The French expression peigner la girafe means to do a useless, tedious, or annoying job, but literally translates as “to comb the giraffe.” That’s one of the many gems in Mark Abley’s new book Watch Your Tongue: What Our Everyday Sayings and Idioms Figuratively Mean. Abley also observes that Korean youngsters use an expression meaning “Of course!” or “Absolutely!” Literally, though, the expression translates as “It’s a carrot!” You can hear the expression dang geun in an adorable Korean cartoon that shows carrots singing to each other that of course they’ll always be friends. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Interesting Foreign Expressions”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
We all have had the experience of doing work that’s tedious or pointless, and the French have a wonderful term for that that translates as combing the giraffe.
Do you know this one? Pogner la giraffe, which refers to the idea of doing something that’s just, you know.
Right. How do you get up there? You’ve got to get the ladder. He’s not going to stand still.
Right. He doesn’t care very much. He’s not helping.
I learned that from a new book by Canadian author Mark Abley. It’s called Watch Your Tongue, What Our Everyday Sayings and Idioms Figuratively Mean.
And Mark is from Canada. He’s the author of Spoken Here, Travels Among Threatened Languages, which I really loved. It takes you on a tour of the world’s endangered languages from the Arctic Circle all the way down to Australia.
And this book is a delightful compendium of things like that. I also learned in his new book that in Korean, the word for of course or absolutely sounds a whole lot like the word for carrot.
So among younger Koreans, if they just want to say of course or absolutely, they just say the equivalent of it’s a carrot. Tongan or something like that.
And in fact, there’s a video of an absolutely adorable cartoon with dancing carrots singing in Korean that, of course, they love you, that I just I’ve watched several times now. It’s a real day brightener, but it’s a carrot.
So Mark Abley’s book is called? It’s called Watch Your Tongue. Watch Your Tongue. Great.
We’ll have a link to that on the website. And then a little later in the show, I’ll share a book that I recommend.
Okay. And if you’ve got books that you’ve been enjoying that you’d like to tell us about so we can share them with the world, tell us an email, words@waywordradio.org, or call us 877-929-9673.
