Sokath, his eyes uncovered [1]

[cellio]

One of the things that's hard about learning English from the outside (and, I presume, hard about other languages) is how much of common usage is idiom and analogy. This thought came to mind during a meeting today with exchanges like the following (in fairly rapid succession):

Developer: What about $problem?
Tech Lead: We'll burn that bridge when we come to it.

Developer: Are you saying the build manager is God?
Developer 2: Watch out for the lightning bolts.
Developer: We'll burn that bush when we come to it.

Product Manager: Ok, we'll include your feature in the product but only as a secret alpha-release utility.
Developer: So it's in the product, but I can't fix bugs.
PM: Right.
Developer: I feel like the white trash with the half-built cars on the overgrown lawn.
PM: True, and you're in my neighborhood now. Maybe I should rethink that.

Maybe you had to be there.

[1]

Comments

[dragontdc.livejournal.com]

Interesting site on an interesting show.

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

Great reference; excellent transcript of the discussion, too!

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

2 thoughts:

1. Ever learned Mishlei? "Everyone" learns Tehilim but "no one" learns Mishlei, so my once-a-week Tanach group tried it... and discovered why: it's repetitive and gets rather dull rather fast, and there are these puzzling bits throughout which seem to refer to sayings / poetic language that were common knowledge at the time Mishlei was written but none of us has a clue about now.

2. I've disliked that episode since the first time I saw it because it didn't make sense to me linguistically: how would children learn that language? From what we saw, that language only made sense if one knew the stories that were being referred to, but those stories couldn't be told (e.g. to children) without using more words than they were using, etc.