s face:
  a sullen look (Chinese)
  
• To play the insulted liver sausage:
  to sulk (German)
  
• Stand like a watered poodle:
  crestfallen (German)
  
• To loosen the turban:
  to be crestfallen (Hindi)
  
• Addressing the ground:
  dejected (Hindi)
  
• To twist one’s navel:
  to sulk (Japanese)
  
• The front of one’s eyes gets dark:
  feel depressed (Japanese)
  
• Vomit the sound of weakness:
  whine (Japanese)
  
• To walk with a suitcase:
  to be in a bad mood (Spanish, Chile)
  
• With a cloudy face:
  sad (Japanese)
  
• The heart to burn:
  to grieve/mourn (Hindi)
  

With a cloudy face
Japanese: sad

• To lower the ears:
  to give in (Spanish)
  
• To be covered in mud:
  to be defeated (Japanese)
  
• A day of sorrow is longer than a month of joy:
  proverb (China)
  

IRRITATED/ANNOYED/UPSET

• To make music:
  to complain (French)
  
• To make a slice of bread and butter:
  to make a fuss (French)
  
• Let the dolls dance:
  complain (German)
  
• Big ugly bedbug:
  a person who gets angry easily (Spanish, Argentina)
  
• Like a little match:
  quick-tempered (Spanish, Puerto Rico)
  
• Stop climbing on my head:
  stop annoying me (Arabic)
  
• To have the face of bad milk:
  to be in a bad mood (Spanish)
  
• To have a lemon face:
  look annoyed (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• To have a face like a busy telephone:
  to be annoyed (Spanish, Puerto Rico)
  
• To look for someone’s fleas:
  to provoke or irritate (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• Don’t twist my head:
  don’t annoy me (Yiddish)
  
• To pierce the eye:
  to irritate (Hindi)
  
• To not be a pear in sugar:
  to be disagreeable (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• To have bad grape:
  to have a gruff or severe demeanor (Spanish)
  
• A lot of Christmases with no Christmas Eve:
  a bitter person (Spanish, Puerto Rico)
  
• To bend the spiral of hair on the crown of one’s head:
  to be nasty (Japanese)
  
• One’s belly balloons:
  to get frustrated [from keeping quiet] (Japanese)
  
• Where the mountains and rivers end:
  at the end of one’s rope, at wit’s end (Chinese)
  
• To be wool gathering:
  to be at wit’s end (Hindi)
  
• To step on a favorite corn:
  to hit a nerve (Russian)
  

ANGRY

• To leave someone the way God painted the parakeet:
  to make someone mad (Spanish, Nicaragua)
  
• To lose the stirrup:
  to lose one’s temper (Italian and Spanish)
  
• Anger hair points to heaven:
  livid, hopping mad (Japanese)
  
• To have one’s liver twist:
  to get angry (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• To have the mustard rise up:
  to get angry (Spanish, Peru)
  
• Dandruff attack:
  fit, tantrum (Spanish, South America)
  
• Smoke belches from the seven openings on the head:
  fuming angry (Chinese)
  
• To make one’s eyes triangular:
  to look angrily at someone (Japanese)
  
• One’s belly boils over:
  to be furious (Japanese)
  
• To climb up the coconut tree:
  to fly off the handle (French)
  
• To get horns like an animal:
  to get very upset or angry (Spanish, Nicaragua)
  
• To anger one green and blue:
  to be so angry as to see red (German)
  
• To show blue veins:
  to become enraged (Japanese)
  
• Led to a white knee:
  roused to fury (Russian)