There’s nothing useful I can add to the gazillion or so words that have been written about the quarter-final match between the All Blacks and Ireland at the Rugby World Cup, so I believe I’ll say something about five of those words that quickly took on the aura of religious incantation.
In case you haven’t already heard, this was not just a great match, but “a match for the ages”. So true and final is this assessment that every commentator, news reporter and journalist is now legally bound to describe the game in this way before discussing any further aspect of it.
This puts them in a similar league to Catholic priests, who, when popping communion into the hands of their flock, are not free to ad lib (“Enjoy!” would be fun), but must utter the four words prescribed by their church. Given rugby’s status as a religion in this part of the world, the analogy is probably more apt than it might seem.
For the ages is an odd little phrase when you think about it. What ages is it referring to? Why isn’t just one sufficient? What length of time are the ages in question and when will it be safe to regard the match as one for a previous set of ages but not the current ones?
Of course you and I know the expression simply means the game will be remembered and talked about for a long time. As an idiom, it doesn’t have to lend itself to being unpacked into its component parts. To quote dictionary.com, an idiom is “a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words.” So fair play (there’s another one) to for the ages.
Their resistance to unpacking is one reason that anyone writing for people with English as a second language should minimise the use of idioms. Likewise anyone writing for an international English-speaking audience. I remember reading years ago about an American soldier asking his Australian counterpart - a large, imposing man - if his unit could borrow some supplies. Upon being instructed to “go for your life”, the American did what any person in his US army-issued boots would do - he turned and ran. What the Australian meant, though, was something that his compatriots would have understood as “help yourself”.
Idioms are an example of what linguistics call phraseology, a technical term for formulaic expressions where word order can be strange, complex - and fixed. In my student days one of my flatmates was a sweet American guy called Jim, whose party trick was playing Beethoven’s Fifth on the guitar (which sounded surprisingly good). One day he heard me describe something as shit hot and was thrilled beyond words at this wonderful and - to him - new Kiwi expression. A while later he had occasion to employ it himself when something great happened. In a perfect demonstration of the fixedness of idioms, he blurted “hot shit!” to the mirth of his cruel Kiwi flatmates.
No matter how hard you try, you’ll never avoid formulaic expressions altogether. Oxford Research Dictionary lists nine different types including sayings like take it easy and come on!, phrasal verbs like take off, binomials like more or less, formulaic expressions like once upon a time, and idioms themselves, which they divide into seven categories (idioms, quasi-idioms, phrasal idioms, clausal idioms, idiomatic phrases, idiomatically combining expressions, constructional idioms).
Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, who wrote numerous popular books on language, made a distinction between idioms that can be unpacked and those that can’t. In compositional idiomatic expressions, or ICEs, the meaning can be mapped onto the components of the phrase. For example, spill the beans can be mapped onto divulge (spill) the secret (the beans). This makes it easier for someone hearing the idiom for the first time to guess at its meaning, especially if they have other cues like context, body language and so on.
In non-compositional idioms (also called idiomatic phrases or IPs) like kick the bucket, no amount of mapping will do you any good. The expression as a whole is mapped onto the meaning of the idiom.
What’s more, whereas compositional idioms can be messed about with at least a little, non-compositional ones are about as flexible as a politician defending their actions on live tv. After spilling the beans you can always spill even more beans should you be so inclined. But you can’t kick another bucket or fly off two handles. Likewise, whereas the beans may get spilled, the bucket cannot be kicked and the handle cannot be flown off of.
Despite being un-unpackable, non-compositional idioms may still be easily translated if there’s an obvious metaphor involved. You don’t have to be Einstein to guess that someone who’s throwing their toys out of the cot is having a tantrum, or that the person who just hit the roof is probably a bit angry. In an uncharacteristic turn of straightforwardness, linguists call such idioms “transparent” (and those at the other end of the spectrum “opaque”). As it turns out, non-compositional idioms tend to be more opaque than compositional ones, although there are plenty of transparent non-compositional idioms (like hit the roof).
As for that All Blacks-Ireland test match, plenty of water has since flowed under the bridge and most of it is New Zealand tears. But as we know, that’s sport, all credit to the Springboks, the boys did us proud, they gave it everything, it wasn’t our day, it wasn’t to be, it’s a game of inches, it was one hell of an arm wrestle, Sam and the boys will be gutted, the sun will still rise in the morning and sadly, there can be only one winner. Also, you can’t blame the ref unless you do blame the ref in which case the ref handed the game to South Africa but let’s all move on anyway.
Which is, I believe, what I will now do.
Bits and specious
The official Swedish dictionary has been completed 140 years after work on it began. Grattis, Sverige!
Asteroids have some weird as hell names.
In 1999 Geoffrey Nunberg was one of those who testified in front of the US Trial Trademark and Appeal Board that the Washington Redskins football team had adopted a name that breached the Lanham Act, which forbids trade names and trademarks that are disparaging. The case went through the court system before being thrown out in 2003. Nunberg died at the age of 75 in August 2020, one month after the Washington Redskins voluntarily began the process to retire their name. They were rebranded the Washington Commanders in 2022.
Quote of the week
The English language is shot through with idioms and expressions which allude to violence without inciting it, most of which pass without notice unless they're called to your attention. One of the most disingenuous moves in the incivility wars is to treat these expressions with a specious literalism; politics makes Freudians of us all.
Geoffrey Nunberg, “Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years”
A similarly odd phrase is "having the time of your life" for an especially fun event. An alternate heard in the 1940s was "They were really having a time for themselves."