I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears and Other Intriguing Idioms From Around the World (18 page)
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Authors: Jag Bhalla
Enlighten Up!
Lakoff sums up the gaps between science and our 18th-century view of mind by calling for a New Enlightenment. Using the tools of the first Enlightenment we can improve our scientific and philosophical understanding of ourselves. The
scientifically correct
now need to join forces with humor’s longstanding position as a weighty counter to the “hegemony of reason.”
6
Plato understood the value of such an alliance; in condoning the use of comedy in his ideal state, he said, “For it is impossible to know serious things without becoming acquainted with the ridiculous.”
ASSORTED HIND THOUGHTS
Play-gerism & Recycling
Paraphrasing Clive James in his astonishing encyclopedia of erudition,
Cultural Amnesia
, false wit consists in quoting from old books.
7
I am guilty of much quoting of others’ wit (play-gerism). I hope, however, I can be considered less guilty in that I have included quotes from new books also. Another way to
vice-a-virtue
this–is that it’s carbon friendly. Much of the wit herein is post-consumer recycled.
On Writing as Combat
Judith Thurman, in her wonderful collection of essays
Cleopatra’s Nose
(so entitled because of Pascal’s joke about how if hers had been shorter, the whole face of history would have been different), describes her experience of writing as “line by line combat.” I wouldn’t dream of putting this meager effort in the same ballpark as hers. But her thought now comes to my attention-deficient disorder-ly mind. Having now attempted to write, it seems my process has been a thought by thought, word by word, phrase by phrase struggle. And that’s before getting to the lines…I am now in even greater awe of real writers.
On Reading, Puns, & Lenient Sentencing
The pun has gotten a very bad rap. It is not the lowest form of wit. Some puns are low cringe-worthy crimes against humor. But many others serve a higher purpose. They are not all just double entendres. My deep ancestors included elaborate punning in the highest of their literary forms. Sanskrit, like English, had an embarrassment of semantic riches. It could be written to incorporate and play on multiple meanings. So that a given sentence or passage could be read to have more than one parallel interpretation. Such poetry was designed to be read and savored in more than one pass. Inspired by my poetic ancestors, I whole-mindedly condone multiple meanings that conspire, with conviction, to serve the same sentence.
On Conversing
Clive James, whose wit I have already borrowed, said, “A writer leaves you everything to say. It is in the nature of the medium to start a conversation within you….” Since I’m not a writer, and certainly not in the sense James meant, it’s
a tall order
to hope that something in these pages started a conversation in you. Still, perhaps one of the idioms in these pages will help you start a fruitful conversation with someone else. Perhaps this gathering of words can rise to the level of small-talk-provoking material, suitable for cocktail party chatter.
On Finifugal and Fini-frugal Gratitude
I dislike endings, but can’t let this one pass without a brief word of gratitude. Thank you for sharing some of your limited and precious time. I hope it has been at least a pleasant pastime (or “thought expeller”).
INTRODUCTION
1.
Ellen Bialystok, Fergus I. M. Craik, Morris Freedman, “Bilingualism as a Protection Against the Onset of Symptoms of Dementia,”
Neuropsychologia
45 (2007), 459–64.
2.
Vicki Leon,
Working IX to V
(New York: Walker and Co., 2007), 90.
3.
Nicholas Ostler,
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
(New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 545.
4.
PBS broadcast. “Charlie Rose,” October 28, 2008.
5.
Clive James,
Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 390.
6.
Daniel Goleman, “Friends for Life: An Emerging Biology of Emotional Healing Essay,” www.newyorktimes.com, October 10, 2006.
7.
Stephen Pinker,
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
(London: Penguin Books, 2007), 131.
8.
William Safire,
The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time: Wit and Wisdom from the Popular Language Column in the New York Times Magazine
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 260.
9.
Geoffrey K. Pullum,
The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 159.
10.
Nicholas Kristof, “Our Racist, Sexist Selves,”
New York Times,
April 6, 2008.
11.
Safire,
The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time,
159.
12.
George Lakoff,
The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain
(New York: Viking, 2008), 232.
13.
John Bargh, John H., Mark Chen, Lara Burrows, “Automaticity of Social Behaviour: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
71 (1996), 230–244; as reported in Gary Kluge,
The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 25.
CHAPTER 1
1.
Mark Liberman, “Darwin and Deacon on Love and Language,” February 14, 2004. Available at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000453.html; or Charles Darwin (1871; 2nd ed. 1879),
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.
2.
Geoffrey Miller,
The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
(New York: Random House, 2001).
3.
C. D. Ankney, “Sex Differences in Relative Brain Size: The Mismeasure of Woman, Too?”
Intelligence
16, 3–4 (1992), 329–36.
4.
Jennifer Conellan, Simon Baron-Cohen, Sally Wheelwright et al., “Sex Differences in Human Neonatal Social Perception,”
Infant Behavior and Development
23 (2001), 113–18.
CHAPTER 2
1.
Howard Rheingold,
They Have a Word for It
(Tarcher, 1988), 90.
2.
Angela Friederici, Manuela Friedrich, Anne Christophe, “Brain Responses in 4-month-old Infants Are Already Language Specific,
Current Biology
17:17 (14), July 2007, 1208-11.
3.
Barbara Wallraff,
Word Fugitives: In Pursuit of Wanted Words.
(New York, HarperCollins, 2006), 4.
4.
Roy Blount, Jr.,
Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words and Combinations Thereof
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 98.
5.
Safire,
The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time,
296.
6.
Cabinet Magazine and David Greenberg,
Presidential Doodles: Two Centuries of Scribbles, Scratches, Squiggles, and Scrawls from the Oval Office
(New York: Basic Books, 2007), 199.
7.
Jonathan Haidt,
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
(New York: Basic Books, 2006), 54.
CHAPTER 3
1.
Christine Kenneally,
The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language
(New York: Viking/Penguin, 2007).
2.
Benedict Carey, “Alex, a Parrot Who Had a Way With Words, Dies,” www.newyorktimes.com, September 10, 2007.
3.
Kenneally,
The First Word,
95.
4.
Miller,
The Mating Mind,
54.
5.
Jonah Lehrer,
Proust Was a Neuroscientist
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 69–70.
CHAPTER 4
1.
Nicholas Kristof, “Our Racist, Sexist Selves.”
2.
Martin Seligman,
Authentic Happiness. Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment
(New York: Free Press, 2004), 5.
3.
Richard Wiseman,
Quirkology: How We Discover the Big Truths in Small Things
(New York: Basic Books, 2007), 176.
CHAPTER 5
1.
Tom M. Mitchell, Svetlana V. Shinkareva, Andrew Carlson et al., “Predicting Human Brain Activity Associated with the Meanings of Nouns,”
Science
320 (2008), 1191–95.
2.
“Scientists Watch as Listener’s Brain Predicts Speakers’ Words,”
Science News Daily,
September 15, 2008.
3.
Philip Davis,
Shakespeare Thinking
(London, New York: Continuum), 92.
4.
Philip Davis, “The Shakespeared Brain,”
The Reader
23 (2006), 39–43.
5.
M. Oliveri, L. Romero, C. Papagno, “Left But not Right Temporal Involvement in Opaque Idiom Comprehension: A Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Study,”
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
16 (2004), 848–55; Monica-Zita Zempleni, Marco Haverkort, Remco Renken, “Evidence for Bilateral Involvement in Idiom Comprehension: an fMRI Study,”
NeuroImage
34 (2006), 1280–91; Leonor J. Romero Lauro, Marco Tettamanti, Stefano F. Cappa et al., “Idiom Comprehension: A Prefrontal Task?”
Cerebral Cortex
18 (2008), 162–70.
6.
Maryanne Wolf,
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
(New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 3, 5.
CHAPTER 6
1.
Henry Hitchings,
The Secret Life of Words
(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), 136, 137.
2.
David Crystal,
Words, Words, Words
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 59.
3.
Bill Bryson,
The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
(New York: William Morrow, 1991), 13.
4.
Ostler,
Empires of the Word
, 557.
5.
Howard Rheingold,
They Have a Word for It,
67.
CHAPTER 7
1.
“Language Without Numbers: Amazonian Tribe Has No Word to Express ‘One,’ Other Numbers,”
Science News Daily,
July 15, 2008.
2.
Jim Holt, “Numbers Guy,”
The New Yorker,
March 3, 2008.
3.
Ibid.
4.
Pinker,
The Stuff of Thought,
114.
5.
Michael S. Gazzaniga,
Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique
(New York: HarperCollins, Ecco, 2008), 96.
6.
Ibid., 96.
CHAPTER 8
1.
Jack Hitt, “Say No More,” www.newyorktimes.com, February 29, 2004.
2.
Charles Darwin,
Physiognomy. Constitution of Man,
Number IX (1874).
3.
Lehrer,
Proust Was a Neuroscientist,
77-88.
4.
Pinker,
The Stuff of Thought,
195.
5.
Ammon Shea,
Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages
(Perigee Trade, 2008).
CHAPTER 9
1.
“How Grue Is Your Valley?” www.economist.com, January 18, 2007.
2.
Roxanne Khamsi, “Russian Speakers Get the Blues,” www.newscientist.com, May 1, 2007.
3.
A. Franklin, G. V. Drivonikou, L. Bevis, “Categorical Perception of Color Is Lateralized to the Right Hemisphere in Infants, but to the Left Hemisphere in Adults,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
, USA 105 (2008), 3221–25.
4.
Jim Holt,
Stop Me if You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 104.
5.
“All of Orwell,”
The New Yorker,
1946; reprinted in Clive James,
As of This Writing: The Essential Essays 1968–2002
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 284.
6.
Christopher Hitchens,
Why Orwell Matters
(New York: Basic Books, 2002), 11.
7.
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,
Horizon–GB,
April 1946; reprinted in George Orwell,
Why I Write
(London: Penguin Books, 2004), 102.
CHAPTER 10
1.
Malcolm Gladwell,
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
(New York: Little, Brown, 2005), 197–212.
2.
Stephen Pinker, “Holy @&%*!”,
Wired Magazine,
August 21. 2007.
3.
Pinker,
The Stuff of Thought,
334.
CHAPTER 11
1.
Douglas Caldwell, “University Panel Discussion on the Nature of Work in the United States,”
Sacramento Business Journal,
February 28, 2003.
2.
Lehrer,
Proust Was a Neuroscientist,
76.
3.
P. J. O’Rourke,
On The Wealth of Nations
(New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2006), 36.
4.
Ibid., 198.
5.
James Buchan,
The Authentic Adam Smith: His Life and Ideas,
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 10.
6.
Ibid., 56.
7.
Keith Jensen, Josep Call, Michael Tomasello, “Chimpanzees Are Rational Maximizers in an Ultimatum Game,”
Science
316 (2007), 107–109.
CHAPTER 12
1.
Robin Cook, “Robin Cook’s Chicken Tikka Masala Speech,”
The Guardian,
April 20, 2001.
2.
Hitchings,
The Secret Life of Words,
144.
3.
Ibid.
4.
Editors,
The DailyCandy Lexicon: Words That Don’t Exist but Should
(Virgin Books, 2008), 43.
CHAPTER 13
1.
Clive Thompson, “The Eyes of Honesty,” www.newyorktimes.com, December 10, 2006.
2.
Haidt,
The Happiness Hypothesis,
64.
CHAPTER 14
1.
W. T. Fitch, M. D. Hauser, N. Chomsky, “The Evolution of the Language Faculty: Clarifications and Implications,”
Cognition
97 (2005), 179-210.
2.
Ray Jackendoff, Stephen Pinker, “The Nature of the Language Faculty and Its Implications for the Evolution of Language,”
Cognition
97 (2005), 211-25.
3.
Bill Bryson,
The Mother Tongue,
236.
4.
Alan Metcalf,
Predicting New Words
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 129–33.
5.
“All of Orwell,” reprinted in James,
As of This Writing,
284.
6.
Lakoff,
The Political Mind.
7.
Clive James,
Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 389.
