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A COLLECTION OF FOSSILISED METAPHORS

Genuine lovers of language already have on their shelves books by linguists and psychologists, such as David Crystal and Steven Pinker; or erudite tomes such as Nicholas Ostler’s ambitious “Empires of the Word”, a history of the world told through its languages. That leaves plenty of space on the coffee table or in the guest lavatory for a witty but shorter and easier read. Jag Bhalla’s book, enlivened with illustrations by Julia Suits, a New Yorker cartoonist, seems ideally suited.

Bhalla, a self-confessed monoglot, has collected idioms from the four corners of the world (eight corners, in Hindi) and returned, as he puts it, with “souvenir collections of linguistic gems". Why would the Germans have a single word that means the “disappointment one feels when something turns out not nearly as badly as one had expected”? Something about that seems quintessentially German, as Bhalla muses.

The official definition of an idiom, he explains, is “a group of words always used together as a phrase, where the meaning of the phrase isn’t clear from the meaning of the words in it.” For example, he kicked the bucket (or, in French, “he passed his weapon to the left” or “she swallowed her birth certificate”). Idioms are therefore “presolved cryptic word puzzles” or “fossilised metaphors” whose meanings were clear when they were coined but have since taken on a life of their own.

The word itself comes from the Greek idios, or “private”. The original idiots in ancient Greece were those who were not interested in public affairs and kept to themselves, being idiosyncratic. Language too is both public and private. Idioms are a great way to tell insiders from outsiders. Extremely interesting, in short.

 “I’m not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears and other intriguing idioms from around the world”, by Jag Bhalla (National Geographic Books), out now

~ ANDREAS KLUTH