Webs of Language

"There's a cool web of language winds us in," says the poet Robert Graves. Some of the strongest threads of this web are found in our stock of figurative language, in the links between proverbs, phrases, and quotations.

"Always something new out of Africa" has been proverbial in English since the 16th century. It derives from a comment in his Natural History by the 1st-century Roman statesman and scholar Pliny the Elder, "Semper aliquid novi Africam adferre" – "Africa always brings [us] something new". We talk (especially in the current climate) of a "bear market" in which falling share prices encourage selling; in Stock Exchange usage, a "bear" is a person who sells shares hoping to buy them back again at a lower price. A dealer in this kind of stock was known as a "bearskin jobber", and it seems likely that the original phrase was "sell the bearskin". This in turn may have derived from a proverbial warning against over-optimism: one should not "sell the bear's skin before one has caught the bear" (in some early versions, the animal is a lion).

Also in the (20th-century) business world, the US coined the expression "triple-witching hour", as an informal name for the unpredictable final hour of trading on the US Stock Exchange before the simultaneous expiry of three different kinds of options. The "witching hour" is traditionally midnight, a time when witches are supposed to come out and anything can happen: the idea is found most famously in Shakespeare's Hamlet: "'Tis now the very witching time of night When churchyards yawn."

A traditional proverb may take its quoted form from a particular writer. The essential idea behind the proverb "To err is human; to forgive, divine " is recorded from the 16th century, but the precise wording derives from the poet Alexander Pope in An Essay on Criticism (1711). In the late 20th century, a satiric twist gave us a modern saying: "To err is human but to really foul things up requires a computer."

"Cruel and unusual punishment" is now an established phrase for punishment exceeding the bounds of what is regarded as an appropriate penal remedy for a civilized society; it comes originally from the Eighth Amendment (1791) to the American Constitution: " Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted." "An eye for an eye", used for revenge or retaliation in kind, derives ultimately from the biblical book of Exodus, "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth" both phrase and quotation are moderated by the modern saying, sometimes attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."

Printer friendly version