Food Speak

It’s funny how many hours a day we spend thinking about food. Even when we’re not eating or thinking about eating or full from eating it seems food nudges its way into our everyday speaking. This week I discovered just how imbedded food is into the English language as I tried to come up with different food metaphors. As I stared at pictures of food on the Internet to get inspired, I thought of three metaphorical categories that we use everyday:

1.  Domination is eating
2. Dishonesty and Bribery are oily substances
3. Insanity is nuts

I. Domination is eating

It seems that in the arenas of sports, competition, and life in general, often the actual act of eating is used as a metaphor for dominating or defeating another person. Here the act of eating is the source and domination is the target.  Examples of this can be seen in the following phrases:

• to eat someone alive
• to have someone for lunch/to eat someone for breakfast
• eat my dirt
• bite me/try me
• swallow you whole

The origin of this metaphor is not too hard to deduce. From our days as hunter-gatherers to the current era of National Geographic and Animal Planet, where we can see predators on television in their natural environment, we can see that eating is at its core the domination of one species over another. Something has to die in order for us to eat it, whether that something is a plant or animal. Thus it makes sense that to defeat an opponent or an enemy can be described metaphorically through the act of eating.

II.             Dishonesty and bribery are oily substances

It’s funny. After watching Paula Dean on the Food Network, I can never look at butter the same way again. But it turns out that Paula and her fatty, delicious Southern soul food are not the only things that can be buttered up. In fact, butter and other oily substances such as grease can actually be representative of bribery and dishonesty in the English language. The following are just a few examples:

• butter him up
• grease his palm
• greaser
• a greasy person
• he’s slick

Looking at the physical properties of oil, such a comparison makes sense. Oil is slimy and slippery and slick. Moreover, in the same way dishonesty and dirty deeds are hard to wash off your conscience, oil is very difficult to remove from your hands, no matter how hard you try.

III.           Insanity is nuts

I had never really thought about how we use nuts metaphorically until this week, but once I stopped to think about it, it’s true. We include nut language in everyday speak, and often nuts are a metaphorical representation of insanity or the mind. Here nuts are the source and insanity/the mind are targets. This is the case in the following expressions:

• He’s a nut.
• Our nutty professor
• He’s a hard nut to crack
• You crack me up
• He cracked.
• She’s a cracker.
• He’s such a nutter.
• That guys is a little bit crazy in the coconut.

Nuts with their generally tough exteriors are somewhat similar to our own human skulls, and perhaps that’s how the metaphor originally developed. Thus, when you crack a nut it’s as if you cracked someone else’s skull or mind, and made them become crazy. Perhaps from that idea insanity later became associated with any variation of the word “nut”. Or perhaps there is another explanation for the phenomenon.

In any case, thinking about food metaphors this week has made me really stop to think about our daily language and how much we need to use tangible items to express intangible ideas or even, sometimes, other indescribable things. Not only do we live, breathe, and eat food; we speak it as well.