We were talking about a mutual friend. “He’s a good egg,” I said. She cocked her head and looked at me sideways.
“Egg? A good egg? What does that mean?” she asked in her accented English.
I was a little surprised. I thought “good egg” was a well-known way of endorsing someone.
“A good person,” I explained. A reliable and decent human being.” “Ohhh,” she exclaimed. “I get it. I get it! In Italy, we would say ‘Un pezzo di pane.’ A good-hearted person is a piece of bread. There’s nothing like a good slice of bread!”
How is a good person like, well, an egg?
Now it was my turn.
“Bread? Like a piece of bread? How does that work?” She countered, “But how is a good person like an egg? What’s that based on? A piece of bread — un pezzo di pane — is wholesome. Humble. Comforting. The whole story is there in that one slice. No, it makes sense. Perfect sense.”
OK. Sure. The bread analogy had legs. I love bread. If they’re being honest, who doesn’t like bread? I couldn’t, however, come up with anything that fleshed out the egg parallel.
Indistinguishable and interchangeable, eggs are masters of concealment. Not to mention wobbly and fragile, too.
The conversation moved on.
Fit as a pear?
“How’s your dad?” the Italian asked of the Spanish-born woman. “Oh, he’s great, just great. At 80, he’s as fit as a pear.” And there it was again. The momentary puzzlement. That pause while the phrase got turned over and examined like an old map.
“Like a pear?” “Yes. Like a pear. That’s what we would say if someone was free from physical problems. Healthy. Happy. Estar más sano que una pera.”
This time we both — the Italian and myself — went, “Hmmmmm.”
The English equivalent would be “fit as a fiddle.” In Italian, sano come un pesce, fit as a fish. In our momentary examination of the phrase, we could find nothing that fleshed out any of these idioms.
Out come the smart phones
Out came our phones. A shallow dive into various sites revealed nothing concrete. The best we could find was that the phrase “fit as a fiddle” was British English, dated back to the 1600s and was based, primarily, on alliteration.
The next half hour was spent dredging up as many of these idioms as we could think of.
A story came up about an expression first heard in childhood from a grandparent. Ich verstehe nur banhnhof. It’s the equivalent to “it’s all Greek to me.” It means “I only understand train station.”
Apparently, it had come home from World War I. Soldiers stationed in Germany protested their lack of fluency with this phrase. Outside of place names, “train station” was about the only word they could recognize.
We were joined by another friend. When we told her what we were talking about, she instantly volunteered the expression her Chinese grandmother used to make with predictable regularity.
“With age comes wisdom”
“Jiāng hái shì lao de là.” She laughed and said her grandmother trotted this out every time she was losing an argument. Roughly translated, it said that aged ginger was more powerful than fresh ginger.
Ahhh, yes. But of course. We all recognized the idea behind this one: “With age comes wisdom.”
Lots of other parallels about wine, cheese and oak trees suddenly floated to the surface. What’s more, we all recognized that this phrase, in its many permutations, was starting to go into high rotation in each of our lexicons as we moved into our powerful ginger years.
Our coffees grew cold. The Spanish woman suggested it was “time to put the cows to bed.” Despite there not being a single cow between us, we all understood.
QUESTION: What are the idiomatic expressions from your heritage? Email Jane at booklessclubusa@gmail.com.
Jane MacDougall is a Canadian journalist who has worked in the newspaper, radio, TV and film industries. Her columns have appeared in a variety of publications in Canada, including the National Post, as well as in the U.S. (She is also a trained chef who recently appeared on Sara Moulton’s PBS show, Sara’s Weeknight Meals.) You can email Jane at booklessclubusa@gmail.com and visit her website at https://janemacdougall.com.
