I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears and Other Intriguing Idioms From Around the World Read Free Page B

considered their founding sacred text.
     
    • Fifth, the power and influence of language also operates at much more personal levels and in much less explicit ways. To quote George Lakoff, the prominent cognitive linguist: “Language usually works through the cognitive unconscious, so we are mostly unaware of the effects it’s having.” 12 We’ll return to more of his views later, when we summarize his call for a New Enlightenment to address the increasingly apparent shortcomings of the First. An experiment conducted at New York University shows how language exposure, even if inadvertent, can have very measurable effects on behavoir. Researchers asked students to volunteer for an experiment in which they completed a word-based task (constructing grammatically correct sentences from lists of words). However, unbeknownst to the students, the experiment hadn’t ended when they left. The time it took them to walk down the exit corridor was measured surreptitiously. Students whose lists had contained words associated with old age (like retired or wrinkled) walked more slowly, by 13 percent, than those whose word lists were neutral. The words they had been exposed to measurably changed the speed at which they walked. 13 That’s staggering. And alarming.
     
    OK, enough preamble. Please join me on a trip of the tongues, through the world’s idioms…and along the way, into the inside of heads…of others and of our own selves.

 
    Dry firewood meets a flame
Chinese: instant attraction

chapter one
THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE
    Swallowed like a postman’s sock
    L ANGUAGES MAKE VISIBLE what’s important to their users. And what could be more important than love? Some paleolinguists have proposed that language developed for romantic purposes. Though, to be more precise, they mean for mating, not dating. Dating is an evolutionarily recent phenomenon that we aren’t well adapted to. Speaking of evolution, Darwin proposed an early version of this theory. In The Descent of Man he wrote, “Some early progenitor of man probably first used his voice in producing true musical cadences, that is in singing…and…this power would have been especially exerted during the courtship of the sexes.” 1 Music may have been the audition, as well as the food of love . This view of language-origin-ology is known as “la-la” theory.
    La-la theory has languished unloved since Darwin’s time. Its old flame has only recently been rekindled (as the Italians would say, like “reheated cabbage”), for example in Geoffrey Miller’s Mating Mind Theory. 2 The modern version has expanded far beyond the analogy with the songs of courting animals to include many aspects of complex evolutionary psychology. So perhaps “la-la” as a folksy name is no longer satisfying. I propose “woo-woo” theory as a better nickname to encompass its increased scope. Ardent woo-woo theorists believe language (and other sophisticated mental and behavioral traits) gained considerable complexity in the competition to impress the opposite sex. Their theory leads them to the deliciously seductive point of view that the human brain fits the profile of a “sexually selected ornament.”
    The peacock tail * is one of nature’s most flagrant sexually selected ornaments. It clearly doesn’t fit the survival of the fittest model, in which animals are ruthlessly honed to be lean, mean, survival machines. Instead, peacock tails became ostentatious, so much bigger and unfit compared to peahen tails (which are a drab gray), in hot pursuit of the survival of the sexiest scenario —i.e., animals are not so lean, not so mean, courtship machines. Often what makes you fittest makes you sexiest, but not always. The peacock tail is a substantial survival liability. And surviving in spite of it is precisely what the peacock is advertising. Many sex selection characteristics in nature are driven by the needs of males to attract the attention of choosy females. Usually it’s that way