A new breed of linguistic misstep: mixed idioms

Hello:

In part, in explanation of the name of this blog, and in part, in the interest of posterity, I want to propose a new category of linguistic error (of the hilarious variety): the mixed idiom.

We can think of the error committed by my title as a spoonerization of the idiom-conjunction:

lying though the teeth + paying through the nose

These two phrases are both idiomatic. That is to say that their meaning cannot be deduced from a literal interpretation of their component words.

Now, I created this title by choosing 2 idioms (both containing the idiomatic use of body parts) and transposing the body part elements between them. This makes the joke a little more obvious that the way that it has usually occurred, tumbling embarrassingly from my lips.

How it has occurred most often in my case, the transposition is tacit. The source-phrase for the transposed element is not present in my speech. So, in conversation, I simply say: "Could you believe Rhonda? Saying she ain't never skipped school before!! That girl was lying through her nose!"

(pause for laughs)


I remember a particular instance in which I wanted to tease my friend about his inclination for introspection, aloneness, etc. I said (with gusto--for extra embarrassment) "My friend, you are a lone shark". Well, hilarity and embarrassment ensued.

This was a special case, because, not only did I transpose shark for wolf (both animal-like things), it sounded like I was saying "loan shark". I think this sort of double confusion made it extra hilarious. The corollary mixed-idiom would be: "loan wolf" as in, "If you want to buy that 1981 Toyota Corolla for $300, you're going to have to go and see that loan wolf".

Anyhow...I think that these mixed idioms occur for different reasons. In the case of the lone shark, I think that all along, I had genuinely been fooled into thinking that when people were saying "loan shark" they were really saying "lone shark", and so I thought it was an appropriate phrase to use.

It also frequently happens in speech, I think because people are talking faster than they are thinking. Because, in my experience, the switch is often between things of the same ontological (roughly) type, I imagine that the cognitive mechanism that allows this to happen goes something like this:

you know that you need an idiom that means the person really had to pay for what they got.
your idiom 'paying through the nose' is labeled for that use so your mind picks it up and pops it into the queue for words about to be spoken. When they arrive at the part of the brain that sends words to lips, though, all it looks like is this 'paying through the [body part]'. Your brain goes back to the idiom file and looks for cross-references for idioms containing body parts, and picks out something random. You say: "Oh man...T-bone really paid through the teeth for that 81 corrola!". Embarrassment, hilarity...consequent social anxiety ensue.

I'm interested in these mixed idioms, so I'll try to keep a log here of one's I come accross.

Russian (at least, late 19th C Russian) naming conventions and Anna Karenina

Hey there....

Current fiction on my bedside table is Anna Karenina (Tolstoy). I'm only about 100 pages in, but I was struggling with keeping the characters straight.

In my reading history there are only two (fiction) books that I've ever started but not yet finished. The first is The Temple of My Familiar (Alice Walker), the second is One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez). No real reason for stopping the Walker text, but I am very able to pinpoint the issue I had with the Garcia Marquez read. The story in One Hundred Years encompasses the lives of 7 generations of Buendias. Almost all of the men share some part of their first or second names in common. Add to this the author's choice to deal with the timeline in a frequently changing and ambiguous way, and the story becomes very confusing. The foremost confusion, for me, was who was who. That is, I had a lot of difficulty keeping the characters straight.

This is the same trouble that had confronted me in the early pages of Anna. In the early pages, Levin and Stepan are dining together and Tolstoy refers to Stepan alternately as Oblonsky (unbeknownst to the innocent reader, however). Although it seemed appropriate to the story that only the two be dining together, I couldn't shake the feeling that Stepan, Levin and Oblonsky were taking up a table for three.

I found the following tip, from Sparknotes very helpful:

Each Russian has a first name, a patronymic, and a surname. A person’s patronymic consists of his or her father’s first name accompanied by a suffix meaning “son of” or “daughter of.” Hence, Levin is addressed as Konstantin Dmitrich (son of Dmitri), Kitty is called Ekaterina Alexandrovna (daughter of Alexander), and so on. Characters in the novel frequently address each other in this formal manner, using both the first name and patronymic.

When characters do not address each other formally, they may use informal nicknames, or diminutives. Sometimes, these nicknames bear little resemblance to the characters’ full names. For instance, Levin is sometimes called Kostya (the standard nickname for Konstantin), and Vronsky is sometimes called Alyosha (the diminutive of Alexei).

The other thing is, that some of the characters, particularly the male characters, are often referred to by their surnames only (just like in real life!)

It would be interesting to find out whether these naming conventions are still commonplace in Russia today.

The Selfish Gene, quickly

So, I read the Selfish Gene for an undergraduate class I took this Winter in the philosophy of biology with my fave philosopher of all time, Gillian. It isn't your standard philosophical fare because it was written for a wider audience. Also, Dawkins is a fantastic writer. I was completely impressed by the argument Dawkins makes in the book.

There are two downfalls to my mind (both minor). First, he makes numerous implicit simplifying assumptions about the nature of the gene and how it operates in evolution. See, e.g.:

David Sloan Wilson, "Levels of Selection: An Alternative to Individualism in Biology and the Human Sciences", Social Networks 11 (1989): 257-272. Elsevier Science Publishers B. V., North Holland.

Second, he makes unreflective overtures (at least in this anniversary edition) to a particular kind of moral conclusion that he thinks must be drawn as a result of the arguments he makes in the book (Something like compassionate secularism). I think that this attempt is baseless, and, also, detrimental to the respectability of his broader point. I've written a paper on this. Perhaps I'll abridge it and post it here.

In general, I think that Dawkins should stick to the philosophy of biology and leave the other sub-fields of philosophy alone. Eeee.

My quick review:

This book accounts, innovatively, for the existence of biological altruism in an evolution-driven universe. Dawkins deals with the toughest cases by introducing the concept of the meme. To me, this step was really brilliant.

I would like to mention that this book is not about atheism, and cannot, in itself, be construed as support for an atheistic worldview. Dawkins' work to this effect is, I think, wholly self-contained.

I wish that primarily atheistic books would not be linked as 'related' to this one. This is a book on the philosophy of the natural science we call biology. Naturalism, and specifically, atheism is a substantive assumption that is not necessarily engaged by simply discussing biology as a discipline.

Describing obscure mental phenomena

Something I find incredibly interesting is making an attempt to describe (as precisely as possible) particular mental phenomena that we have all encountered, that are rarely ever talked about and that are difficult to put our fingers on.

One such phenomenon that I was discussing with my parents today is embodied by the following rough set of circumstances:

You see a face on TV, you hear a song on the radio, you are describing a familiar concept and a vital piece of data is escaping you: a name, an artist, a word. You know that, filed somewhere in your cognitive library, the piece of data that you want is there--waiting for you. But you forget the way to find it. You're having a mental block!

This experience is common enough and not all that interesting on its own. What is more interesting is what sometimes happens as follows:

You give up trying different combinations of keywords in your mental search engine. You give up trying to figure out that person's name or the word that is eluding you. Later--perhaps much later--you witness someone else experiencing the mental frustration of a missing piece of data. You seeing them struggle, somehow works as a trigger for your unrelated, lost piece of data from earlier, and you blurt out "Splinter!" or whatever it is you were looking for.

So, the circumstance I'm describing may be a special case of the more generalized experience of finally having the elusive word or name come to you after having given up, relaxing and letting your mind move onto something else. I've had many times when I come up with the data in question simply 'out of nowhere'.

But is there something special about the experience of watching someone else search that will declutter the search channels in our own minds and allow us to reach out and grasp the piece of data we are, seemingly, not even looking for anymore?

A topic for another post, I think, will be to investigate a little more, some theories about modeling the mind on a search engine and what sort of analogies we could come up with in the digital world that would describe this sort of mental block on labels.

Probability and Freedom of the Will

So, I've long been skeptical about the use to which statistics/probabilities are put in contexts ranging from policy decisions to personal choices.

I think the underlying worry can be boiled down to something like the following:

Every event to which you might want to assign a probability either will or will not occur. There is an important sense in which, then, any probability we assign does not and cannot properly represent a fact. It does not represent any set of real circumstances. The only real set of circumstances related in an important way to the event we are interested in is that it has not, now, come to pass and that at any particular point in the future it either will or will not have come to pass.

This kind of approach to probabilities, I think, tracks the philosophical position broadly referred to as determinism. Now, I think we have to try to put a finer point on this classification--just what kind of problem can we have with probabilities (on this basis), and what sort of philosophical commitments does it require of us?

I need to think about this for a minute.

Going to re-read an old article by Michael Dummett and see what kind of light it might shed on the issue.