A hitch or a hitch? |
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Writer B. Timofeev in the book "Are we saying right?" calls an obvious, albeit very old, distortion of the well-known phrase: "I got like chickens in the cabbage soup." “As a rule, they don't boil cabbage soup from chickens,” writes Timofeev. “Where, then, did the rooster end up (hens - in the old name)? It's all about the distortion of an old folk proverb: "I got into OSHIP like chickens". This expression cannot be found in any of the explanatory and phraseological dictionaries. The dictionaries of MI Mikhelson and DN Ushakov, 4-volume and 17-volume dictionaries published by the Academy of Sciences give only a saying that he got like chicken in cabbage soup, that is, in unexpected trouble, in an unpleasant situation. M.I.Mikhelson cites as an illustration an excerpt from V.I.Dahl's story: “You don’t know where you will lose. He walked, walked, and ran into his own misfortune, and hit like chickens in cabbage soup: the Circassians took him with their live hands - he was running towards the hunter and the beast, and he himself ran over to them.. The pluck, which has arisen on the basis of false etymology (only pluck or pluck could have turned out from “pluck”), is ready as if to displace the cabbage soup originally from the saying. Meanwhile, a more reliable interpretation of the origins of this expression is possible. The fact is that before the chicken was called not only a male poultry, but also a rooster of any game (black grouse, for example). In a number of expressions I got caught like a fox in a trap, like a hazel grouse in a snare, etc., jokingly and ironically it sounded like a chicken in a cabbage soup (about a black grouse). Moreover, the last expression could have a literal source and also associated with a snare. In the old days, there was a kind of trap that pinched a bird's leg - a spike, or a pinch, or a pinch (that is, clamps, tongs, vices). Such traps made of split wood were placed on birds, large animals (foxes, bears), squirrels and martens. The hand or leg of an unwary hunter, an unlucky lumberjack, could have fallen into a shchap (or a pinch), like a trap. This gave rise to the saying. "To get into shchap - in tightness, in shchemy, in trouble", - read in the dictionary of V. I. Dahl. So, one more initial version of the saying: I got like chickens in schap (in a pinch), which gave a sound and semantic playing out of the words shchap - pinch - shchi.
V. I. Dal in his dictionary gives fervor and bullying - for the name of a battered place, a splinter on a tree, as well as especially fervor and fervor (diminutive for it - a bully) - to denote a hook, a snag, a zastruga.There is also a proverbial expression: "There is no hitch, no hitch, everything is smooth"... Moreover, the ancient distinction between the words bully (a splinter in a tree) and a hitch (sastruga, splitting when processing a board) allows you to penetrate into the original meaning of the saying. It is not about protruding knots and splinters, but about the hooks remaining after processing, and about knots in the board, which are always very difficult to align. No knot, no hitch - this means that everything is processed clean and the first-class material (without knots) is brought to a mirror shine. Hence, the figurative use of the saying is not a simple comparison, not the quality of the material, but a good job, a brilliant performance of some business or task. This is how the expression should be understood without a hitch, without a hitch. And this is another example of the living imagery of proverbs and sayings, deep wisdom and accuracy of the meaning contained in them. L. Skvortsov Similar publicationsRead nowAll recipesRead now |
Attempts "Fix" one or another proverb and saying, to clarify and clarify its meaning are encountered quite often. This is due to the antiquity of many proverbs and sayings, partial or complete oblivion of their literal meaning, polysemy, which sometimes allows them to be interpreted in different ways.
Suggesting to replace a hitch with a hitch, many consider them to be words of different roots and meanings. In reality, this is not entirely true. In the alternation of vowels e-i-o - "Zero sound" the phonetic relations of deep antiquity are reflected. It is clear, of course, that the words historically of the same root, entrenched in different vocalizations, can be perceived over time as semi-related, or even just as alien, as, for example, the words to tear - run away - pull - bully - perky - nonsense (although they all go back to the same root). By the way, from the same root the words turf (what is ripped off), a hole (what is ripped through, ripped off) and road (a passage ripped through the forest) are formed from the same root. Many speakers tend to associate the word village with the word tree in origin. In fact, here is the same root to tear. A village is a place of a forest settlement, where trees have been torn up, torn out, literally "a torn place, arable land." In modern folk dialects, the old word dor has been preserved - "Virgin soil lifted, new" or "village" (Lipin Dor, for example): its connection with the verb to tear - to tear out is undoubted.
