Idiom Addict

Idioms fascinate me. But finding their origin helps maintain their stickiness. We all know the phrase sour grapes but fewer associate it with its fable origin of the fox and the grapes. And fewer know it representing the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance.

Finding true value in an uncertain world poses a daunting challenge. During the Middle Ages, poor families would go to the market seeking a piglet to raise for meat. Unscrupulous vendors would sometimes substitute a cat into a tied burlap sack. Upon arriving home the unhappy customer would untie the merchandise, and the feline surprise emerge. This spawned three idioms - buying a pig in a poke (inadequate inspection of merchandise), letting the cat out of the bag, and holding the bag.

Be all you can be. Jeff Katz pens a fine post over at the Marblehead Patch with an introductory discussion of Maslow's Hierarchy. Our "needy" self craves physical comforts, security, belonging, and esteem. But our "higher" self seeks learning, aesthetics and quality, self-actualization, and transcendence.

This gnaws at me. In the early 1980s, two Australian "nobodies", Barry Marshall and Robin Warren identified a bacteria (H. pylori) associated with ulcer disease. Global scientific skepticism of the discovery from Perth couldn't have been greater. But a series of dramatic events, culminating with Marshall's ingestion of the offending bacteria and subsequent illness helped change correlation into causation, and culminated with the Nobel Prize in Medicine (adapted from the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die).

Become a bookworm. Aristotle wrote: "In books also animalcules are found, some resembling the grubs found in garments, and some resembling tailless scorpions." Today, we don't view "bookworms" so literally. Some have said that the difference between who we are and whom we become in five years relates to the persons we meet and the books we read. It's on like Donkey Kong.