Common World Idioms - Christophe, Gary

--- Christophe Grandsire scrawls:
>"to kick the bucket".
Yes, It means "to pass on" -- It certainly can't
qualify as a "universal idiom." I'm more interested in
knowing its origin- anyone?

>"to be caught with the hand in the handbag"
YES! Excellent to compare with "red-handed"
"To be caught with..." seems to be rather common - the
ending tends to be localized: "the hand in the cookie
jar" etc..

> I
> still couldn't imagine what logic would make it
> possible to guess this
> meaning from such an idiom as "red handed".
As Gary Shannon quite straightly put it: "..."red
handed" means "with blood on your hands" and that
being "caught red handed" means being caught between
the act of comitting mayhem and the nearest bar of
soap..."

Here is where I will agree to see your point,
Christophe: The act of killing someone is no longer as
bloody as it used to be, and the reference may not be
resonant. Nowadays, some people can afford to send
planes, (toys or otherwise) that can bomb lots of
people to smithereens - the pilots dont need to see
any "red" at all. Aside from the moral issues of
blood-free killing, it also presents the context that
murder and killing, though still acts of "mayhem" is
not necessarily bloody, and therefore the metaphor
might seem too old.

(BTW, Is'nt blood the *primary *concept humans
associate with "red" -- I agree that while red=blood,
blood does not necessarily equal "mayhem" - it could
also represent "vitality", "life", "life essence",
"menstruation", etc. All virtually the opposite of
death and "mayhem.")

This is one of the issues I'm dealing with in looking
at refactoring Chinese characters, is the ancient
context, which may no longer make real sense to
people.  So something like the word "hao3" (good)
which written as the radical of "mother" and "child"
together -- supposed to kindle a concept of
"goodness."  The symbol for family or home is a "pig"
under a "roof". Very old - and perhaps, *too old.

The point (where I agree slightly with Christophe) is
that replacing very old concepts with new ones, can
mistakenly erase the very primitive, though
human-understandable context. The human-essential
context is in fact what has the most universal appeal,
and is most commonly understood. So, yes I disagree
that the effort is baseless.

>Metaphor is extremely culture-centric
> ad thus not very fit for international
> communication, and common idioms are
> for that reason extremely rare, and must be
> considered as coincidences only.
No, this is making my point.  I'm interested in the
known idioms which *trancend the typical barrier of
local language.  In these few - perhaps ten or twenty
- is "a pot of gold." :)

> common idioms are
> for that reason extremely rare, and must be
> considered as coincidences only.
"Coincidences?" HA! There are no coincidences.

Coincidentally, something for Gary on Darmok:
http://www.4reference.net/encyclopedias/wikipedia/Biblespeak.html

Steven Cooney
Symbolproject.org

----

--- Christophe Grandsire
> And I agree with Mark and disagree with you here.
> Before I learned through
> a book about idioms and their translations from
> English to French, I had no
> idea what it meant (I didn't even know it had
> anything with actually being
> caught. It's an idiom after all!). And even after I
> learned it meant: "être
> pris la main dans le sac": "to be caught with the
> hand in the handbag", I
> still couldn't imagine what logic would make it
> possible to guess this
> meaning from such an idiom as "red handed".

> Idioms are about the most difficult things to
> translate from language to
> language, any translator will tell you that. Using
> them in an international
> means of communication is a bad idea. Metaphor is
> extremely culture-centric
> ad thus not very fit for international
> communication, and common idioms are
> for that reason extremely rare, and must be
> considered as coincidences only.







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