Yp1-03(2) Idioms: Motivation and Etymology Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij and Elisabeth Piirainen Abstract

3.4. Intertextuality from the etymological perspective

There are thousands of idioms that go back to an identifiable textual source (originally either direct quotations from an author’s work or allusions to an entire text passage). A large section of idioms is traceable to classical antiquity, to the Bible or narrative traditions. Even film productions are a modern textual source. Some of these idioms belong to the motivation type of “intertextuality” (cf. Section 2.3).

Out of the different strands of intertextual tradition, only one has been studied in more detail so far: idioms of biblical origin. Many idioms date from translations of the Bible. Larger, however, is the proportion of idioms in contemporary languages that were already very popular with classical authors (including many inconspicuous idioms with nothing to suggest their classical origin). This strand of tradition is by far not as well researched as the phenomenon of biblical idioms. The works of Erasmus of Rotterdam alone contain hundreds of expressions that live on to this day in modern languages.

Further sources that should be mentioned when discussing the intertextual origins of idioms include idioms going back to fables of the Aesopic type like to bell the cat ‘to undertake a dangerous mission at great risk to oneself for the sake of others’, the lion’s share ‘the biggest part of something that is taken or done by one person instead of being shared fairly with other people’), to fairy tales (cf. idiom (6) or, for example, to be a bird in a gilded cage ‘to live in affluence, prosperity but lacking freedom’, to animal tales (as poor as a church mouse ‘very poor, possessing nothing’, to fight like cat and dog ‘to frequently have violent arguments with each other, to keep quarrelling with each other all the time’) and all the other kinds of folk tales, jests and comical tales that once were well-known but fell into oblivion in the course of history and survive in idioms of the present day, as is supposedly the case with idiom (11) above.

These examples clearly show that no generalizations can be made in this field because every idiom has undergone its own development in the course of its history. What these examples make evident is that the task of describing true etymology must be strictly separated from the task of revealing productive motivating links that influence the idiom’s functioning in discourse.