Language Museum

Visiting my grandparents recently, I was struck by a phrase my grandmother said frequently: “go tell that to your Dutch uncle”.

I’d never heard this before, and neither my grandfather or mother use the phrase or could tell me where it was from. A quick search doesn’t reveal anything of its origins. My grandmother used it jokingly when she thought someone was saying something fanciful or that she didn’t believe. I got the impression that the “Dutch uncle” was someone fictional, who would believe the stories you would tell.

A “Dutch uncle” is referenced here as “a term for a person who issues frank, harsh, and severe comments and criticism to educate, encourage, or admonish someone”, whereas here it is “a person who bluntly and sternly lectures or scolds someone, often with benevolent intent”. Perhaps my grandmother was using it more in the sense that the Dutch uncle was someone who would punish the story-teller for their lies.

My grandmother is in her eighties and from the West Country in England. Perhaps this is a regional idiom?

Can anyone shed any light on this strange phrase?

A friend sent me the link to this website, which has quickly become a favourite.

Idiomsbykids.com is a project run by a schoolteacher in Nanaimo, Canada. He explains:

These pictures illustrate what an idiom actually says and not what the idiom actually means. We used a loose definition of idioms to basically define idioms to be idiotic. In other words they are expressions that generally need explanations to be understood. They often have very interesting origins but sometimes their origins are not even known. What each student did was draw pictures of exactly what the idiom said, not what the idiom meant.

(For the full definition of an idiom, along with a list of English idioms, click here.)

Idioms can be hard for language learners to understand, so perhaps drawing pictures could be helpful. You could even add your pictures to the website – and see if you can be funnier than the kids! My current favourites include dead meat, a bit at sea, and doggy bag.

In London recently, I dropped by to see The Rosetta Stone at the British Museum. This slab of granodiorite is so famous that I could barely get near it for all the people craning over each other to take a close look.

So why were all those people so eager to look at a big stone? And why is it so important?

Weighing in at around three-quarters of a ton, the stone is approximately 118cm high, 77cm wide and 30cm deep. Discovered by Napoleon’s army in 1799, the Rosetta Stone is named after the place it was found – near el-Rashid (Rosetta) in present day Egypt. When Napoleon’s army was defeated, the stone became the property of the English, and has been on display in the British Museum since 1802 (although its presence is debated).

The Rosetta Stone is inscribed with three columns of different languages – Greek, Demotic and hieroglyphics, which all have the same message. The inscription on the stone is a decree passed by a council of priests – but it’s not so much what is written that’s important (although it does tell us a lot), it’s what knowledge can be gained from the inscription.

The decree is inscribed on the stone three times, in hieroglyphic (suitable for a priestly decree), demotic (the native script used for daily purposes), and Greek (the language of the administration). The importance of this to Egyptology is immense. Soon after the end of the fourth century AD, when hieroglyphs had gone out of use, the knowledge of how to read and write them disappeared. In the early years of the nineteenth century, some 1400 years later, scholars were able to use the Greek inscription on this stone as the key to decipher them. Thomas Young, an English physicist, was the first to show that some of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of Ptolemy. The French scholar Jean-François Champollion then realized that hieroglyphs recorded the sound of the Egyptian language and laid the foundations of our knowledge of ancient Egyptian language and culture.

(Source: British Museum).

As you can see, it is hugely important to language, and the term “Rosetta Stone” has become idiomatic

as something that is a critical key to the process of decryption or translation of a difficult encoding of information. (source)

Its importance is highlighted with the Rosetta Project, which I will be looking at in my next post….

I found this postcard in a souvenir shop in Australia recently, and it greatly amused me (click for legible full size).

Australians have come up with some excellent phrases that (sadly) have not made it into general use in British or American English. “Ya flamin’ galah” is perhaps my personal favourite, and will be familiar to anyone who watches Australian soaps. It basically means “you fool” and is best delivered in a broad Australian accent.

Whilst most of the slang on this postcard you’re unlikely to hear in the major urban areas of Australia, I can’t wait to get to the outback (or “the bush”) to see if someone really will call me a drongo and give me an earbashing for having a barney!
For more Aussie slang, see here.

We commonly use the term “déjà vu” in English to describe the sensation that a current situation has happened to us before (current research suggests there’s a rational theory). For example, we may walk in to a friend’s house for the first time and feel like we have been there previously.

The French, however, have a range of terms to describe the different feelings that in English we may all describe as déjà vu. Déjà is the French word for “already”, and vu means “seen”. There’s also déjà senti (already felt), déjà vecu (already experienced) and déjà visite (already visited).

The example I provided above then, would more accurately be described as déjà visite. Next time you get that odd feeling of having previously experienced a situation, think about it a bit more – it may not be déjà vu!