I have come to the conclusion that Americans are obsessed with the human body. It’s not because of the constant envelope pushing from the advertising industry where the less clothing you wear the more successful you are. It’s not the almost complete disregard for modesty in the clothing business where even young preteen girls are being taught that showing off their ‘booty’ is appropriate. These things may be true, but I believe I have stumbled on a piece of evidence much more subtle and yet widespread that we seldom notice. The prolific use of references to the human body in our everyday vernacular proves to me that Americans are obsessed with it. Well, perhaps obsessed is a strong term…let’s just agree that the use of body imagery is a great way to creatively express many thoughts and we do this without thinking probably every day of our lives!
Let’s just start with the arm for example. We say we got a ‘shot in the arm’ when something gave us a boost or benefitted us in some way. Even though a real shot in the arm can be painful, it refers to the benefit it gives our immune system in protecting us from sickness. We also describe something that costs more than it seems to be worth as ‘costing an arm and a leg.’ This idiom has an obscure origin and may be related to the sacrifices of soldiers when they return from war sustaining personal injuries and yet the conflict produced no clear victory from the battle.
What if we describe something as being ‘smooth as a baby’s bottom’? This is a clear description of the fact that a newborn’s skin is perfect and has not worn out with age and therefore soft and smooth. To ‘pick her brain’ means we access the knowledge of that individual to make up for our own lack of information while saying someone has a ‘harebrained’ idea we mean that his idea is about as intelligent as an idea thought up by a rabbit.
If your best friend is ‘all ears’ he’s a good listener and eager to hear what you have to say, but if he ‘talks your ear off’ you really can’t get a word in edgewise and he doesn’t come up for air! When we agree with someone else we are seeing ‘eye to eye’ and when we catch our kids misbehaving when they thought they could get away with it, we have ‘eyes in the back of our head.’ You can ‘drag your feet’ when you delay taking care of a responsibility and you can get ‘cold feet’ when you second guess yourself and want to back out of a decision.
We ‘cross our fingers’ for luck and we’re ‘all thumbs’ when we’re clumsy. We put our ‘foot in our mouth’ when we say something silly and we ‘pull someone’s leg’ when we are just joking around. I have only scratched the surface and I wonder if you can think of your own list of interesting phrases we turn that use our body parts to describe common scenarios? Sometimes I really love the English language! That was a nice bit of fun!