Don't Throw The Baby Out, Just Yet

     If you were a foreigner visiting North American shores for the first time you'd likely think these colonists are “off their rockers”, and to some degree, you'd be right. Not because we stood up from our rocking chair to fetch another beer, but because our language is chock full of expressions that, to the untrained ear, sound preposterous.

     Expressions, sayings and cliches are dished out in our vocabularies like trimmings around a Thanksgiving Turkey. Take for example the following “little ditty”, written explicitly to drive home my point.

     “Aha! The cat's out of the bag!” Harry announced triumphantly.

     “You've been eavesdropping, haven't you?” Lucy recoiled, beside herself with embarrassment.

     “Come now dear,” Harry drew her into his embrace, “why the crocodile tears? Surely, you realize that I'm pulling your leg. Make no bones about it, my dear, I wear my heart on my sleeve when I tell you that there is no rhyme or reason for your dismay. Did you really expect me to fly off the handle?”

     Harry sipped from his Brandy glass, his Adam's apple bobbing with pleasure. He was already three sheets to the wind and would be feeling somewhat under the weather by morning light.

     “I've been racking my brain trying to decide how to spill the beans, Harry.” She finally confessed.

     “Well then,” he goaded, “you might well give me the whole kit and caboodle. What's been eating you?”

     Lucy hesitated. She could pass the buck. It was, after all, April Fools. She had breezed through this one so far, but just by the skin of her teeth.

     Have you ever thought about how often you replace everyday Webster-endorsed words with something learned from the school yard smart-aleck. You might just hear yourself saying, “Son of a gun!”

     Idioms are common place in our everyday language and are often metaphorical in nature. They serve to make our language more colorful. But where did they come from?

     Many of the expressions used today find their origins hundreds of years ago in Saxon times of England and have intriguing explanations to their inception in the English language. For answers, I turned to a book titled “Why Do We Say It?, produced by Castle Publishers. Let's take some of the above examples and unearth their origins.

     The cat's out of the bag. It was a custom for farmers to bring a suckling pig to market in a bag. Sometimes, however, a farmer would substitute a cat for the pig. If the towns person was foolish enough to buy without looking into the bag he was cheated out of his money. To let the cat out of the bag meant the deceit was uncovered.

     Eavesdropping. Early English estate owners could not build their homes right up to the property line. They were required to leave a space for the drip from the eaves. This space soon came to be called the “eavesdrip”. An eavesdropper was someone who placed themselves within the eavesdrip to overhear a conversation from within.

     Under the weather. A greenhorn aboard a ship who feels seasick seeks shelter from the wind by crouching down beside the bulwarks – under their protection – on the “weather” or windy side of the ship.

     Beside himself. The ancients believed that soul and body could part and that under great emotional stress the soul would actually leave the body. When this happened, a person was “beside himself”.

     Skin of his teeth. The expression is a literal translation from the Hebrew text of the Book of Job. Since a person's teeth have no skin, for him to get by “by the skin of his teeth” is to get by with no margin at all.

     Without rhyme or reason. Some poems have no sense to them but at least have “rhyme”. Some prose is awkward but at least has “reason”. When these two qualifiers are missing there is no “rhyme or reason”.

     Shakespeare, too, was responsible for adding panache to the English language with phrases like: “all's well that ends well”, “fight fire with fire”, “in a pickle”, “neither a borrower nor a lender be”, “there's method in my madness” and “wild goose chase”.

     But not all academia are partial to the use of dated cliches, as noted by famous English novelist and journalist, George Orwell.

     “Most people...would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it,” says Orwell. “Our civilization is decadent and our language must inevitably share in the same collapse. Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. [...] There is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.”

     If you're like me, though, you enjoy the flavor these time-tested expressions bring to a conversation. They provide a metaphor in place of an ordinary word to evoke a mental image and drive the description home. And (if English is your native tongue) without requiring explanation, for we all use them.

     A man can be drunk or he can be “three sheets to the wind”. In the latter, he is a drunk flapping ridiculously about like loose sails on a ship; out of control.

     One can be sad, or they can “have the blues”, haunted by a “blue devil” apparition once believed to appear to people in times of delirium.

     Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged. It is the skin of a living thought and may vary in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.”

     So “a tip of the hat” to fanciful phrases that dance among our diction. To throw them away might well be “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”.