ALTHOUGH we work for higher things like creative satisfaction and material comforts today, until a few centuries back people toiled for only one main thing: food.
It is strange to think that this has been our dominating concern from the time we were homo erectus, or earlier, right until a few centuries ago. Even today the poor man slaves day and night just to feed himself and his family.
It stands to reason, naturally, that a large part of our vocabulary concentrates on food. Take the title of this article – it can be interpreted two ways: one, food is substance, giving you something to think about; two, you cannot think unless you have food in your belly.
Using food- and eating-related words delivers the message immediately and with zero confusion. Instead of saying “not too large, not too small” you simply say “bite-size”: Without bombarding the children with complex physics, the professor explained the working of the steam engine in bite-size bits.
“Catch the ball this time, Butterfingers!” lets you know at once that the person being addressed is famous for letting the ball slip from his fingers.
You go to work because you want to earn your bread and butter. Bread and butter is the staple food of English-speakers, and hence the usage stands even today in other countries where English has become a spoken language. You earn your bread and butter even if all you ever eat at home is rice, or chapatti, or pasta.
Just as food is a basic need of the human body, a primal fear is that of being “eaten up” – we still identify with this feeling when we are immersed in books or movies where a monster is out to get our blood.
A common thing a teacher will tell a student is, “Come here, I’m not going to eat you up!”
When something is worrying and upsetting you very much, you say you’re being eaten up with worry, or that it’s consuming you. In the same situation, a friend may ask, “What’s eating you?”
If you have someone eating out of your hand, it means they accept your domination and are willing to do anything you say – they don’t doubt what you give them (to eat); they trust you.
You’ll want to eat your words if you regret having said something. Once a thing is eaten, it no longer exists, so this is a way of saying you would like to undo what you’ve done.
Somebody you’ve got the better of might swear that he will make you eat humble pie – make you apologise or humiliate you. The Oxford dictionary says that humble is based on the “archaic ‘umbles” which meant offal, the unwanted and inferior parts of the meat.
After listening to a long-winded speech that went over his head, the new employee asked his boss what exactly he would need to do, to which his boss replied, “The meat-and-potatoes of it is that you’ll be working with data entry ...”
Meat and potatoes are the basic, everyday food, similar to bread and butter. The expression “meat-and-potatoes” therefore means fundamental or basic. “He’s a meat-and-potatoes man” implies that he’s a simple guy.
Aslam is a man who brings home the bacon. This doesn’t imply that Aslam is the delivery boy for the butcher; it means that Aslam has achieved material success.
There are several ideas about where this expression originated. One is that meat, bacon, was not something everybody could afford to have often, so if you were wealthy enough to have it, you could show it off by hanging it up where even visitors could see it.
Another theory is that this saying arrives from the old English custom of giving a couple bacon as a gift if they were still happy after their first year of marriage. Bacon was obviously a special food.
While meat, potatoes and bread are important foods, none of them would taste very good without a vital ingredient: salt. There are so many expressions that convey the value of this now-common commodity. If someone is highly appreciated, she is the “salt of the earth”.
You cannot take everything Mrs Chen says, seriously – take her words with a pinch of salt.
Any employee worth his salt would make sure he doesn’t let the company down. He’s competent – worthy of the salary he receives.
The owner of the failed business wasn’t too worried because he had a good bit of money salted away over the years. This comes from the fact that salt is a preservative; to “salt away” means to put away money secretly.
There are negative uses for salt, too: to rub salt on a wound is to make someone’s pain or misfortune worse.
There are loads more food-related phrases; this selection is just a handful. If you can’t come up with at least five more by the time you’re through reading this, I’ll eat my hat!
(c) Hasmita Chander, 2003. This article may not be copied or reproduced in any way without permission from the author.