As a life-long student of languages, I’m fascinated by, to use Eric Partridge’s phrase, both usages and abusages.
And this isn’t merely an academic interest. For a study of language is a study of people.
After all, language is a reliable indicator of a person’s class, education, culture, even character. And comparing two languages gives a clue to the differences between two nations.
The current political turmoil in Britain provides a couple of helpful examples of the former benefit, and we have Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng to thank for it.
Yesterday Liz sacked Kwasi in the last-ditch hope of saving her own job. No such luck, prophesied Mr Kwarteng in his good-bye letter.
By stabbing him in the back, Liz only bought herself “a few weeks”, he wrote, because “the wagons are circling” her premiership.
Mrs Malaprop would be happy to discover a kindred spirit. For Kwasi – an Old Etonian and Cambridge PhD! – misused the expression badly.
Contrary to what he evidently thinks, “to circle the wagons” doesn’t mean getting ready to pounce. In fact, it means exactly the opposite: people defending themselves by pooling their resources.
The expression dates back to the American westward expansion, when settlers travelled in horse-drawn wagons. Their caravans were constantly harassed by Indians, wielding bows, tomahawks and scalping knives.
Hence, when they stopped for the night, settlers would form a defensive perimeter by arranging their wagons in a circle around their tents. That’s a far cry from what Mr Kwarteng was trying to say.
What he had in mind should have been conveyed by the idiom of “the vultures are circling”. Those birds of prey scavenge on carrion, the decaying flesh of dead animals. Sometimes they get ahead of themselves and begin to circle a moribund animal in its last throes.
Hence “the vultures are circling” would have been a proper metaphor for both the state of Miss Truss’s premiership and the Tory MPs who can’t wait to tear her to shreds. Unless Mr Kwarteng can provide historical evidence of scavenging wagons, or at least those deployed in an offensive formation, he must own up to an annoying malapropism.
His knife-wielding boss herself is no slouch in that department. When Liz Truss won the Tory leadership contest, she promised that, as PM, she would “hit the ground”. Splat! Ow! Ouch!
Any criticism of that usage has to be qualified by allowances made for the possibility that Miss Truss meant exactly what she said. An outside chance exists that she actually planned to shatter her tenure by falling on the flinty political ground from a great height.
Barring that unlikely possibility, she probably meant to promise to “hit the ground running”, to take a fast start on the road to becoming a statesman of Periclean proportions. Alas, her wrong usage has proved to be factually true, while the correct idiom would have delivered a promise Miss Truss was ill-qualified to keep.
At least, unlike the Eton-educated Kwasi, little Lizzie went to a comprehensive school, if not of the bog-standard variety. While we’re in the business of clichés, that enables her to hit two birds (vultures? wagons?) with one stone.
First, she can score political points by claiming to be as prole as the next woman. And then she can use her educationally disadvantaged background to absolve herself of any personal responsibility for not speaking English proper like. Tories, after all, are no longer in the personal responsibility business.
Getting out of personalities (and politics, come to think of it), comparative linguistics is a good tool of comparative anthropology. For example, one can learn much by comparing English and Russian sayings.
Just compare these two: “Let bygones be bygones” and “Gouge the eye out of anyone who mentions the past”. The first is English, the second, conveying the same idea, is a translation from the Russian.
Far be it from me to suggest that this juxtaposition explains exhaustively the carpet bombing of the Ukraine’s residential areas, but we are beginning to get a tiny hint of a clue.
Or how about this pair: “Too many cooks spoil the broth” and “A child with seven nannies will lose an eye”. Are you beginning to detect a tendency?
Not yet? Then look at this duo: “No use crying over spilt milk” and “Having lost your head, don’t cry over your lost hair”. Still no traction? Then consider this: “At a loose end” and “Like a turd in an ice-hole”.
Even violent English sayings are more violent in Russian. To wit: “Curiosity killed the cat” and “Curious Barbara had her nose ripped out at the market”.
On and on in the same vein. “Still waters run deep” and “Devils live in still waters”. “A bad workman always blames his tools” and “A bad dancer is always hampered by his balls.” “Make a note” and “Make a notch on your nose.” “The cold hard truth” and “Truth will prick your eye”.
Some Russian proverbs don’t have obvious English equivalents, which in itself provides valuable insights into various aspects of Russia. Such as relations between the sexes:
“A chicken isn’t a bird, a wench isn’t a human being.” And its companion: “A wench falls off the cart, the horse’s life is easier”. Or, “If he beats a woman, he loves her”, a proverb I don’t recommend for the defence counsel in a domestic violence case.
If you wonder how a country with the world’s richest natural resources can remain so dirt-poor, look at the Russian proverbs dealing with related subjects: “You can’t earn all the money in the world”, “Work isn’t a wolf, it won’t run away into the forest”, “Work likes fools”, “You won’t build a stone house by honest work”, “You don’t steal, you won’t survive”.
Aren’t languages wonderful? I can never understand why anyone ever bothers to study anything else.
“The wagons are circling” would seem to be misquoting a common saying. My first thought was that since it originated in the U.S., Mr. Kwarteng could be forgiven for getting it wrong. But if it has been around long enough (more than two centuries?) to make it to England and for Mr. Kwarteng to have heard of it, that’s probably too generous of me (that’s a first!).
On closer examoination, however, it appears that he actually did mean, and say, “The vultures are circling.” We know that language is evolving – and at an alarming rate these days, driven by the most illiterate. Checking Merriam-Webster.com we see the definition for “wagon”: 1. a usually four-wheeled vehicle for transporting bulky commodities and drawn originally by animals; 2. a low four-wheeled vehicle with an open rectangular body and a retroflex tongue made for the play or use of a child; 3. any of a species of large, scavanger birds, for example: vultures, crows, jackdaws, and condors.
It is wonderful to live in a world where words can mean whatever we want! Three cheers for Humpty Dumpty!
You are right, the expression crossed the Atlantic long ago and is now common in Britain. But apparently not common enough for some Old Etonians.
I visited a museum in St Louis Mo. one time and the guide said during his talk that the pioneers main reason for circling the wagons was to protect their animals from dangerous wild life and from wandering off. Just thought I’d mention that.
“Aren’t languages wonderful? I can never understand why anyone ever bothers to study anything else.”
The study of mathematics is entertaining. The study of theology is (for people of high intelligence) possibly obligatory. But the study of languages is the study of MANKIND.
Are the Russian proverbs you quote current? I could find you similar sayings in the Icelandic sagas, but I’m sure that modern Icelanders don’t agree with them. (If anything, the modern Icelanders have gone too far in the opposite direction.)
All those proverbs are everyday parlance. But I was joking about not studying anything other than languages. First principles are really my first choice, ill-equipped as I may be to do them justice. That indeed means theology and, as an afterthought, philosophy. As a modern Russian writer said, “I hate getting bored and, compared to Christ, everything else is boring.