Good as Gold

Here’s my article for Jump Magazine on a popular expression:

 

Good as Gold

Call a Spade a Spade

How interesting that a mistake in translation would eventually be misconstrued as something else entirely! The journey of an expression to where we know it today can have many twists and turns along the road.

Let’s start with the present. Some people have suggested that the “spade” referred to in this expression is a derogatory term for African Americans, and as such the idiom is racist. As evidence, they point to an early incidence of it, in John Trapp’s Mellificium Theologicum, from 1647, where he says:

“Gods people shall not spare to call a spade a spade, a niggard a niggard.”

The association of the second part of this phrase with “negro” is in fact a misconception. The word “niggard” was used to mean “miser” or “mean”. And the “spade” referred to is a tool used for digging, not an insulting term for another person. It should be pointed out that the use of “spade” in US slang to insult people of African American origin arose in the 20^th century, long after Trapp’s work was published.

So where can we look to find the origin of our phrase? Well, perhaps surprisingly, we can look to Greek. In Plutarch’s work Moralia, from Sayings of the Spartans (Apophthegmata Laconica – Αποφθέγματα Λακωνικά).

Here we find¨

την σκάφην σκάφην λέγοντας (tin skafin skafin legontas).

This means “calling a basin a basin”. So how did we get from here to spade? Did people use their bowls and basins to dig with? Not at all. It comes from a mistranslation. In the early 1500s, Desiderius Erasmus translated Plutarch in his work Apophthegmatum Opus. The precise date is not known, but it was sometime between 1518 and 1536, the year of Erasmus’s death. It should be noted that Erasmus was chronically short of money while he was studying Greek, and had to borrow and beg for funding and texts in order to pay for teachers and study, and this led to him doing a lot of work alone. Perhaps this irregular education approach was one factor in his making a mistake, as he translated the Greek σκάφη as “spade”, mistaking it for σπαθί.

You may be wondering how this reached English – Erasmus was, after all, Dutch, often known as Erasmus of Rotterdam, and certainly didn’t write in English. This came about in 1542 through the translation of Erasmus’s work by playwright and cleric Nicholas Udall, who maintained Erasmus’s mistake.

Looking at how this idea appears in other languages, it’s very interesting to note that the expression in Slovenian translates the same as in English, call a spade a spade; reci bobu bob. A very similar expression also appears in Welsh: galw pâl yn bâl; “to call an oar an oar”, a shape not unlike a spade.

Irish has an intriguing expression – ná baintear an t-ainm den bhlonag, which translates as “do not take the name from fat”.

Italian and Spanish both essentially use the same expression; llamar al pan pan y al vino vino in Spanish and dire pane al pane e vino al vino in Italian, both meaning “call bread bread and wine wine”.

For once I can present you with an innocuous expression involving a cat – in French you would say appeler un chat un chat, meaning “call a cat a cat”.

In Turkish, people concentrate more on the shape of things, it seems, with eğriye eğri,doğruya doğru demek, which means “call bent bent and straight straight”. This reads very well in Turkish itself, where it actually plays on the similarity between the words “bent” and “straight”.

Some languages have less colourful expressions, using the meaning “speak plainly” or “tell it like it is”. In Hungarian, the expression is a nevén nevezi, meaning “you name it by its name”, and the same idea is present in Bulgarian наричам нещата с истинските им имена and Polish nazywać rzeczy po imieniu. But Polish in fact has another expression that you may find interesting; Koń jaki jest, każdy widzi, which translates as “everyone can see what a horse looks like”, which seems to suggest that there is no point in calling it anything else.

A very intriguing pair of expressions come to us from German, where the norm is quite different, and people are not thinking in terms of calling things by their names. The first one is reden wie der Schnabel gewachsen ist, which translates as “to speak as one’s beak has grown”, while the second, just as different from the first as it is from its counterparts in other languages, is as follows: kein Blatt vor dem Mund nehmen, meaning “not to place a leaf in front of one’s mouth”. A refreshing streak of originality among expressions along very similar lines!

Of course, this would not be complete without looking at the expression as it is today in Modern Greek: λέω τα σύκα σύκα και τη σκάφη σκάφη (leo ta sika sika kai ti skafi skafi), which translates as “call figs figs and the basin basin”. Very little changed, as you can see.

Come Hell or High Water

This expression is one that has given rise to a great deal of speculation about its origin, with various suggestions put forward.

We will start with the most gruesome proposals, which link “come hell or high water” to a form of medieval torture. There are essentially two main contenders here. The first would have us believe that “hell” was a burning hot poker inserted into the throat, with the “high water” being the drink subsequently given to the prisoner to “put the fire out”. The second torture has the prisoner forced to immerse the hand and arm in boiling water – “low water” up to the wrist and “high water” up to the elbow.

Whilst these are of course most unpleasant things to happen to anyone, it does not seem to me to be likely that they are the origin of our expression, meaning “whatever happens, in spite of any obstacle”. The expression separates the two parts: hell or high water, whereas here they are put together, and frankly, there seems to be very little evidence linking them to the expression in any case.

Let’s take a look at the second proposal. This derives the expression from the Bible, and again, there are two main contenders. I expect it comes as no surprise that many see the “high water” as a reference to the flood in Genesis, sent by God as a punishment to mankind, with Noah and his family the only survivors. In Gen 6:17, some English translations read “I shall bring high waters on the earth”, although others translate this as “floodwater”.

I also rather expect that the other biblical  reference to “high water” is not so well known. This is in Isaiah 43:2.

“When you pass through deep (high) waters, I will be with you.”

My first thought on seeing this is that, despite obvious similarities, again it is not in keeping with our expression. This is because the implication of the verse is that the high waters here are not an obstacle, not a problem, because God is there.

The biblical proposals for the origin of “come hell or high water” generally see the “hell” part as a literal reference to the second coming of Christ, when hell will come to Earth.

Now we come to our last theory, which suggests that the phrase comes from the cattle ranches of the American mid-West. In the nineteenth century, cowboys drove their herds through rivers, whether the water was high or not, and of course a swollen river could present quite a challenge. A Washington Post article from November 1905 about cattle herders reads “…between the alien land law, drought and rustlers, the “hell and high water of the cattlemen,…”, linking the expression directly to this theory.

Not only that, but there is also an expression along the same lines used in the southern United States: “Lord willing and the creek don’t rise”. This seems to refer to a creek, which is a small stream, flooding, thereby giving us the same idea as the “high water”.

In Modern Greek, a popular expression in this context is βρέξει χιονίσει, (vrexei chionisei) which means “it rains, it snows”, which is similar to the other popular English phrase “come rain or shine”.

Across the Adriatic in Italy, people say cascasse il mondo, which translates as “should the world fall”, an image of disaster perhaps akin to the idea of hell coming. Perhaps in a similar vein, the Polish expression is choćby się waliło i paliło, which means “even if it tumbles down and burns”. Another nice apocalyptic image!

In keeping with this theme of doom, Slovene has an interesting idiom: pa tudi, če vse hudič vzame,  or “even if the devil takes everything”.

In this case, I am rather partial to the Turkish saying, which seems a little gruesome! It is; iki elim kanda olsa, meaning “if both my hands are in blood”. Perhaps not as disastrous as the English and Italian, but still very unpleasant!

Catch Red-Handed

For those of you hoping to read of a fantastic mythological reference, or an interesting metaphor that gave rise to this expression, I’m afraid I will have to disappoint you! The origin of this phrase is straight-forward. The “red” refers to blood, the idea being that if you have just performed a murder, you might just still have blood on your hands, which would therefore be literally red. Over time, this expanded to include other crimes as well as murder and the phrase took on a more figurative meaning.

The expression first appears in the form “red-hand”, and it can be found in Scottish legal contexts, such as in the Scottish Acts of Parliament from 1432, and other documents relating to legal matters in Scotland, where it was obviously considered a perfectly acceptable phrase to use in formal situations.

It was predominantly a Scottish expression for a few centuries, until Sir Walter Scott wrote his novel Ivanhoe in 1819, and used it there;

“I did but tie one fellow, who was taken redhanded and in the fact, to the horns of a wild stag.”

This novel served to popularise the expression outside of Scotland.

Looking outside of English, in Polish you would say przyłapać na goracym uczynku, which translates literally as “caught someone in the heat”.

In another Slavic language, Slovene, there are two possibly expressions, one of which has a similar imagery to the English; imeti krvave roke, which means “one has blooded hands”, or alternatively ujet na delu, meaning “caught at work”, much like “caught in the act”.

In French, just as in Italian, you would be caught with your hands in the bag: être pris la main dans le sac.

Spanish has an expression that brings bread to mind: lo/la agarraron con las manos en la masa; “he/she was caught with hands on the dough”

In German you might say auf frischer Tat ertappt worden, or “be surprised in the act”.

Over to Welsh now, where we have a particularly interesting note. Firstly, there is the expression dal rhywun ar y weithred, which literally means “to catch someone in the act”. But this phrase is almost incidental in our Welsh note today. Far more intriguing is the word llofrudd. Today, this word means “murderer”. Let’s take a look at the components of the word: llof + rhudd. The first part, llof, is an old word for hand (the modern word being “llaw“). The second part, rhudd, as you have probably guessed, means “red”. Put it together and you get “red-handed”. One has to wonder about the ultimate origins of the phrase in English, prior to it finding its way into the Scottish idiom.

Another Celtic language, Irish, has the phrase breith maol ar dhuine.

I am quite fond of the equivalent phrase in Greek; πιάνω κάποιον στα πράσα (piano kapion sta prasa), which literally means “catch someone in the leeks”!

The Morbid Mog

English, it seems, has no particular love for cats. When we are not stuffing them into bags from which they need to be let out, we are swinging them, possibly by the tail, or skinning them. And as I am sure you all know, there is more than one way to skin a cat, or indeed a rabbit, as people in some areas prefer to say.

What a gruesome expression it is! Why might we have been skinning cats?! It seems that cat fur was once an popular part of women’s fashion, as we can see in The Leisure Hour, printed by W. Stevens in 1852. You might recoil in horror at the thought today, but people in the past had no such scruples, it appears. And of course, in order to remove the fur, the cat needed to be skinned.

But the idea of skinning a cat is only a fairly recent version of this expression. English speakers have long had a penchant for cruelty to animals! It goes back to an earlier form, where it was “there are more ways to kill a dog than hanging”. This appears in 1678.

The earliest reference to the expression as it is today; “more than one way to skin a cat” is to be found in a short story, The Money Diggers in ’Way down East; or, Portraitures of Yankee Life by Seba Smith from 1840:

“This is a money digging world of ours; and, as it is said, ‘there are more ways than one to skin a cat,’ so are there more ways than one of digging for money”.

There were other versions of the expression also widely used – “there are more ways of killing a cat than choking it with cream/ butter/ pudding.” No improvement from the cat’s point of view!

Let’s take a look at what other languages have got to say. Are they all so cruel to cats?

We’ll start with German, where there seems to be a basic expression – Es führen viele Wege zum Ziel; “there are many ways to the aim”.

The Welsh expression makes me smile: mwy nag un ffordd o gael Wil i’w wely, which translates as “more than one way to get Will to his bed”. Poor old Will!

In Irish we find is iomaí bealach le cat a mharú seachas é a thachtadh le him.

There is a nice idiom in Greek, which actually flows with a lovely rhythm in its original language: το καλό το παλικάρι ξέρει και άλλο μονοπάτι (to kalo to palikari xerei kai allo monopati), which means “the good lad knows another path”.

In Turkish, the expression her yiğidin bir yoğurt yiyişi vardır literally means “every man eats yogurt his own way” imples of course that there are many ways. Certainly a much gentler approach than in English!

But this time, I like the Spanish expression for its practicality and simplicity: varios martillos para un mismo clavo, literally “several hammers for one same nail”.

Burning the Midnight oil

These days this expression is used figuratively to mean “work late into the night”. But it doesn’t take any great stretch of the imagination to work out where it came from. We might not actually burn oil today, but in the past, of course, any work done late would have needed an oil lamp or a candle to see by, and this is of course where the expression originated.

Historically, we know that it was used in the early 1630s, probably much earlier. We find a reference to this phrase in the most famous work by poet Francis Quarles, Emblems (published in 1635).

We spend our mid-day sweat, our mid-night oil,
We tire the night in thought; the day in toil.

(Book II, following Epig. I)

Given the prevalence of candles around the world, you might have expected the expression to be a common one across many languages. However, it seems that in German one is more likely to say simply bis spaet in der Nacht arbeiten – which simply means “to work until late at night”. In Italian the expression fare la nottata, which translates as “make a long night”, is popular.

Welsh deserves a special mention for its idiom, because of the image it conjures up: gweithio tan berfeddion nos, meaning “work till the bowels of the night”.

As Busy as a Bee

This has been illustrated by my six-year-old son

This is how I am feeling at the moment! I’m sure we’ve all felt like that. And people have been feeling like that, or at least using this simile to express it, for hundreds of years. The earliest known historical use is in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1343-1400). We find it in the Squire’s Tale:

Ey! Goddes mercy!” sayd our Hoste tho,
Now such a wyf I pray God keep me fro.
Lo, suche sleightes and subtilitees
In wommen be; for ay as busy as bees
Be thay us seely men for to desceyve,
And from a soth ever a lie thay weyve.

(My own loose translation into Modern English): “God’s mercy,” said our host. “Now from such a wife I pray God keep me, Such slyness and subtleties are in women, for as busy as bees they deceive us men, And weave a lie from a tale.”

Not a nice sentiment for women, of course, although perhaps not unusual for its time, but the interesting thing is that the simile has remained unchanged, and we still use this form today.

Why bees in particular? Are bees extremely busy? Well, they certainly give the impression of being very busy! They fly about at a great speed, going from flower to flower, they never seem to rest. You don’t see them sitting lazily in the sun, like a lizard! And of course they hum, which is a busy sound in human terms – the hum of a marketplace, a busy human gathering.

Taking a quick look at other languages, it seems the bee image is by no means unique to English! We find it firstly in Czech, where být pilný jako včela – “be as busy as a bee” has the same image, but a slightly different connotation from the English idiom. Whereas in English this expression is associated with the present, someone is very busy, has a lot to do now, in Czech the impression given is that the person is in general hardworking.

Polish and Swedish have something in common – they both use the same expressions in this context: Pracowity jak pszczoła from Polish and flitig som ett bi from Swedish, both meaning “busy as a bee”, and pracowity jak mrówka (Polish) and flitig som en myra (Swedish), both translating as “busy as an ant”.

I rather like the Welsh expression prysur fel lladd nadroedd, which means “busy like killing snakes”! I wouldn’t have thought that the Welsh spent all that much time killing snakes, but there you are, you never know!

Coming from North Germany, the German expression, for when there’s a lot going on, things in general are really busy, so a slight shift in meaning, deserves a special mention of its own; da boxt der Papst – “the pope boxes”!

If there’s no cat…

“When the cat’s away, the mice will play”

 

I’ve always thought this expression has a lovely rhythm to it. And of course it has a long history too.

 

In the early 14^th century, it appears in French as ou chat na rat regne; “with no cat, the rat is king”. But this imagery bears a strong resemblance to the Latin phrase dum felis dormit, mus gaudet et exsi litantro, which translates as “when the cat sleeps, the mouse rejoices and leaps from the hole”.

 

Perhaps the best known historical reference to this expression in English can be found in Shakespeare’s play Henry V, in which the Earl of Westmoreland says:

 

“Playing the mouse in absence of the cat,

To tear and havoc more than she can eat.” (Act 1, Scene 2)

 

Unsurprisingly, especially considering the Latin phrase, it is also an expression that is to be found in a number of different languages, although interestingly most people prefer to think of the mice dancing rather than playing.

 

This is certainly true of the Slovene version: Ko mačke ni doma, miši plešejo; “when the cat is not at home, mice are dancing”. It is very similar in Italian: Quando il gatto non c’è, i topi ballano – “when the cat is not there, the mice dance”. The Modern French version has moved on a bit since the 14^th century, and is now more likely to be heard as quand le chat n’est pas là, les souris dansent, which translates the same as the Italian expression. This is also the case in Greek, which uses: όταν λείπει η γάτα, χορεύουν τα ποντίκια (otan leipei i gata, horevoun ta pontikia) – which means “when the cat is not there (missing), the mice dance”.

 

In Spanish there are two options – one means the same as the Italian and French; cuando el gato no está los ratones bailan, and the second one, cuando el gato no está los ratones están de fiesta, means “when the cat is not there, the mice have a party”! Good for the Spanish mice! It seems they are very neighbourly and don’t mind if their Portuguese rodent friends join in; quando o gato sai, os ratos fazem a festa is the Portuguese equivalent, and it also means “when the cat is out, the mice have a party”.

 

Perhaps in Wales the mice don’t have a party, but they still have a good time:  in Welsh we find llon llygod lle ni bo cath: “the mice are merry where there’s no cat.”

 

Moving on, we come to German, where if the cat is out of the house, the mice don’t just play, or even dance tamely, they dance on the table – Wenn die Katze aus dem Haus ist, tanzen die Mäuse auf dem Tisch. Similarly, in Finnish, the mice like to get up on the table, although in this case they prefer to jump: Kun kissa on poissa, hiiret hyppivät pöydällä, which translates, of course, as “When the cat is away, the mice are jumping on the table”.

 

Now we come to two languages in which the expression is slightly different. Firstly, in Russian they say Без кота мышам раздолье. (bez kata mysham razdolje), which means “without a cat, there is freedom for mice”.

 

And last but certainly not least, we come to Turkish, where the mice get really sporty! Kedi olmayınca fareler cirit atar, which is literally “when the cat doesn’t exist, the mice throw javelins”.

Can’t see the Wood for the Trees

This expression, still popular today, has been in use in largely the same form for centuries. Many dictionaries trace it back as far as 1546, where it was recorded in John Heywood’s “Prouerbes in the English Tongue”. He wrote “ye can not see the wood for trees”. However, in order for Heywood to include it in his work, it must have already been widely known and recognised, which of course gives us the first clue that there might be a longer history than at first thought.

An intriguing reference appears in a work by Thomas More, who was famously executed by King Henry VIII. This was the enormously titled “The second parte of the confutacion of Tyndals answere in whyche is also confuted the chyrche that Tyndale deuyseth. And the chyrche also that frere Barns deuyseth”, generally known simply as “The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer”, which is dated 1533, thus putting it 13 years before Heywood’s work.

Here’s the section, with the expression at the end: “Uery well declared, as though he wold tell vs that there were a woman that went inuysyble, and that he ment not that her handes, or her fete, or her hed, or any parte of her were inuysyble / but all her partes beynge vysyble, her self were yet inuysyble. And as he myght tell vs, that of Pou|les chyrch we may well se the stones, but we can not se the chyrce. And then we may well tell hym agayne, that he can not se the wood for the trees.” (p. ccccxxxvii, in Book VIII.)

It goes beautifully with the preceding sentence about seeing the stones but not the church, and the way in which it is used so naturally does indeed suggest that this was already a well known expression by 1533.

Trees were an important part of culture across the continent, so it is natural that this should be an expression that appears in many different languages. In German it is Den Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht sehen, while in French just one tree is preferred, with l’arbre qui cache la forêt; “the tree that hides the forest”. Similarly, in Spanish it is por ver el árbol no ves el bosque “seeing the tree, you don’t see the woods”. And of course, in Welsh it is almost a word for word translation: methu gweld y coed gan breniau.

Even non-Indo-European Hungarian gives us nem látja a fától az erdöt. And in Finnish it is Ei nähdä metsää puilta, “not to see the trees of the forest.” In Russian, they say деревья не дают на лес посмотреть (dereviya ne dayut na les posmotret), which is literally “the trees don’t let you see the forest”. From Greek comes βλέπω το δέντρο και όχι το δάσος (vlepo to dentro kai ohi to dasos), which is “I see the tree but not the woods”.

 

With special thanks to Lucy Allen for her help in researching the reference to this expression in Thomas More’s work.

Let the Cat out of the Bag

At first glance, this might seem like a stange expression. After all, what was the cat doing inside the bag in the first place in order to be let out of it?? And why should this be regarded as a way to reveal a secret?

The expression dates back to the 1700s. The idea is that an unscrupulous trader might try to sell a sack which was supposed to have a pig in it – a useful animal, which could be used for meat and leather, while in reality a cat had been put in the sack. Obviously, if the cat was let out of the bag, then you would realise that you were being had – the secret would be revealed too early. One can only assume that the cats put in these bags were not the noisy type, else the secret would be revealed by a loud meow, without having to let the animal out at all!

There has been some speculation that the expression is related to the “cat-o-nine-tails”, a kind of whip used to punish sailors. However, there does not seem to be any basis for this claim. Taking a known whip out of a bag seems to bear no relation to the idea of revealing a secret, and in fact the only thing our idiom has in common with this is the word “cat”, hardly an uncommon animal, and one that we see used in a number of other expressions too.

Interestingly, it wasn’t just merchants in Britain who were dishonest and tried this trick – exactly the same expression exists in German; die Katze aus dem Sack lassen, and in North Welsh at least, it is again the same as in English gollwng y gath o’r cwd.

In Poland people are still taking things out of bags; wyszło szydło z worka, which means “an awl came out of the bag”, an awl being a kind of tool used to make holes in leather.

The Spanish have a number of expressions; soltar la lengua, which translates as “release the tongue” is the most literal when it comes to revealing secrets. Then there is abrir la bocota, “open the big gob”, which of course we might say in English too, and my personal favourite, destapar la olla, which means “uncover the saucepan”. To me at least, this brings a rather lovely image to mind of a pot bubbling over with secrets waiting to be revealed!

The French expression, itself dating only to the 19^th century, is quite explosive! Vendre la mèche – “to sell out (betray) the fuse”, in reference to a way of discovering where mines were.

This brings me on to Slovenian, where we find a familiar expression. Daj karte na mizo, which literally means “lay your cards on the table”, in order to reveal a secret. However, there is another expression in Slovene that I rather like. The usage is slightly different, but it is still on the general theme of revealing secrets. When someone has something to say and doesn’t know where to start, people may prompt them with kaj imaš za bregom, which translates as “what do you have behind the hill”. This is a lovely note to finish on and leave you wondering what I have waiting behind the next linguistic hill!