As long as I can remember, I have always loved language. The study of
it, that is. I must have gotten it from Mom who, for instance, not only
read The Lord of the Rings trilogy but studied Tolkien's appendix of the
language he created. I never went that far, nor does it mean I speak
languages (as in plural) but I do enjoy how they work and the mathematical
formulas behind them.
Perhaps nothing charms me more about language than idioms--those peculiar expressions that have a meaning indirectly derived from the literal words and which almost never have a direct translation into another language. Some examples are beating around the bush, chewing the fat, enough is enough, every picture tells a story, etc., etc.
When the idioms come from another language than my own, they often are funnier or more powerful because I've never heard them in quite the same way. A missionary-linguist friend told me years ago, for example, that the Filipino tribal group with whom she worked would often say, "That's just like God!" whenever they'd read or hear something they didn't expect. To this day, I still use that phase when something surprises me.
So far here in Holland, as I get situated into this new culture and language, no one idiom has charmed me more than the one I have now heard several times: You can't walk on one leg! I've heard it mostly in the context of eating and kissing, as when offered a second cookie or kissed twice...because you can't walk on one leg. In other words, you can't eat/have just one!
The one time, however, that takes the cake (see what I mean) was when Astrid and I ate at our favorite Greek take-out café here in our neighborhood. While most customers come and leave quickly with take-out, there are 5 tables for those of us who like the atmosphere and eat in. With that kind of intimacy, we have grown to know the owner, his son and his mother, all of whom keep the business hopping. Two weeks before our wedding in February, we told them how excited we were that a date had finally been set...an excitement they appeared to share with us. That meal we celebrated with a bottle of their Kechri wine because we loved the shape of it and decided we'd make it into an oil lamp...and even told them so.
At the cash register as we left, to our delightful surprise, the son (with father looking over his shoulder) handed us another bottle of the same wine, gratis, and said, with a big grin, "You can't walk on one leg!" It was their congratulations to us.
How can you ever forget an idiom like that! It makes you want to be generous and go out and do random acts of kindness just so you can say it all the time. Ahhhh. The power of language. We could have a feeding frenzy with it!
Perhaps nothing charms me more about language than idioms--those peculiar expressions that have a meaning indirectly derived from the literal words and which almost never have a direct translation into another language. Some examples are beating around the bush, chewing the fat, enough is enough, every picture tells a story, etc., etc.
When the idioms come from another language than my own, they often are funnier or more powerful because I've never heard them in quite the same way. A missionary-linguist friend told me years ago, for example, that the Filipino tribal group with whom she worked would often say, "That's just like God!" whenever they'd read or hear something they didn't expect. To this day, I still use that phase when something surprises me.
So far here in Holland, as I get situated into this new culture and language, no one idiom has charmed me more than the one I have now heard several times: You can't walk on one leg! I've heard it mostly in the context of eating and kissing, as when offered a second cookie or kissed twice...because you can't walk on one leg. In other words, you can't eat/have just one!
The one time, however, that takes the cake (see what I mean) was when Astrid and I ate at our favorite Greek take-out café here in our neighborhood. While most customers come and leave quickly with take-out, there are 5 tables for those of us who like the atmosphere and eat in. With that kind of intimacy, we have grown to know the owner, his son and his mother, all of whom keep the business hopping. Two weeks before our wedding in February, we told them how excited we were that a date had finally been set...an excitement they appeared to share with us. That meal we celebrated with a bottle of their Kechri wine because we loved the shape of it and decided we'd make it into an oil lamp...and even told them so.
At the cash register as we left, to our delightful surprise, the son (with father looking over his shoulder) handed us another bottle of the same wine, gratis, and said, with a big grin, "You can't walk on one leg!" It was their congratulations to us.
How can you ever forget an idiom like that! It makes you want to be generous and go out and do random acts of kindness just so you can say it all the time. Ahhhh. The power of language. We could have a feeding frenzy with it!
Our old Dutch background would say this when offered a second cup of coffee. That is, one cup was not enough and thank you for realizing that I needed a second (or more!) cup.
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