flyingiguana Posted January 17, 2011 Share Posted January 17, 2011 I seem to be on a BBC kick this morning. Here's an article on the influence of the King James Bible on the English language: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12205084 Interesting comments on how many of the signature phrases in this were just copied word for word from Hebrew. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kalanamak Posted January 17, 2011 Share Posted January 17, 2011 Thanks! (I also enjoyed the stay-at-home-dads article on the page)! This reminded me of the little sayings that ran rampant through our family, and it has been just so much fun to google them and find their origin. About a third are from the KJB, another third from Shakespeare, and the rest are a motley collection of sayings from all over, especially in the 1890-1940 US era (e.g. "I say its spinach". ) Another rich source of really humanly pertinent sayings is from the Ethiopian culture. The wonderful, short novel Things Fall Apart has a "saying", spoken by the characters, nearly every page. I work with a Russian Jew who is very clever with languages, but his English is running third place. He and I have so much fun picking apart idioms, and him finding equivalent ones in Russian or Hebrew. The Russian sayings tend to be a bit more "earthy".:001_smile: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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