I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears and Other Intriguing Idioms From Around the World (8 page)

LEGS & FEET

• To be someone’s leg:
  dating (Spanish, Chile)
  
• Stretch your legs the length of your carpet:
  live within your means (Arabic)
  
• One’s legs stick out:
  exceeding one’s budget or income (Japanese)
  
• Are you standing on one leg?:
  Are you in a hurry? (Yiddish)
  
• Be on a short leg:
  on friendly terms (Russian)
  
• To reveal the legs of a horse:
  to show one’s true colors (Japanese)
  
• One’s hips are gone:
  to be a coward (Japanese)
  
• To clap the palms on the thighs:
  to challenge or prepare to fight (Hindi)
  
• Press under the thigh:
  keep under control (Hindi)
  
• To mingle each other’s knees:
  an intimate talk (Japanese)
  
• To get knee to knee:
  an intimate talk (Japanese)
  
• My knees are laughing:
  to be unsteady (Japanese)
  
• Gnaw one’s parent’s shin:
  sponge off one’s parent (Japanese)
  
• To step on the same spot with the second foot:
  to hesitate (Japanese)
  

To write with the feet
Italian: to have poor penmanship

• Foot-licker:
  a sycophant (Italian)
  
• To write with the feet:
  to have poor penmanship (Italian)
  
• To live on a wide foot:
  to live in grand style (Russian)
  
• To live on a large foot:
  in grand style (German)
  
• Foot nectar:
  water from washing the feet of a respected person (Hindi)
  
• To lick the soles of the feet of:
  to ingratiate oneself (Hindi)
  
• To look at someone’s feet:
  to take unfair advantage of a weakness (Japanese)
  
• To throw a foot:
  to shake a leg, to dance (Spanish, Cuba)
  

Visiting Mr. Rock
Spanish: to urinate

• Feet, why do I love you?:
  said when fleeing danger (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• Apply henna to the feet:
  be reluctant to go anywhere, or do anything (Hindi)
  
• To worship the left foot of someone:
  to acknowledge someone’s superiority (Hindi)
  

OTHER IDIOMS INVOLVING BODIES AND BODY PARTS AND BODILY FUNCTIONS

• To take off one’s own skin:
  to give someone some help (Japanese)
  
• One’s blood makes noise:
  to get excited (Japanese)
  
• A feeling of vomiting blood:
  being very determined (Japanese)
  
• To turn blood white:
  to grow cold or indifferent (Hindi)
  
• Like blood-cupping on a dead body:
  useless, futile (Yiddish)
  
• Insect acid runs through one’s body:
  the creeps (Japanese)
  
• To change the fishes’ water:
  to urinate (Spanish, Costa Rica)
  
• To visit Mr. Rock:
  to urinate (Spanish)
  
• Go defecate in the ocean:
  Get lost! (Yiddish)
  
• Baloney:
  acronym for “bothering someone’s balls for no reason” (Hebrew)
  
• To de-testicle:
  to ruin, mess up (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• A spot for crying:
  a weakness (Japanese)
  
• Not blow in one’s own moustache:
  not give a damn (Russian)
  
• Pluck the moustaches of:
  to teach a painful lesson, to humble (Hindi)
  

Stinking hair
Japanese: foreigner

Oranges to China

N
OT ALL HUMANKIND
is our kind. Unkind though the thought may be, us-ness and them-ness is baked into us. And you guessed it; language can tell us how basic those base instincts are. Psychologists now have language lenses that can peer deeply into what we feel about those we don’t consider our peers.

Implicit Association Tests
*
can explicitly measure the strength of our associations with positive and negative language and our non-conscious views of members of other groups (genders, races, nationalities, etc.). Each test involves sorting a set of words or pictures into one of two categories, as quickly as possible. The test measures the average time it takes, down to the millisecond level. Words that go against the grain of your implicit associations will take longer to access and will hence be slower to classify, and vice versa. That’s just startling (or, as the Germans might say “knocks the strongest Inuit from the sled”). These tests have now been taken by millions of people, and the news isn’t very
politically correct
. The results show that most people have some race, gender, and age-related biases—even
PC
types who think of themselves as not harboring any biases. This sort of group identification is another example of an evolved characteristic that no longer has adaptive benefit.

Whatever your implicit views of foreigners, the explicit purpose of this book is to provide easy access to some of the wonders of their languages. In his great book on the history of English,
The Secret Life of Words
, Henry Hitchings also
dips his toe
into issues of language leakiness. He quotes the views of a 16th-century French poet who believed that language could only be improved by the “artifice and industry of men” and hence that it was our duty to ennoble our own tongue with the “ornament and excellence of other languages.”
¹
Hitchings also quotes a slightly later Englishman who wrote “the most renowned of other nations have entrusted [England] with the rarest Jewelles of their lipps perfection.”

The English seem to have responded to that call admirably, having welcomed linguistic jewels from 350 languages. David Crystal in
Words, Words, Words
reports that only 20 percent of English’s current word stock comes from Olde Englishe.
²
The rest are new coinages or the linguistic coin of other realms. Bill Bryson in his magnificent survey
The Mother Tongue
notes that this mélange has left English with richer lexical resources, having around 200,000 words in common usage, as compared to 180,000 in German and a relatively impoverished if comparatively purer 100,000
³
in French. I’m hoping that this book can, in a small way, contribute to the wholesale jewel thievery that has characterized the progress of English. Perhaps one or two of these
new-to-you
stock phrases may
strike you
as worthy of inclusion in your own word stock.

All un-isolated languages are a
melting-pot-luck
of ingredients of the choicest and catch-iest kinds. This kind of language sharing has been going on for as long as peoples of different tongues have been coming across each other. Frequently, though, the sharing hasn’t always been so entirely kind. As Hitchings puts it, language mixing is often a result of “one culture chafing against another.” This cultural chafing has often been extreme, involving war and conquest. English still bears the scars of its many skirmishes. That “sk” pairing came with the Nordic raiders and has stayed. As Hitchings also points out, sometimes language change has involved conquests of a different sort: “Nothing more urgently accelerates the need to communicate than” romantic desire.

As will be evident from the idiom lists in this book, different languages have different personalities. Nicholas Ostler, in his exuberantly erudite and encyclopedic language history,
Empires of the Word,
says: “Each language has its own color and flavor…we have glimpsed some of the distinctive traits: Arabic’s austere grandeur and egalitarianism; Chinese and Egyptian’s unshakeable self-regard; Sanskrit’s luxuriating classifications and hierarchies; Greek’s self-confident innovation leading to self-obsession and pedantry; Latin’s civic sense; Spanish’s rigidity, cupidity and fidelity; French’s admiration of rationality; and English’s admiration of business acumen.”
⁴
As noted earlier, some believe English has a particular comic richness. Others have noted that English is heavy on downtoners–words that soften the meanings of surrounding words–enabling greater use of indirectness.

The Japanese take indirectness to very much further fields. Howard Rheingold in his exquisite book,
They Have a Word For It,
mentions a word expressing exactly that.
⁵
Haragei means “visceral, indirect, largely non verbal communication.” Which he describes further as, “Direct verbal communication the way we use it in the West is generally shunned. Nuances, silences, gestures, facial expression are much more important…. One Japanese can understand what another is trying to communicate by closely observing posture, facial expressions, the length and timing of silences, and the various ‘meaningless’ sounds uttered by the other person.”

Before delving into the use of country references in idioms, I need again to apologize in advance and ask you
not to shoot the messenger
. Many of the following idioms involving countries and peoples express negative stereotypes. So I’ll omit further commentary. However, before getting into the lists, I will mention one stereotype that the French have, captured in their expression “to be from Birmingham. This hits close to home, since I grew up near there. It means to be utterly boring. Just to be clear that “Birmingham” is in England, not Alabama.

ON INCOMPREHENSION: AS WE WOULD SAY, IT’S ALL GREEK TO ME…

• For me this is Arabic:
  incomprehensible (Italian)
  
• It’s Chinese:
  incomprehensible (French)
  
• In Chinese:
  incomprehensible (Spanish)
  
• Chinese grammar:
  incomprehensible (Russian)
  
• I only understand train station:
  incomprehensible (German)
  
• All I hear is the word salad:
  incomprehensible (German)
  

SPEAKING OF GREEKS…

• To do the Greek:
  to cheat, be a card shark (French)
  
• To do the Indian:
  to steal (Italian)
  
• To English someone:
  to fleece, trick, steal from (French)
  
• Person from the Sultan’s tent [moor]:
  liar (Spanish, Venezuela)
  
• Person from Morocco:
  a lie, con, scam (Spanish, Venezuela)
  
• Chinese story:
  big lie, fishy story (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• To build a Turk:
  to make up phony stories (German)
  
• To Caribbean:
  to dupe (Spanish, Venezuela)
  
• Perfidious Albion:
  untrustworthy (French)
  

AT THE OTHER END OF THE SCALES OF JUSTICE–TO BE FAIR OR EVENHANDED

• Go Roman:
  go Dutch, split evenly (Italian)
  
• American style:
  go Dutch (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• To make separate cash registers:
  to go Dutch (German)
  

OTHER COUNTRY & PEOPLE IDIOMS

• Golden country:
  United States of America (Yiddish)
  
• To discover America:
  say something obvious (Italian and Russian)
  
• American auction:
  a Dutch auction (Flanders, Belgium)
  
• Swedish curtains:
  jail bars [Swedes make good steel] (German)
  
• To be the Scottish shower:
  to blow hot and cold (Spanish)
  
• To sweat Chinese ink:
  to work very hard (Spanish)
  
• That knocks the strongest Eskimo from the sled:
  it’s too much (German)
  
• Oranges from China:
  no way, nothing doing (Spanish)
  
• Grandma’s summer:
  Indian summer (Russian)
  
• A cad can’t become a Polish landowner:
  a leopard can’t change its spots (Russian)
  
• English key:
  monkey wrench (Spanish)
  
• The land of the roast beefs:
  England (French)
  
• To take English leave:
  to take unauthorized time off (French)
  
• To take a French leave:
  to go without saying goodbye (Spanish)
  
• To be drunk as an English sailor:
  to be completely drunk (Italian)
  
• To drink like a Cossack:
  to be drunk (Spanish)
  
• To do the Portuguese:
  to avoid paying (Italian)
  
• A German argument:
  quarrel for no good reason (French)
  
• To be a Bedouin:
  to be unsophisticated (Italian)
  
• To swear like a Turk:
  to swear a blue streak (Italian)
  
• In the Turkish style:
  rudely (French)
  
• Turk’s head:
  scapegoat or fall guy (Spanish)
  
• To be as strong as a Turk:
  to be strong as an ox (French)
  
• Play the Indian:
  play the fool (Spanish)
  
• Play the Swede:
  play dumb (Spanish)
  
• Stinking hair:
  foreigner (Japanese)
  
• Big polenta eater:
  Northern Italian (Italian)
  
• Big dirt guy, peasant:
  Southern Italian (Italian)
  
• To speak French like a Spanish cow:
  to speak with a poor accent (French)
  
• A pimple:
  Hungarian (Czech)
  
• Cockroach:
  Frenchman (German)
  
• Lice:
  Spaniards (French)
  
• The French disease:
  syphilis (Italian)
  

One hand cannot hold two watermelons
Iranian: one thing at a time