>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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