Hear, hear! Talking English idioms that really take the cake with Anatoly Liberman.
To go the whole hog.
Anatole Liberman:As merry as a pizmo.
Ari Hoptman:Fit as a fiddle.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:Before you could say Jack Robinson.
Anatole Liberman:As perked as a pear monger.
Ari Hoptman:So I don't know him from Adam's off Ox.
Anatole Liberman:Draining cats and dogs, peeing through the nose, and all those strange things which no one seems to know anything about. We have met here today to discuss the book recently published by the University of Minnesota Press. Take my word for it. There is an idiom in the title, and it's all about idioms because the book is about idioms. There is a subtitle here, a dictionary of English idioms, and it is a dictionary of English idioms.
Anatole Liberman:But before we begin to speak about idioms, I think it would be good if I introduced all three of us to the world at large. I'm Anatole Liberman from the University of of Minnesota, and I'm the author of this book. My friends today, professor Larry Mitchell and and doctor Ari Hochman, have collaborated with me on the major etymological project of my life. And Larry's name is on the cover of a of a dictionary, and Ari's on the cover of a bibliography. Both books have been published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Anatole Liberman:So it's not that we are simply together to chat about things which interest us in some way. We're professionally interested in etymology and in in origin of words, and we are all three specialists in language history. So that that is the reason why this team exists. That is as much as I can say about about introductions unless you want to add something, Ari. You wanted to add something to my introduction?
Ari Hoptman:No. No. You said it all very nicely.
Anatole Liberman:No. No. No. Because I thought the expression on your face No.
Ari Hoptman:No. You said we just were down to three people gathered to chat about fun things. I said, oh, well well, I thought we were.
Anatole Liberman:Exactly what I'm going to do. I'm going to to talk about fun things. And, the main thing is that, all three have read the entire book. Well, I have read it because I had no chance not to read it. I've written it.
Anatole Liberman:And Larry and Ari were kind enough to read it. Though reading a whole dictionary is probably another tedious task, so I'm very grateful to them. But we're here to discuss one important thing. To what extent is such a book interesting to the world at large, to specialists and to nonspecialists who is going to read it? I am not an objective critic because I know the book by heart.
Anatole Liberman:And since I know the book by heart, I have lost the emotional contact with it that that made me write it. But you, Larry, and you are you have recently read the book, so you are not yet bored by it or with it. And this is a very good thing, So you can certainly say something about it. So what do you think? There are many questions really.
Anatole Liberman:Is it a readable book? Is it a book, or is it only a reference tool as they say? Is it something that people will read and enjoy? Is it something that goes above and over what has been published along the same lines? What do you think the future of this book is?
J. Lawrence Mitchell:Well, I let me say right away, in terms of the the reading part of it, I wouldn't characterize it by saying I I read the book. I jumped in at the deep end, I would say. That is I looked up something right away. So I had something in mind, and I look it up. Then I I'm moved from there, moving back and forth, in entries.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:So it's not a book that I would start by reading at the beginning under the letter a and go through the z. Although I might see look to see if there was anything on the z or zed as we might call it. So jumping in the deep end, I think, is what most people will do here. And once they're in, they'll want to swim.
Anatole Liberman:Not sink, which is a very good thing.
Ari Hoptman:And I, opened it up at random and, just looked at what I found. I just pointed my finger randomly and said, well, let's take a look at this. Some of the idioms I knew, some of the idioms I didn't know, they were all fun. They were all interesting. Even the ones that I I had never heard about, I was strangely curious to know the etymology of, if that sentence was grammatical.
Ari Hoptman:I was very close, anyway.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:Yeah. I think for many people, the the issue will be which ones that they know and which ones they don't know so that they want to start with the ones they know, I imagine.
Anatole Liberman:Very good. Thank you. And, now that you have heard all of us, perhaps, a short comment on three different accents will not be entirely out of place. As you have heard, all of us speak English, but somehow in a different way or in different ways. So let me, let me explain how it how it happened.
Anatole Liberman:Now Larry was born in Scotland, but was educated not in Scotland. And his is a British accent, which all my life I've been trying to imitate with very little, success. That is every time when I ask someone who was born in England, when I am in England, would you take me for an Englishman? The answer was a resounding no under no circumstances, which is extremely disappointing because I learned English from, from the BBC seventy or eighty or ninety years ago, the way they spoke English at that time. But there is something wrong, with my English.
Anatole Liberman:There is no local accent. You will never guess whether I'm from Devonshire or from Cambridgeshire, and, that is probably why I'm never taken for an Englishman. I was, born and educated in the Former Soviet Union and learned English from my English teachers who had never heard an Englishman in their lives. So I was the third or the fourth generation of Russian English speakers. Now I've spent more than half a century in The United States and, almost half a century in The United States and haven't Americanized my accent because, that would turn me into a laughingstock.
Anatole Liberman:And so I decided I will stick to my accent. Now Ari, was born in the Midwest and has his absolutely obvious cultured, cultivated accent that he uses on stage because he's also a a well known popular actor.
Ari Hoptman:I I should say when I go back to my hometown, which is Detroit, people think I'm from someplace else. So I'm my accent has no home. It's Midwestern, and it's neutral, but it I I I tell the story frequently about how I applied for a job once in Detroit, and the person who took my paperwork said, well, wherever you're from, you really kept your accent. And I said, I'm I'm one of you. I grew up just down the street.
Ari Hoptman:So I don't know what happened to me. I wasn't trying to, fool anyone, but, something happened.
Anatole Liberman:Well, I think you should have used some idiom, to prove, that you're really, from Detroit. Well, now that you know so many idioms, that won't be too difficult. So now that you know who we are, all three of us, it brings me to another point. We may call ourselves an international team to a certain extent. One born in Britain, One born, in The United States, and one born in Russia, and all of us interested in English professionally so and also because we love the language.
Anatole Liberman:The book is called, of course, a dictionary of English idioms. What do you think? Is it truly British? Is it English? What is the appeal of the book as far as its geography is concerned?
Anatole Liberman:I also have my own opinion, but I would, first of all, like to know what the two of you think.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:Well, my impression of it is that, if anything, it leans towards British usage in the number of examples. They're probably more drawn from British, speech than from American, but that's a function of the world at large to some extent. But there are other cases where I couldn't say offhand whether the, particular idiom is British or American, in part because I have become so used to speaking to Americans and speaking in America and reading that way. So take take the example of touch wood. Some people say touch wood, and some people say knock on wood.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:If you ask me without having the dictionary by my side which one was British and which one was American, I couldn't tell you offhand because I've assimilated both of them, and I could say either of them. So I think that that makes for me a very interesting aspect of the book itself is the way in which you can find yourself or lose yourself in the locutions and their origin.
Ari Hoptman:And I think reading as an American, the ones that I don't recognize, I automatically assume to be both British and classy. So, I was thinking, oh, this must be from some very fine works of literature that I haven't read, but I want to know. It doesn't dissuade me from wanting to know more about the, about the phrase. Actually, I want to know more about it because I think, well, I should be a bit more educated.
Anatole Liberman:Well, I have have almost the same, attitude toward it. Both of you, I think, have mentioned something which partly amused me. You said there are many idioms there which you don't know. I would like to say that 80% of the idioms that I discussed in the book were totally new to me. Is that a drawback or an asset?
Anatole Liberman:So many, of these idioms are truly local. You know that their discussion goes back to some discussion in notes and queries and other popular magazines. Very often, I write, no one knew this expression. People would ask, what's the origin of this phrase? And no one knew this expression.
Anatole Liberman:To me, these expressions were a great source of both amusement and, enlightenment, because, of course, it's like reading Webster's dictionary. You don't expect to know all the words. Who knows all these words? Also, who needs those words?
Ari Hoptman:But as a great man once said, the the the one of the great things about the dictionary is that it has all the other books in it.
Anatole Liberman:And that is true. That's also true here.
Ari Hoptman:I thought that was gonna be funnier than it actually turned out to be. But you mentioned notes and queries, and you mentioned notes and queries in the same sentence with the word popular. And popular works like notes and queries, but maybe you can mention maybe you can describe what notes and queries is or was.
Anatole Liberman:I expect that someone from the editorial board of notes and queries will give me a medal, because for forty years or so, I have been singing the virtues of notes and queries, have been quoting, citing, describing, and admiring notes and queries. Notes and queries appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century and became wildly, incomprehensibly popular. That is we cannot even imagine how popular it was. It's a beautiful periodical. It was biweekly, which was something like, our Internet today.
Anatole Liberman:You wanted you have a coin, for example, and it's a strange coin. You don't know where it is from, and you are not quite sure what the inscription means, so we describe it and send a letter to know some queries. Two weeks later, three people from Great Britain will tell you that they know exactly what this coin is because they have another coin of the same type, and you will be perfectly satisfied. Or you have a quotation, and there was no Google. You forget where this quotation is from.
Anatole Liberman:Does anyone know? Yes. Yes. Five people know it, and 10 people use it every day. And so it goes.
Anatole Liberman:Absolutely everything, a miscellany of multifarious things, useful or useless, stupid or enlightened, more enlightened than stupid. And among many other things, people asked one another about the origin of words and idioms. And, of course, to know the origin of a word, you have to be a specialist. That is why you find a lot of silliness there. But the best scholars in the world replied to the questions.
Anatole Liberman:There was, for example, the great Walter Skeet, the constantly irascible Walter Skeet who never stopped telling his countrymen that they were ignorant and didn't want to stop being ignorant. And he was there to cure them of that ignorance. And there was the great, James Murray that is probably in the pronunciation of most Americans Murray, but I still cannot make myself pronounce Murray as Murray. James James a h Murray, who was the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, who also wrote letters, very often irascible letters. If you want to say something, say it plainly, and don't beat about the bush or something like that.
Anatole Liberman:Or if you want to send me a letter, send it to me. And the addresses was very easy. Murray Oxford, and that would be enough for the letter to to reach him.
Ari Hoptman:They both had excellent beards, by the way. Murray and, the first one you mentioned. Not Murray, but,
Anatole Liberman:As he yes. He had a more presentable beard.
Ari Hoptman:Yes.
Anatole Liberman:And, and Murray had a a beard as long as long as his dictionary.
Ari Hoptman:But it seems a lot of those explanations of of words, those etymologies, didn't a lot of them show up almost word for word in the Oxford English dictionary later on.
Anatole Liberman:Yes. That's exactly how how it was.
Ari Hoptman:In a way, it's sort of reading the pre Oxford English dictionary if you read notes and queries, plus all those articles about the coins and, symbols on
Anatole Liberman:Kings and emperors and Exactly.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:Remember also that the popularity that you refer to of notes and queries is in part driven by the situation in England at the time when it began. There were many reverend gentlemen who had livings which required them to do very little, and so they had lots of time on their hands. And so if if they weren't digging in the earth and doing amateur archaeology, they were collecting words. So notes and queries was a godsend to them. And those that weren't reverend were often gentlemen farmers, and they similarly had lots of time on their hand.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:And and so those are the kind of educated gentlemen, who were looking around for something to do. And as you say, there was no Internet. There was no radio or television. And so this kind of activity was the kind of thing that would result in, local dictionaries and dictionaries of slang and, ultimately, of course, in the OED itself.
Ari Hoptman:And some of these discussions went on for weeks or even a couple of months.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:Oh, yes.
Ari Hoptman:And I remember looking at the, the etymology of gazebo, which is a particular favorite of mine because no one came into any conclusions, but everyone had some opinion that they wanted to to share with the rest of the world or at least the rest of England.
Anatole Liberman:There was a discussion of the word henchman, which lasted ten years with Frank Chance, whose name is unfortunately almost forgotten. Though, again, I sing, his praise whenever I can because he was a great etymologist and a very well educated man.
Ari Hoptman:You don't know about his beard?
Anatole Liberman:No. There is no no no portrait. Absolutely nothing. And I know very little about him except for the fact that he was a medical doctor. Apparently, he didn't have too many patients, because that is approximately what Larry meant, too much time on one's hands.
Anatole Liberman:But as a result, I have a wonderful database of what people said about idioms closer to today's topic when it's not so difficult to explain an idiom or not as difficult as it is to explain the origin of a word. Because in order to explain the origin of a word, you have to be a specialist. And idioms are late, which is an interesting thing too. Very few idioms are really old. And if they're old, they're quotes from the Bible or translations from Horace or something like that.
Anatole Liberman:But truly English idioms are about four or five centuries old, not much older than Shakespeare in most cases and usually much younger so that many people really knew the explanation of our most recondite proverbs, sayings, and so on, and could explain things about raining cats and dogs and, pain through the nose and all those strange things which no one seems to know anything about, but suddenly, someone knew. After all, this book that we are discussing now owes its existence to those people, not only in awesome queries. That's the main source, but not the only one. It owes its existence to those who offered, volunteered their opinions. Do you think that this was profitable enough to read to go through several hundred volumes in order to sift their opinions and come up sometimes with the answer origin still unknown?
J. Lawrence Mitchell:Yes. And in fact, in this, take my word for it, many of the explanations and the long paragraphs that, you have written don't reach a definitive conclusion about the origin of the phrase, in part because you're well aware even if you replicate them of folk etymological explanations that are so prevalent in some of the historical contributions made in notes and queries and elsewhere.
Anatole Liberman:There is no doubt that that's the way it is. It's almost the same that we can say, we could say, or might say about the original words. Hundreds of pages written about the origin of some of the most common words, man, wife, god, ship, anything. And at the end, we have those phrases, origin uncertain, which is a polite word of saying that nobody knows anything for sure. So it's the same thing here.
Anatole Liberman:But I think one of the advantages of my method is that when you know how many people wanted to explain something and failed, you will be careful in the future, and you will not repeat the nonsense. Read, the entry about cats and dogs, raining cats and dogs. The explanations are incredibly stupid. That is one wonders why those gentlemen who had so much time on their on their hands, why they said those things. Oh, it's because cats, when they walk, the sound they produce does resemble the the sound of a pouring shower.
Anatole Liberman:That's why cats now wait a moment. What about dogs? Oh, never mind the dogs. If you have explained the cats, that's enough, isn't it?
Ari Hoptman:Well, of course, it's become a little, more, if I can say, dangerous now because we have the Internet. And to publish something, you don't even have to have a stamp, which you needed in the days of notes and queries. You just need a computer, which almost everyone has. And if you can set up a website, you can publish your own etymology of any idiom you want. And if you make it look nice, well, then it it carries a lot of weight.
Ari Hoptman:So it's much easier, I think, now to popularize a wrong or ridiculous etymology, much more so than it was in the days of the gentleman farmers.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:Can I come back to some concrete examples that I came across that, that I knew to some degree or had used in some other way, but, was enlightened by what I found in the dictionary? For example, God's Acre. Now I've written about, the novels of Theodore Francis Powis, and he uses this phrase a lot. And, of course, he means the churchyard, but I didn't know anything about, what you mentioned, a German origin for that term, but it's certainly also used in God's Little Acre. But, obviously, it's referring to the same thing.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:And the other one that occurred to me was, the phrase to go the whole hog, which again was common enough violence in England when I was growing up. But I I've come across it in literary terms because Virginia Woolf uses it to describe her talks with Katherine Mansfield, and she describes her with some awe as having gone the whole hog, on a number of occasions after Catherine had confessed to Virginia about all her, little affairs. So it's interesting to see something that has literary characteristics as it were, but haven't been explained in in the way that that you explain it. And and so I thought that this would be useful for a literary scholar who was interested in following up on something like that.
Anatole Liberman:Since you mentioned this idiom, history is also very the history of of research is interesting because the article appeared in a fast shift, and the author of that article used only notes and queries. The numerous explanations in notes and queries and nothing else. This is a classic predecessor, really, of this book. And he said something about notes and queries being immensely useful, and it is immensely useful, God's Acre and how it started in Massachusetts and how Longfellow used it and what he thought about
J. Lawrence Mitchell:Right.
Anatole Liberman:And all those things. But I also find it interesting if you remember Fox's wedding, which means rain and sunshine at the same time. Something that I, of course, have never heard, and I don't think that anyone around us heard it. And it traveled all the way from India and crossed many borders and then became totally incomprehensible. And there is a thick book about the origin of this idiom.
Anatole Liberman:So when you read, something like, my paragraph about it, you only see a reference to the book, and you have no idea how much time it may have taken, to explain the origin. And when I read the, God's Acre story, I was thrilled. Also, there was someone before me who knew that notes and queries is an inestimable source. And there is a bibliography of everything on the proverbs and sayings in notes and queries, but just an enumeration of titles without any explanation. So you go from there, but we, of course, an army of volunteers, opened every page, and I xeroxed every page, and the whole thing now is in my office.
Anatole Liberman:So that, yes, notes and queries is not the only source, but one of the most important ones. What do you think about the indexes in the book? Will they make the book more usable, more useful, and more, if I can use the ignoble term, marketable? Because we all want the book not only to be opened, but also to be bought. There are so many indexes there.
Anatole Liberman:Do you think those indexes were a good idea? I have gone too far indexing absolutely everything, words, origins, authors, and so on.
Ari Hoptman:Well, let's see. I'm looking through the I first went to the subject index because I thought, well, the index has got to be the last few pages. But then as I flipped back, I saw, oh, here's for me a much more useful index of words rather than topics. But if I were looking up an individual idiom, I would find this extremely useful. But if I were doing a paper on idioms and I wanted animal idioms, well, I would go to the back.
Ari Hoptman:So I think it's useful for both casual curiosity and for greater research needs.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:Yes. I found the word index very useful. For example, I wanted to see whether you had, before you could say Jack Robinson. And, I looked up under j, and, of course, it wasn't under j, but, it's under before. But it's there, and so that was useful.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:And another example would be I can say things like as nice as 9p, but probably not something either of you would say. But I wanted to see how often 9p came in because it does occur in a number of of your entries. And so the word index pulls them together in a useful way that I found very helpful.
Ari Hoptman:I like the theme index. Is it called theme index topic index at the back?
Anatole Liberman:Yes. Yes. Some sort of the scores. Yes.
Ari Hoptman:Yeah. I think one of the disadvantages is also the advantage because you you start to look at, oh, well, you want to find all of these that have to do with, I don't know, tables, and you start to go down rabbit holes as you would on the, on the Internet. I think we've all experienced that. But I think that's the nice thing that can happen here with the, with the indexes or indices if you want.
Anatole Liberman:Now I think indexes is perfectly alright. Unless we suddenly switch to Latin, I think indexes will satisfy absolutely everybody. I want also to say one thing may probably come as a revelation to those who will not only open the book and immediately close it, but who will read it. And that is how late most idioms really are. Words are perennial.
Anatole Liberman:If you ask how old the word man, wife, boy, girl is, then you find out that man is very old, boy is not very old, and girl is not very old, and wife is very old. And wife is, of course, is the root of the word woman, which was. But when you look at the chronology of the idioms in the book, you see that they're late, post renaissance, and that is not by chance. I think that might also be an asset because it, to a certain extent, tells people about the origin of language, of mentality of the middle ages. It's also a look at the history of language and not only at the history of idioms.
Anatole Liberman:Did it come as surprise to you that the idioms are late, or did you take it for granted? Yes. Well, of course, they should be late.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:Relatively late. But still, what's surprising in some ways is how persistent some are. You know, again, using similes, happy as or as clean as a clean as a whistle. Well, that seems to be both British and American, and it seems to be around for an awful long time. But at the same time, there's a creative element in the formulation of these, and I found in this corpus of contemporary American English under happy, for example, as happy as the day is long, as happy as heaven pleases, as happy as a pig in mud or something else, as happy as Larry, of course, which interested me,
Anatole Liberman:of course, and
J. Lawrence Mitchell:as happy as a lark or as happy as a kid in a candy store. Now I'm pretty sure a kid in the candy store is not British, but it shows you how alive these idioms are. Even put when they're being preserved, they're being, let's say, added to even so.
Ari Hoptman:So when you read a when you read something like Beowulf, which is about the year January, the language is pretty straightforward. What about Chaucer a few hundred years later? How did he feel about,
Anatole Liberman:Well, that's the beginning, of our epic to a certain extent, and that's what I mentioned briefly in the introduction. I could have written and probably should have written more about it, but I didn't want the introduction to engulf the whole book. If, I can almost quote what I wrote in the introduction. If you have a very good old English grammar and a good old English dictionary and a good edition of Beowulf, like, Cleaver's Beowulf in its modern version, you can read Beowulf and understand everything without an instructor if you have enough time and enough patience. With choices, it is somewhat different because many phrases are truly idiomatic.
Anatole Liberman:But today, you are absolutely lost because you suddenly find out one of the characters in the book kicked the back the bucket, And you begin to think about the bucket, and there is no bucket in view. You have to look it up in some dictionary, and you don't know where to look it up under kick or under bucket and what it has to do with the bucket. And that's why I have a word index. We're dealing with something that can be called the post medieval mentality. When they invented the art of perspective, that is when they pride themselves away from the canvas.
Anatole Liberman:Like children's drawings, they're flat, and their language was flat. They had episodes, and they had similes, but they never had metaphors. And they could say that my beloved is like a rose, but they would never have said my beloved is a rose because my beloved is not a flower. So my beloved was not a rose. Like a rose is fine.
Anatole Liberman:And when they learned the figurative use of words and things, then they began to produce idioms by the million, really.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:So that example you used of, kick the bucket in America, I discovered you could also cash in your chips, which I would never use, but I might kick the bucket.
Ari Hoptman:You can also buy the farm, which is, I think, much more much easier to understand.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:Now does it mean that people didn't know kick the bucket or that they weren't satisfied with it as a as a solution, as it were, to, the location where we plot the problem?
Anatole Liberman:It's hard to tell, because it's this the same question about synonyms. You have already five or six words meaning brave, and you open a dictionary of synonyms in addition to brave and doubting, valiant, and so on. You find to a horror that there are 25 or 30 words meaning brave. Language is so redundant, and that's why it's so hard to learn it. There are so many of them, but, of course, more or less, I think that is what you mean.
Anatole Liberman:Once they began to produce these things, then they could never stop. And there was much fun there, especially if you look at the section beginning with the word as and those Yeah. Those similes. A pages and pages of as, and one wonders who did it and as wise as the woman of Manbrit. Had a long explanation.
Anatole Liberman:Fine. As mean as tongs. Why should tongs be mean, and what does that mean? The explanation, perhaps the association is with pincers, an instrument that pinches, and we go back to the old attraction of flipping money. Perhaps, but that's really all that one one can say.
Anatole Liberman:As merry as a Greek, which I use from time to time, only that no one knows what a Greek is.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:I came across that interestingly a couple of years ago in reading a biography of Charlotte Bronte, and she uses as merry as a Greek. And and there was a note in the edition, which also said they didn't weren't really sure what the grig was, but it might might be a frog.
Anatole Liberman:Yes. Grig, as I have found, that is what Skeet explained. And, of course, if Skeet explained something, who am I, to doubt the value of this explanation? Greek meanings cricket, and he cited many dialectal synonyms. Greek means an eel and cricket and way and so on, a whole a whole line.
Anatole Liberman:I had the same trouble with as merry as a pisma. Nobody understands the word pisma. Pisma. And my student said, what is pisma?
Ari Hoptman:That's one I haven't heard in a while.
Anatole Liberman:Where on earth, Harry, did you run into the word pisma?
Ari Hoptman:There was a nonsense song that was floating around in the nineteen forties. I remember my father quoting this, singing this in the house, and it had, it just it was a nonsense song with the word Pismire, which I assumed was a nonsense word. And then I found out it had an actual meaning and, didn't make the song any more popular instantly, but, it was just floating around my house.
Anatole Liberman:Have only one virtue that, they illiterate because they're stupid, silly. It's fine sometimes, and there may be, of course, some depth as nice as a nun's n u n, as nun's hen. As Keith explained it, but then Keith explained everything. It doesn't mean that his explanation was absolutely correct. But probably the greatest attraction was that nice as a nun's hen has alliterating n's, but then the next is as pert as a pear monger.
Anatole Liberman:Well, that is really too too much, to to swallow.
Ari Hoptman:If you need the word pert, that is, which which you don't generally need.
Anatole Liberman:No. Of course. Of course. And why pear monger, is so pert is not very clear.
Ari Hoptman:Of Of course, you have ones like fit as a fiddle, which is
Anatole Liberman:Exactly.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:Yes. And, again, the alliteration seems to be more important there than, than meaning.
Anatole Liberman:I have no doubt that you are right. Though, one of course, as always when one, deals with such things, one should be very careful. As fit as a fiddle, that's something that you mentioned in in our conversation a few days ago. As fit as a fiddle, are fiddles fit? In the book, you will find an explanation.
Anatole Liberman:Yes. What the word fit meant at that time and when fiddles were fit, that's, probably true. As plain as a pike staff. Apparently, there are some things which are more plain than pike staffs. And that brings me to another question.
Anatole Liberman:How how well are not only these, but in general, how well are sayings, idioms known? I think it, differs tremendously from country to country, from area to area, because sometimes I say something simply to amuse my students. A long lecture, they're tired, sometimes bored. They are students. They have no way of avoiding me, so they have to listen to me for an hour, an hour and a half, and sometimes they teach evening lectures.
Anatole Liberman:They're there like prisoners and cannot escape. So from time to time, I would say something simply to enliven them. Something like, well, there's thank you very much that warms the cockles of my heart. And they will wake up, simply because it's it's so funny. Just as there are words which make them smile, using the word fool, is nothing.
Anatole Liberman:But if I call a fool an income poof, everybody begins to to smile because it's a funny word. Or, someone who seems to be looking out of the window, out the window as most people around me say now, and, not listening to me. And I would say, I think, you've gone wool gathering. And, again, everybody, begins to laugh. Do you know what to go wool gathering is?
Anatole Liberman:Somebody would timidly raise his or her hand saying, yes. I know, and the others will wake up and listen to it. One of the examples which amazed me very much and amused me very much was connected with wordpecker. Everybody knew the obscene meaning of the word pecker, but not the saying, which is the only one. I that is I never heard the word, the word pecker, but there is one, which is supposed to be unpronounceable in England and turned out to be pretty clear everywhere.
Anatole Liberman:Keep a pecker up. And they told me that in in this country, pecker means nose, so there is really nothing to be ashamed of.
Ari Hoptman:In this country meaning England.
Anatole Liberman:I don't know.
Ari Hoptman:Because there's the song, it's very, very British. Drop down dead. What is the they're out of sorts in Sunderland and terribly coarse in Kent. They're dull and hull, and the Isle Of Mull is seething with discontent. And that has the phrase, we'll keep our peckers down or we'll,
Anatole Liberman:Those in England tell told me that this was totally unpronounceable. And here, it seems to be rather innocuous, only that nobody ever uses it. What is your general impression? How idearmatic those whom you know? Well, I don't mean only those exotic phrases which nobody's supposed to know and nobody knew even a hundred years ago.
Anatole Liberman:But in general, are people usually plain spoken, or do they want to enjoy what they say and add idioms for dessert?
J. Lawrence Mitchell:But but, of course, it depends upon how much they know about the, the phrase, I mean, that keep your pecker up. People may avoid it because they do feel that it may be in some way obscene even though that's not their usage. But I don't I couldn't say whether it's British or American. That's one of those examples where I I could say it quite happily, and I wouldn't consider it inappropriate. But it would mean, you know, continue to be optimistic.
Anatole Liberman:Yes. That's right.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:Yes. Right.
Ari Hoptman:But I don't think people are very, idiom friendly, at least in our little corner of of the world in Minnesota, which is where I'm based.
Anatole Liberman:Have the same opinion.
Ari Hoptman:I don't hear people using or if they do use idioms, it's usually a kind of a big production. They make a little pause, and they say, well, you know, it's
Anatole Liberman:Yes. Showing off.
Ari Hoptman:Well, not showing off, but saying I'm about to, pay attention because this is about to this is about to get more interesting. So I don't know him from Adam's off aux, which I only heard once in my life, but I've been I've been waiting for an opportunity to use it.
Anatole Liberman:Yes.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:Well, I think in Texas where I'm located now, there seem to be much more willingness to launch into sort of, let's say, dodgy, terminology. I've come across one as as as happy as a leather queen at a prison rodeo, which I think is, an interesting location.
Ari Hoptman:Texas has one of my favorites. I don't know if it's in the book. That dog don't hunt, which sounds strange coming out of Midwestern mouth, but, I mean, that doesn't make any sense. I can't even I can't even use it just because it doesn't it doesn't sound right.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:There's a variant on it that said that hound don't hunt.
Ari Hoptman:That hound don't hunt.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:And that works better as a little from a little point of view. Right. Yeah. It means something like you can't make that argument or you can't you can't go there.
Ari Hoptman:Yeah. They say he did that? No. That dog don't hunt or that hound don't hunt. I tried my best.
Anatole Liberman:Well, I can tell you an example of more or less the same type. One of my favorite, phrases is to be in a Brown study, which means in a state of deep meditation, reverie, and having a serious problem, and I have to decide what to do with it. I learned the the phrase from Agatha Christie, because Hercule Poirot is very often in a in a Brown study, and I'm very fond of Agatha Christie's books and of her style. I think she writes beautiful English. So from time to time, I use it.
Anatole Liberman:I know for for sure that nobody understands it. So that's fine, I thought. And there was a long discussion of this phrase in periodical, not in notes and queries, but, in the periodical, the nation, in the American, periodical, when the b volume of the Oxford English Dictionary appeared, and there was an explanation there. And in order to find the material for this book, we, I mean, an army of volunteers, not only I. We opened every periodical in the world, really, like Scientific American, The Nation, New York, New Yorker, everything.
Anatole Liberman:And, not only notes and queries. Notes and queries looms large, but that's not the only one. And, a very interesting explanation about Brown study. And, I was quite sure that this is specifically British phrase. Two years ago, I won't tell you why, but I reread Huckleberry Finn, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the book which I read first when I was 12 years old.
Anatole Liberman:So I reread it and enjoyed it very much, and then I jumped up. Hack says, I felt rather Brown studdish. Hear me. Huckleberry Finn knew this expression. He knew this idiom.
Anatole Liberman:Was it something that they knew only in the South, in one of those southern states? How on earth did Huck know something that no one seems to understand today? I think someone who will open, open this dictionary, not necessarily read it from cover to cover because that's really too much to explain, would find many amusing examples of what they thought was true and what was not necessarily true. There is a long entry on being in a Brown study. Harry, do you ever use it?
Ari Hoptman:I have heard it a few times, each time from you.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:I know that I heard it when I was growing up, but I would never use it myself.
Anatole Liberman:But you knew it when you were growing up?
J. Lawrence Mitchell:I knew it when I was growing up. Yeah.
Anatole Liberman:Yeah. So it was common enough, for you for you to become. I've never heard anyone to use it. If we can imagine that someone can read this book from cover to cover, will this person close the book with the feeling of having learned something really worthwhile so that the money spent on it hadn't been wasted? What is your opinion?
Anatole Liberman:That's a very blunt question. Is the book worth buying?
J. Lawrence Mitchell:Absolutely. I think it's, again, it's going to be one of those kinds of books that people will keep handy because they'll want to dip into it from time to time either when they're talking with friends or because, they've got something there that they want to, test. For example, with those as happy as in other phrases of that sort. I tested them among friends in the area where I live in in this retirement community just to see what people use because I can use my wife as one kind of, measure of American English, but, she's been exposed to British English too. But there's lots of people here from different parts of the country who never have.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:So I find it quite useful. And, of course, it's the kind of thing that might well constitute a kind of parlor game or the kind of thing that you do over dinner Because often I get together with other people over dinner, and there may be half a dozen of us. And I I would say, if you're gonna say as happy as, what would you say? Or as clean as, and it's interesting to see what responses you get. So I think having the book, at hand would be valuable for that kind of, enterprise.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:Certainly, in in Christmas, it would be a a great present for somebody.
Anatole Liberman:Do you think, Ari, that this book could be used in any courses dealing with the English language?
Ari Hoptman:Oh, sure. People talking about exactly what you were saying, the changes in how people express themselves, certainly, where you made that comparison of, the directness of Beowulf versus what happens later on, you know, with, in in Chaucer where it starts to shift and Shakespeare where it's going. Am I using it right whole hog? But what I was thinking of also is that some people might decide, just to have some fun and, use some of these in conversation, which might lead other people to think, well, where where did you, where did you come up with such an obscure phrase? Well, it was in well, it was in this book that I got here.
Ari Hoptman:That was when well, take my word for it. I think people might have some fun just trying to revive some of these, idioms.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:By by the way, I think the title is a great one. Take my word for it. It really sort of captures the the contents there very nicely.
Anatole Liberman:It's not easy to write a book. It's very hard to think of a good title, and, that has been my experience for years. I tried dozens and dozens of titles and offered them to the press, and they finally said, take my word for it. It's perhaps the best. And that's why, it now graces the cover of the book.
Ari Hoptman:The previous title the pre previous suggestion, Oklahoma, I'm glad they didn't go with that one.
Anatole Liberman:Yeah. That's It was not
Ari Hoptman:as good. Not as descriptive.
Anatole Liberman:Not as descriptive. And, I can only finish our discussion because I think that we can talk about it forever, but, one hour is quite enough. Let me tell you two things of which I am immensely proud. Once upon a time, the University of Minnesota Press used to exhibit books, I think, in the faculty club. And, one of my books was there, and it was stolen.
Anatole Liberman:And those who organized the exhibit said, it's the only time in the history of our exhibition that a book has been stolen. And I was tremendously proud that the book which was stolen was the last book, which I would imagine, being stolen. That was Germanic exantology. The very title makes people, sleepy. And then, on another case, someone worked for the University of Minnesota Press and then left the press.
Anatole Liberman:I think this young woman was a student. And, the press said, we want to give you some parting present. What would you want? And she chose one of my books, translation of Lermanente. That makes more sense.
Anatole Liberman:In my long life, one could have boasted of more things, but that's all I have. So I have to share the, little treasure that that I have.
Ari Hoptman:But don't steal the book. Pay for the book. Buy the book.
Anatole Liberman:Yes. Take my word for it. Absolutely.
Ari Hoptman:Absolutely.
Narrator:Hello. Quick interjection from producer Maggie here. Number one, this is directed to our listeners. Very importantly, please support your local bookstore. Number two, personally, for me, having so much word and etymological expertise in one space, virtual though it may be, is a rare opportunity to ask a question of our conversants that's been persisting with me.
Narrator:How do each of you sign off on your letters or emails?
J. Lawrence Mitchell:I always use cordially even on my emails. I tend to be old fashioned that way.
Ari Hoptman:I say sincerely or. When I'm writing to students, I write because they're they're supposed to know after three semesters.
Anatole Liberman:Yes. Well, I I have a small range of signatures. I learned it from some Englishman, many years ago who signed his letters with ever. Sometimes when I feel more linen sentimental, I write ever. When in other cases, I sometimes write well, of course, best regards and so on.
Anatole Liberman:But there's one thing, that I really hate. That the word all the best, has, at least in England, has lost the article, and now everybody writes all best. And I think it's absolutely wrong because with the superlative degree, you need the definite article. So I refuse to write all best and write all the best just to prove that I'm still alive and kicking, of course.
Ari Hoptman:But you have to be very, very careful with the when you use, smellulator because, not everyone's going to like it.
Anatole Liberman:That's absolutely right.
Ari Hoptman:Has to be a a very good friend.
Anatole Liberman:Thank you very much. It has been a pleasure to see you both, especially, because, Larry lives now the whole country across from me, and we exchange a few, Christmas cards. But now, it's the pleasure of talking to you several days ago when we were, discussing how to organize, this session. And now seeing you seeing you and seeing you you, Ari, with with our COVID things, and we always meet with masks and don't recognize each other. And now we're here showing our true face.
Anatole Liberman:So thank you very much.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:Thank you.
Ari Hoptman:Always a pleasure.
Anatole Liberman:Thank you
Ari Hoptman:so much. Thank you.
J. Lawrence Mitchell:Thanks. Ari, good to meet you.
Ari Hoptman:Good to meet you. We're we're our names appear in the same book, but we've never met until this, till this moment.
Anatole Liberman:It's,
Ari Hoptman:rather bizarre.
Anatole Liberman:No other place like etymology which unites people We'll see
Ari Hoptman:you later.