One of the
friends I made on-line, a Filipino nurse in Norway, commented on the seeming
illogic of Norwegian idiom here:
The web post
invites us to puzzle over the expressions
"tørr
bak i øret" , literally "dry behind the ears", but meaning
"of advanced years"
"holde
i sjakk", literally "keep in check" but meaning to keep under
control
"svart
i øye", literally "black in the eye", but meaning in a rage
I don't know
Norwegian, but perceive the similarities with English, apart of course from the
grammar and structure of the words.
English has
an expression "wet behind the ears" which means very young, newborn
in fact. The reference is to the amniotic fluid that covers newborn puppies,
foals, etc. The mother usually licks them "dry" with her tongue,
removing all the birth gunk and allowing the clean saliva to dry off naturally.
I can see how this expression might have originated in a culture where farming
and keeping livestock played a major part. To be "dry behind the
ears" would be the opposite. I don't think English has a counterpart to
the Norwegian expression, though. Or maybe there is -- in some village in
Yorkshire, previously inhabited by Vikings. James Herriot, can you help?
"Holde
det i sjakk" doesn't translate to "hold it in chess," as the
original post suggests, but to "hold it in check," i.e. to control,
which is English, though admittedly so much a part of the language one hardly
notices that it is, in fact, idiomatic. I guess "check",
"checks" (as in plaids) and "chess" have a similar
etymology.
"Svart
i øye" could refer to the tendency of the pupil to dilate under intense
emotion, causing pale-eyed people (like the original Norwegians) to turn
dark-eyed for a moment or two. Reminds me of the English expression "eyes
darkened with passion", found in romance novels and the like, and which I
often found, to my great amusement, in the work of my creative writing students
at the University of the Philippines -- writing about men and women in a
contemporary milieu. As most Filipinos have black or brown eyes, I don't think
passion would darken them, except figuratively. I like logic in all things.
***
Language is
all about practices and lived reality.
And really,
the Scandinavian languages are not as impenetrable as some native speakers
would have us believe. Knowing English gives you a key to a few of the locks in
the mighty series that keeps Nordic people (oh, okay, to be fair, Danish
people, as for the most part my experience is limited to Denmark) secure in
their strongholds of exclusivity.
When my
husband and I discuss language, it is often a journey of mutual discovery
--that an expression in his native Danish has an English counterpart, and vice
versa.
