A book on international idioms reveals much about our national characters

It was my French flatmate who alerted me to the clunkiness of British idioms. She taught me tenir la chandelle – the eloquently captured French idiom for the third wheel on a date. The image of a third person holding up a candle while two lovebirds enjoy a dimly lit dinner is perfectly rational. You can imagine Miranda Hart doing it for Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy.

The English equivalent – playing gooseberry – is frumpy and seemingly obscure. The etymology is less allegorical here: the “gooseberry” is the unwanted guest; it was once synonymous with the devil, or a bored chaperone idly picking bitter fruit while two lovers sneak off to expose a daring bit of ankle to one another in a nook of the orchard.

Said French roomie fell victim to my idiomatic mischief making. She was still learning metaphorical phrases when The Inbetweeners was on TV. After some drinks, I told her the outrageously crude phrase used by the randy teenage boys in the series – “frothing at the gash” – meant you were starving. I came unstuck weeks later when, in front of mutual friends waiting for dinner to be served, she remarked: “I am so ‘ungry, I am – ‘ow you say? – frothing at my gash!”

No wonder, then, that in a recent book exploring the quirky world of international idioms the French ones are the best. Idiomantics, by Philip Gooden and Peter Lewis, lists each peculiar idiom by thematic category alongside its host country. They range from bonkers to richly evocative. A fine example of the latter is avoir un coeur d’artichaut – to have the heart of an artichoke. It means to be fickle in love – as the artichoke heart has several layers.

The French love foodie idioms. The authors highlight those that are “just so quintessentially French”: retombler comme un soufflé (to sink like a soufflé) is to run out of steam. Chanter comme une casserole (to sing like a saucepan) is to sing terribly. Entre la poire et le fromage (between the pear and the cheese) is an off-the-record remark; when the palate-cleansing pear was served at a medieval meal, drinking began and people divulged more freely while awaiting the cheeseboard. My favourite, pédaler dans la choucroute (to pedal in sauerkraut), is to get nowhere fast. Naturally, some élan is lost in translation.

Life’s existential futility is melodramatically reflected by French idiomatic phrases. Métro, boulot, dodo (underground, work, sleep) captures the daily grind. The authors express its power as articulately as the idiom itself: “The rhymed endings of the three juxtaposed two-syllable words only serve to underscore the stultifying, inescapable monotony of it all.” Quelle horreur! Meanwhile, avoir un cinq à sept (to have a five-to-seven) means to have a post-work affair and return to your spouse by evening. That’s one way of alleviating the monotony. Wasting time on a pointless task is peigner la giraffe (combing the giraffe) – which could either relate to Zarafa, the first giraffe on French soil, who had four keepers, one tasked solely with grooming her coat; or a euphemism for self-pleasure owing to the phallic nature of a giraffe’s neck. Either way, it’s fabulous.

Even insulting idioms are delivered with typical French panache. To speak French like a Spanish cow is to do so very badly. “The English have landed” or “to have the English” means to have your period: Napoleon’s army were defeated by the despised, red-coat wearing English. How xenophobic, how crass – but how utterly brilliant.

One of the book’s most revealing finds is how languages express the same idea through different idioms. Pigs might fly translates as “when hens have teeth” in French; “when donkeys fly” in Italian; “when frogs grow hair” in Spanish; “when a cow coughs” in Portuguese; and “when fish climb trees” in Turkish. Some idioms can only be satisfactorily translated by another idiom: “to have a spider on the ceiling” or “to have a little bicycle in the head” in French means to have a screw loose/be as mad as a box of frogs.

There are some slightly grim examples. “Basket case” (US) is used to describe something utterly dysfunctional because it referred to soldiers who had all four limbs amputated. A pernicious phrase, which this blog has made the case against using. Creepily misogynistic but “in purely linguistic terms, it’s snappy and inventive” is the German Von hinten Lyzeum, von verne museum (“from behind, a girl’s school, from the front a museum”.) The worn out “mutton dressed as lamb” (its closest translation) was given fresh breath in English when “Whitney dressed as Britney” entered into popular parlance.

Idiomantics teaches that other languages can be just as idiosyncratic as ours. So in the Netherlands, a “monkey sandwich story” is an urban legend. If you “draw the arse card” in Germany, you’ve been given a bum deal. In America, a “Mexican breakfast” is a cigarette and water, while a “Mexican jeep” is a donkey.

What of the best of British? Aptly, one of our best is “sweet FA”. Originally, FA stood for Fanny Adams, – an eight-year-old murdered in 1867. Sailors joked that the Royal Navy’s tinned mutton contained the remains of “sweet Fanny Adams”. The handy acronym lends itself to the modern expletive revision.

George Orwell’s first rule of writing in Politics and the English Language is: “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” How refreshing that we can ditch our clunky, hackneyed idioms and start doing what we’ve always done so well: borrowing from other countries.

via Media: Mind your language | theguardian.com http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2013/jan/04/mind-your-language-idioms