by liberal japonicus
Just a short observation. Living with a non-American is always interesting for the observations they make that give you pause. This is one of them.
My wife has an interesting pattern with sports. If she likes a sports figure, she then likes the sport to an extent that amazes me. When Asada Mao was a competitive figure skater, my wife would watch ice skating contests and then explain to me in detail the differences between a Salchow and a toe loop. But when she left competition, like a light bulb, she stopped watching competitions. When Naomi Osaka was competitive, tennis was on at our house all the time and when she took a mental break, the sport disappeared.
Well, currently in the LJ household, the focus is on the Dodgers and Otani Sho. It’s quite endearing, she’s telling me the boxscores and saying ‘well, the Dodgers got 3 points in the last inning’ and, depending on my mood, I will tell her or not that it is runs, not points. Since I do like baseball, I don’t mind, though there is definitely a Venn diagram to be made. I watch Otani deal with a breaking ball inside from a left handed pitcher and I’m interested in how he stacks up against left handed pitching in general, she tells me that Dekopin, Otani’s dog is a breed that is rare in Japan (per Wikipedia, it is a Kooikerhondje) and can explain why the Wikipedia entry is Decoy and how he went from Decoy to Dekopin (which is not in the Wikipedia entry).
And since baseball is a team sport, anyone one degree of separation gets my wife’s attention. So when Freddie Freeman hit a walk-off homerun in Game 1 of last year’s World Series, she tells me that she’s happy cause Freeman’s son was earlier diagnosed with Guillain–BarrĂ© syndrome and had a full body paralysis incident at the beginning of August. I’m a sports fan, but that is a level of detail that escapes me.
So with that background information, a few days ago, my wife asked me what the phrase ‘go postal’ meant. I explained that it came from a series of incidents where US postal workers who had been fired or were dissatisfied with their job came back to where they worked with a gun and killed their coworkers. I asked her why she was asking and she said she had read an article where a fan said “If they call up Tanner Scott, I’m going to go postal”. My wife went back reading up on the Dodgers while I gawped at the fact that a phrase like this would be so unremarkable for Americans to use and so unsurprising to my wife, who said, ‘yappari’, which is roughly ‘that is to be expected’ or ‘that is totally unsurprising’.
So a short post about my astonishment that ‘going postal’ is such an ordinary phrase. What other similar phrases can you think of?
It’s improbable that ‘bought the farm’ comes from here but it’s the literary illustration of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_Land_Does_a_Man_Need%3F
Another oddity: “turn and burn.”
Reputed to originate regarding air force dog fights. But the most common occurrence, in my experience, regards truckers (or anyone else driving any long distance). Meaning to arrive somewhere and immediately head back in the other direction. In that context, the “turn” is obvious. But the “burn”? Not so much.
A bit of color on your comment. Japan is interesting (and this transfers to other places) in that if you went back to before Meiji, everyday Japanese would probably never even define themselves as Japanese, they were from their fiefdom. And before the unification of Japan as what we think of as a nation state (1615), that was even more the case. However, the Meiji Restoration made a goal of creating a a polity that exhibits the characteristics that wonkie mentions.
One of the things they did was make it part of education extend the notion of nationhood back thru time. In fact, every Japanese student learns the historical date of 1192 as ii kuni skuro which is a goroawase, a mnemonic peculiar to Japanese. It marks the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate and means ‘let’s make a beautiful country’, even though the idea of a nation-state is ahistoric. But it helps solidify an ‘our nation’ ethos that you see not only in Takaichi’s philosophy, but more generally among the Japanese population. (ed to fix the italics, cause it really bugs me…)
I think “bought the farm” for dead dates back to the days when small family farms lived precariously from one season to the next, always struggling to get their mortgage paid off.
“Drank the Kool aid” is relatively new.
Different places have different directions to indicate failure. “The deal went south” maybe comes from “being sold down the river” etc? I read somewhere that in Ireland your deal doesn’t go south; it goes west. Does anyone know?
For berserk, there are two etymologies, one is bare-shirt (suggesting that the warriors wore no armor) or bear shirt (wore bear skins). It’s in Old Norse, but doesn’t appear in Old English. My Old English teacher favored the bear shirt etymology, because of the etymology of the word bear, ‘brown one’ in Indo European, This is because the actual word for bear (*rktos) was a taboo word, and no one wanted to summon or anger one of those bad boys. Which is precisely the opposite of having something like ‘going postal’ become an everyday phrase of annoyance.
They speculate it could be about compensation for the farmer whose land was destroyed, but I also wonder if it isn’t a humorous extension of “plowing” into the ground.
I seem to recall it referencing the 6′ by 3′ patch out ground for a grave. Ground which wouldn’t be built on, and so was forever rural.
Going ape-shit
I have no idea regarding the etymology…
I believe this comes from accounts (probably even a film, most likely 8 mm) of chimpanzees (or maybe gorillas?). This behavior seems to occur where humans would shout insults, without reaching the point of physical altercation. But naturally American viewers would see anything but stuff being thrown and hitting others — i.e. a physical altercation, and with weapons.
OED says “bought the farm” is recent (1950s) USAF slang originally for a fatal plane crash. They speculate it could be about compensation for the farmer whose land was destroyed, but I also wonder if it isn’t a humorous extension of “plowing” into the ground.
Going berserk
The berserkers were apparently Norse or Germanic warriors:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker
Going ape-shit
I have no idea regarding the etymology…
On a more positive note, Farsi can be quite dramatic and poetic even when it cones to everyday expressions.
So you might hear “ghorbunet beram” 10 times a day, especially when there are children around. It literally means “I would sacrifice myself/die for you” but translates as “I love you (so much” or “you are so lovely / sweet” 🙂
Or perhaps to commit suicide by hanging by standing on a bucket and kicking it out from under the feet.
“Kick the bucket” is an 18th-century phrase where bucket is another name for a beam. Perhaps kicking while hanging from a beam.
“gotta go see a man about a horse”
“Bought the farm” is certainly American. A British equivalent would be “gone for a Burton”. It makes good sense for ‘a Burton’ there to be a beer, but other derivations have been suggested.
“buying the farm” sound more American to me. Although ‘farmer’ as a term already existed in the Middle Ages (yeoman farmer), one is more accustomed to ‘peasant’, and ‘farm’ sounds more USian. I guess ‘farm(er)’ has the connotation of ‘free’ while peasant implies ‘tenant’. Iirc* the yeomanry was ‘agriculturalists’ actually owning their land but not being noble while a peasant was dependent on (of?) a landlord.
*too lazy to look it up
Is the phrase American in origin?
Perhaps that has something to do with climate. In Germany, untended ground tends to sprout grass pretty quickly. In the US, especially the western US, untended ground tends to be dust. For quite a while across the Great Plains; pretty much permanently in the Southwest.
In German one bites the grass instead of the dust before watching the radish from below (no pushing up daisies)
The first expression that immediately leapt to mind for me was “bite the dust.” As I scanned down, I read the link to the previous “Typepad bites the dust” post. Had already I read it subconsciously? I tend to think so, but it’s unknowable, at least with current technology.
Hartmut, holy shit…
I should also note that ‘gawp’ tends to have a positive meaning, so it is not the right word. Appalled or aghast might be closer, but there’s not a word for when something just short circuits any sort of judgement and you just stand there, slack-jawed.
“(etwas) bis zur Vergasung (tun)” (to do something up to the gassing)
It means to (have to) do something beyond the point where it gets really annoying/cumbersome/intolerable, e.g. having to work overtime constantly or a sports trainer or PE teacher forcing yet another round around the stadium (and then another, and another…)
Originating from WW1 and popular in the inter-war years. Since WW2 there is a taboo because most people assume it is referring to the holocaust. But it is still used, often unthinkingly.