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I little while ago I posted about a contemptible misuse of language commonly heard in America. This time, the rest of the English-speaking world is at fault too.
We're all accustomed to hearing this phrase used to indicate loss of self-control -- perhaps reckless abandon of one's sensibility, particularly with regard to love.
Head Over Heels
Interestingly, the opposite to this appears to be 'feet firmly planted on the ground', which indicates a rational and contained approach. Well, I don't know about you, but when my feet are firmly planted on the ground, guess where the fuck my head is?
That's right, it's over my heels.
Now obviously the original intent of the term was to convey an out-of-control tumbling in the sense of 'head over heels over head over heels', but when expressed concisely it doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
I'm so desensitised to this that I wouldn't have thought to post about it, except that today I overheard a typical conversation between two young women, only one of them wasn't a native anglophone.
The chatty girl was telling the other one of her new boyfriend and how 'head over heels' he was about her. Clearly perplexed, the other one asked: "should he have not been upright?"
I may have ruptured some organs laughing. Lots of English idioms make me cringe, and since everyone uses them to excess it must be really hard on textbook educated newcomers.
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I have a few German friends who have been trying to learn English. Every time they hear certain unusual phrases that they have not heard before, they just look at me weird.
For instance, it was raining rather badly the other day and I remarked, “Don’t go out without an umbrella; it’s raining cats and dogs.” They just looked at me with this bewildered look and then one of them asked, “Is it raining badly with cats and dogs outside in the rain? Is it not safe?”
I just burst out laughing and spent the next half hour explaining the term to them. They keep telling me that English is a lousy language to learn. Can’t say I understand what the fuss is all about. ;)
It seems like a lot of English idioms just aren’t as derivative as they are in most other languages. Cats and dogs is a great one :)
Albeit quite evocative, exactly how full of tea and crumpets do you have to be to come up with that one?
Rhyming slang is another one that brits and mostly old-school british-influenced aussies still cling to. Rhyming slang tends to annoy me more than entertain me I have to say.
“get on the dog and bone” meaning “get on the phone”… requires altogether too much effort and really makes the speaker seem mentally ill to someone without intimate knowledge of the phrasology.
I was born in Australia, so I’ve learned this crap by rote but I really hate to think what it must be like trying to make sense of it all as an outsider… who is then accused of refusing to integrate.
“When it first appeared, back in the fourteenth century, it was written as heels over head, which makes a lot more sense. Logically, it meant to be upside down, or, as to turn heels over head, to turn a somersault.
It became inverted around the end of the eighteenth century, it seems as the result of a series of mistakes by authors who didn’t stop to think about the conventional phrase they were writing. ” (http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-hea3.htm)
Conformists will be the death of us all….or was that cardiac arrest? I always get the two confused.