Howdy All. Joanna here, thinking about colorful phrases in general and historical colorful phrases in particular.
My father came from farm people in the South. I’d go visiting down there and hear expressions that just delighted me. I remember, “She’s so mean I’m surprised her spit don’t poison her,” “Things put away all cattywumpas,” “That dog won’t hunt,” “Folks living high on the hog,” and another canine metaphor, “I have no dog in that fight.”
If I were writing a Southerner, I'd have her use these expressions. When I try to create a character who thinks in another language, I look for folk expressions in that language and and use them in literal translation, hoping this builds a sense of "foreign" into the character’s thinking.
We have some lovely French expressions:
-- Petit à petit, l'oiseau fait son nid (Little by little the bird builds its nest.)
This is a very French saying from before the Eighteenth Century. I like the image of the little birdie patiently picking the exact twig and inserting it into the exact right place. The proverb doesn’t just tell us to keep working. It says to take pains as we keep working.
I could see a protagonist in 2050 muttering “Subroutine by subroutine the wizard builds his program.”
-- Nowadays folks -- well, French folks -- say La nuit porte conseil (The night brings counsel) which tells
us to “Sleep on it." Good advice in the age of after-hitting-send regrets.
But that’s not quite the original old folk saying. In 1800 they would have said “La nuit est mère de conseil" (Night is the mother of counsel.) Somewhat more colorful, but it would sound old-fashioned and florid in a modern convo.
-- Il faut tourner sept fois sa langue dans sa bouche avant de parler.(One must turn one's tongue in the mouth seven times before speaking.) Or, “Think before you speak.”
This does not present a pleasant picture, does it? It's so long and awkward-sounding I cannot imagine why it’s still around, but it dates convincingly to 1835 and is still in colloquial use today.
-- L'habit ne fait pas le moine. (The habit doesn’t make the monk.)
Modern equivalents would be “Clothes don’t make the man,” or “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” Interestingly, neither of those seem to have existed in the Regency.
Our habited monk is in use in modern France and also nicely old. Dates before the C18. But it may be happier on a native French tongue in Regency times than on English ones. Henry VIII having closed down the monasteries in C16, would English speakers find the habits of monks the first comparison they’d reach for?
This one is a reminder that our historical folks need proverbs suited to their worldview as well their times. Would our 1810 Earl's daughter advise the Vicar sitting next to her at dinner to “cut to the chase,” or "she'll knock him tail over teakettle"? It's not just that the catch phrases are 200 years in the future, they would have been considered inappropriately informal.
-- Avec des si on mettrait Paris en bouteille. (With an ‘if’ we would put Paris in a bottle.)
This is an old one, considered traditional even in 1803. It means, if anything is possible, then everything is possible. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. If we accept one wild unlikelihood we can prove impossibilities. This is kinda the mother of logical fallacies.
I’m not sure what Paris is doing in a bottle, though.
And you?
Do you have a folk saying you love
and does it need to be more widely used?