As I was watching the beginning of Brokeback Mountain, I saw how a herd of sheep behaved and it suddenly made me think of the first person who saw the similarity in certain human behaviors to that of such a herd and “invented” the analogy we use everyday.
We all have said something about the sheepiness of some group of people but how many among us have ever seen sheep being herded (or whatever the correct word may be)? How many of us actually lived around shepherds and really picture it the way it was originally intended.
I, for one, think this analogy has lost much of its power as a consequence. If, in a couple of decades, someone calls an invasion the beginning of another Iraq, I will relate to it better than if he calls it another Vietnam (not saying that Iraq is nearly as bad as Vietnam was but I couldn’t think of a better example. As long as you get my point, it’s all good.)
What analogies, sayings, proverbs or anything else can you think of that have lost their power of suggestion over the years? And of course, this being the SDMB, I would be doing myself a disfavor if I didn’t ask you all what new analogies, sayings or proverbs you would replace them with.
If you find this post uninteresting, feel free to sneer with disdain and to click yourself away from it in a dignified manner.
Anyways, I’m sure we’ve all seen footage of sheep being herded on one occasion or another but it’s nowhere near the real thing. Same way watching D-day’s first battle in a movie or on tv is nowhere near the real thing.
Isn’t it though? Enough to understand the analogy of what sheep being herded looks like?
Comparing it to knowing what it’s like to have lived through D-Day is a little different, I really must say.
It’s not so much a nitpick as I was trying to point out that a lot of what we “know” these days comes from other adventurous souls going out with cameras and bringing home the footage for us. Sure, we can’t claim the level of authentic experience that they can, but we can get a reasonable idea of what it’s like. Certainly enough to be able to make analogies from what we’ve seen.
I would submit the commonness of the sheep-herding analogy has nothing to do with how many people know anything about sheep, and everything to do with how often that analogy is used in the Christian Bible. Many, many expressions in modern English originate in that book, and few people who haven’t read it in depth can spot most of them readily. Ever heard someone describe another person as “their rock”? From the Bible. Prodigal son? From the Bible. Woe is me? Beat swords into ploughshares? Salt of the Earth? All from the Bible.
You want one that’s really lost its original resonance? The Good Samaritan. We’ve heard that bandied about so much that most folks just naturally assume that Samaritans, by their nature, were good. Well, I won’t say they weren’t, but that’s certainly not the way the original audience of the Gospels saw them. Asimov once wrote an essay that in a truly accurate translation of the Bible, the word “Samaritan” in that parable should be replaced with whatever group the culture reading it would find hateful. So to a Serb, it would be a Croat who helped the traveller, and to a modern Israeli, it would be a Palestinian, and so forth.
And for the record, I was going to mention this one even before Lizard pointed out how many common expressions come from the Bible. I will note, though, in connection with sheep, that the Bible generally regards sheep as good (it’s the goats that are bad), while the modern usage of the analogy is more typically insulting. So maybe that’s not the best argument for Lizard’s point.
When I read the Hornblower and O’Brian books, it seemed like every other page was the origin of some phrase I’d heard all my life and never thought about. Like “taken aback,” which is what happens to a ship when the wind suddenly veers to come directly from its front.
My not-very-cultured SIL’s reaction to classic movies. We had to explain very, very, very slowly that John Ford did it first. Dad had a bias against movies made after 1970, so our own knowledge of the classics is pretty decent; SIL was surprised to find out that black and white movies weren’t just “an artsy resource” like in Schindler’s List and that you can date movies quite accurately based on the color and visual effects. It was one of those “my home vs. your home” differences that we’d never run into before, since our friends also know John Ford from The Betty Ford Clinic.
/hijack
Those comparisons from the Bible have the advantage of existing in (almost?) every language. Unlike some expressions that are native to English and which right now I can’t remember, I didn’t need anybody to explain them to me
But often their subjective meaning is better understood than the literal one - the meaning is a whole “block” in our minds, the words are a “block” that you know “just goes like that”, but I’ve met quite a few people from big-cattle-only countries who were surprised to learn that sheep and goats give milk (which you can turn into cheese) or that wool comes from sheep (which you do not kill for the wool, you just give them a haircut all over). One of them knew that “well, a sheep is an animal that behaves, well, like people who are behaving like sheep, no? Kind of like cows do when the cowherds are there.” Uh, sort of - and they give milk, they’re about this big, and you can shear them for wool.
After a witnessing a lamb being, uh, slaughtered, my father remarked how apt that expression is. While other animals may fight or scream or squeal or otherwise exhibit some behavior that seems to indicate that they are aware of their fate, a lamb will very docilely let you slit its throat.
A stitch in time saves nine
Now you’re cooking with gas
All at sixes and sevens
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth
To Welsh on a bet
FWIW, this is a big enough problem that there’s a classic text, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, dedicated to explaining fading sayings. The 1898 edition, the last on which Brewer himself worked, is now in the public domain and available online here and here.
That’s how I felt when I first watched Casablanca: I’ve heard all these lines before and it’s distracted to see/hear them within even the original work.
