Language Log

What have you done with God's ear?

Back on 23 September I surveyed some items on the fringes of Snowclonia, among them


Time for an update.


God's Ear.  What I said before:


Almost immediately, Mank Mandel supplied a lead:


(Also appearing in English as "from your mouth to God's ear".)  That is, what's conveyed is 'may God hear your words', contextualized as polite receipt of praise.  The expression has clearly been extended for some speakers of English (many of them not Jewish) to a wider set of contexts.  And at some point people varied the expression by allowing possessives other than your, to convey 'may God hear X's words'.  That would be the snowcloning moment (but see below).

Ben Sadock then supplied a Yiddish original: 


Some versions have the expanded in gots oyern arayn.  The ones I've found all have moyl 'mouth'.   Most have the plural oyern, rather than the singular oyer, and the second-person possessive, but other versions have been reported:


No doubt there are other variants in Yiddish.

In English, the raw Google webhits favor lips over mouth and show a favoring of concordance in number between the two nouns: lips ... ears (9,100) over lips ... ear (3,360), and mouth ... ear (2,330) over mouth ... ears (650).

Now, is this a snowclone -- or an idiom with an open slot in it?  In principle, a similar question arises for every putative snowclone that has only one open slot, for instance:


Most of these are full sentences, though some are NPs.  Now, most expressions traditionally labeled "idioms" are on a smaller scale, but many of them have open slots in them.  Here are a few such VP idioms with make:


(Note that the last two have a possessive open slot, just like the God's Ear formula.  There's a huge number of idioms with possessive open slots in them.  Please don't write me about further examples of open-slotted idioms; idiom dictionaries are packed with them.)

Formulaic expressions that are full sentences are traditionally labeled "proverbs" rather than idioms, and they are nearly completely fixed, with no open slots in them (though ANY formula is available for the occasional playful variation, of course):


So one way to think of God's Ear is as a cross between an idiom with an open slot in it and a proverb -- that is, as a big idiom (a sequence of two PPs conveying a proposition) or as an open-slotted proverb (of relatively recent invention).  Indeed, snowclones in general might be seen this way.

Body Snatcher.  What I said before:


In what follows, I'll refer to the literal understanding of the two questions in sequence as the "at face" interpretation and the figurative understanding as the "impostor" interpretation.

The ensuing ADS-L discussion (and e-mail following up on my September Language Log posting) went in many directions.

First, no one has found the figure, or anything like it, in any version of Invasions of the Body Snatchers.  The IDEA is there, but not any formula.

Second, lots of people suggested some influence from the famous James Thurber cartoon, with the caption "What have you done with Dr. Millmoss?":

But the question in the cartoon is entirely literal; there's no suggestion that the hippopotamus is trying to pass itself off as Dr. Millmoss (and every suggestion that the hippopotamus has eaten Dr. M.).  The Thurber cartoon, wonderful as it is, is a red herring.

Next, a similar digression that turns on mere similarity in form: Linda Wilkinson citing the 1971 movie title Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?  Though there might be the beginning of another formula here.

Meanwhile, the hounds of ADS-L were on the antedating trail, trying to find earlier and earlier instances of the impostor use of the expression.

[Side note: antedating and sourcing can be fascinating, but for a variety of reasons they're mostly not my thing.  Establishing that some usage is in fact current for some group of speakers shouldn't commit you to a study of where, when, and why it originated and how it spread.  Not that these aren't interesting questions.]

This search into the (recent) past pulled up an awful lot of examples that could be seen as at-face uses of Body Snatcher.  That's what happens when you search on strings.  But several landmarks appeared:

Chris Waigl noted that there was a small flurry of impostor cites in 1997/8, possibly based on its appearance in the the film Ever After (1998).  From the imdb:


Chris and I supposed that this was a secondary spread of an existing snowclone.  And there are earlier impostor cites.  A few, going back in time:


Somewhere along the line, I noted that there was no particular reason for the expression I started with to be the sole way of conveying the impostor idea.  Had it really become formulaic?

This turned out to be a hard question to answer.  One thing quickly became clear: other ways of expressing the impostor idea were around:


I have no easy way of determining how often one formulation is used versus others.  It might well be that the variant I started with is the most common.  But it's beginning to look like this is not so much a figure of speech, tied to particular wording, as a figure of thought -- much like systems of metaphor.

Posted by Arnold Zwicky at December 16, 2007 09:37 PM