A propos, I was told in school that the expression "to kick the bucket" (to
die) comes from Lancashire, where pigs would be constrained in a crude
wooden structure called "the bucket" when slaughtered. In their death-agony
they would... This may be English-teacher folklore. Any old Lancashire
farmers out there?
At 08:46 PM 7/24/2000 +0100, you wrote:
>>Don't get too excited Dave,
>
>>in Gaelic, being called a cow is likewise a term of end.
>
>>bovinely
>
>>Randolph Healy
>
>Yes. I think this may be a case of things not translating across
>cultures. In my previous incarnation as a bookseller, one of my
>colleagues, a young Catalan woman called Nuria, was always coming out
>with sayings like "I am as tired as a cow..." - which may be enshrined
>in the folk wisdom of generations of Catalans, but caused riotous
>amusement in Manchester. On a serious level, Nigel Lewis, in his "The
>Book of Babel" is very good on how such 'proverbial' usages, ways of
>saying things that are 'part of the language', can be powerfully
>revealing of how generations of people thought about the world. How
>everyday metaphors, expressions we may no longer even think of as
>metaphorical, encode modes of perception intimately scaled to the rural
>labour that most people once did. Does make you wonder how poets
>featured in Brazilian popular culture, though.
>
>
>
>
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