Category Archives: Proverbs

ko nema u glavi ima u nogama

Nationality: Croatian
Age: 18
Occupation: student
Residence: Dubrovnik, Croatia
Performance Date: 4/23/2017
Primary Language: Croatian
Language: English

Ko ne radi glavom radi nogama (ko nema u glavi ima u nogama)

Informant: MK was born in New York, but raised in Dubrovnik, Croatia. He is a senior in high school. He has an older brother, and a younger sister. While growing up our grandparents would teach us valuable life lessons and most of the time they would use a proverb in doing so. Proverbs are a huge part of our family’s culture. MK heard this proverb multiple times weather it was from family members and schoolteachers.

 

What does this proverb mean?

 

“Roughly translated it means one who doesn’t have it in his head has it in his feet. Another version of it is one who doesn’t work with his head, works with his feet.”

 

Does this proverb have any meaning to you?

 

“Yes, it does. My grandmother tells me this almost on a daily basis haha. I got so use to hearing it that it became almost like a joke between me and my grandma.”

 

The proverb explains how if you don’t think, you will have to go back to where you started and do the same thing you should’ve done already. For an example my wallet is in my room and I already left the house to go for lunch, I have to go back home (work my legs) because I forgot it (didn’t think). All in all the proverb is clever and like most of them it teaches a lesson.

“el nopal en la frente” and the origin myth of Mexican City

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: March 31 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

 My informant (AG)’s parents moved from Mexico to Los Angeles before her birth. She speaks Spanish to her parents in home and is surrounded by Mexican culture.

 

Main piece:

 

Original script: “el nopal en la frente.”

Transliteration: “The cactus on your forehead.”

Full translation: “You merely look Mexican and indigenous.”

 

AG: “I consider myself a “Chicana”, which means someone whose parents are Mexican but is born here. I learned this word in middle school, and ‘Chicana’ is a big culture in LA. ”

“Cactuses are super important in Mexico, they are on their flag and we eat them. And they also have a big influence on Aztec culture. On the flag, there are a cactus, an eagle and a snake. So on the flag, the eagle is standing on a cactus and with a snake in its snout. This has to do with the original myth of Aztec people. When they were trying to find a place to live, the god told them that once they find a eagle that was eating a serpent, that will be their holy land, the place that they were supposed to live in. They searched it and found the eagle, and the place they found it is now Mexico City. They built the empire because they saw the image. ”

“So when my mom says to me that “el nopal en la frenta”, it means that I look kind of indigenous. It’s like a criticism, it’s like you have a cactus on your forehand, you look Mexican, you look brown and indigenous, but you can’t even speak Spanish.’”

 

Context of the performance:

This is a section of the entire interview. AG told me the context of the proverb when she heard it. When she talks to her mom but can’t speak Spanish perfectly, or when she is not aware of certain Mexican history and culture, AG’s mom will say this proverb to her. Moreover, AG told me that this saying is only used between relatives or people who are really familiar to each other, so this will never appear in a conversation between two people just met.

 

My thoughts about the piece:

This is a saying always told from a older generation to a younger one, and especially, according to my informant, is prevalent in LA and being told to young people around her age. This reflects on the trend that younger generation of immigrants tends to lose the connection with indigenous culture and the older generation is the monitor to enhance the culture bonding.

No ivory is there in a dog’s mouth

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 47
Occupation: Artist
Residence: Beijing, China
Performance Date: March 26 2017
Primary Language: Chinese

Title:

My informant LWQ is a 47 years old Chinese artist. She was born and lived in southern part of China, especially Nanjing for many years before she moved to the north, Beijing at age 36.

The conversation is in Chinese.

 

Main piece:

Original script: “狗嘴里吐不出象牙。”

Phonic script: “gǒu zuǐlǐ tǔ bù chū xiàng yá.”

Transliteration: “No ivory is there in a dog’s mouth.”

Full translation: “A filthy mouth cannot utter decent language.”

Analysis on the script: Dog is a representation of badness, or vulgarity, while ivory symbolizes objects that are valuable and precious. This idiom is used to describe a person’s speech in sarcasm, that the words from this person are all truthless hogwash.

 

Context of the performance:

My informant LWQ was joking about a conversation between her and her husband. In a jocular manner, she described her husband’s words using this idiom, to express a disagree attitude in her husband’s words.

 

My thoughts about the piece:

It is very interesting that there are so many idioms, proverbs in Chinese about dogs, and without any exception, dogs carries negative meanings in all those folk pieces. In general, dogs represent inferiority, humbleness, degradation, and manifests people who are inferior in morality and status. However, at the same time, though folk pieces about dogs are all negative, they are used in a jocular manner, always being performed in joking, or playful satire. Moreover, I remember by grandmother always call me “狗东西” (phonic script: “gǒu dōng xī”, transliteration: “Dog thing”, translation: “doggie”) where dog is used in a term of endearment. It seems that there’s an ambiguous attitude toward dog among Chinese people.

Bulgarian folktale

Occupation: Social Worker
Residence: San Francisco
Performance Date: 3/16/17

This piece folklore was gathered at the San Fransisco trauma recovery center. I met with a group of social workers and over the course of one hour we all got came together in a meeting room and in one big group we decided to go around the table and each discuss folklore from their lives. At the beginning of the discussion I gave a brief description about what folklore could be. After that everyone shared pieces of folklore from their lives.

“We have a saying in Bulgaria that the god was giving space for each nation Bulgarians were late, as usual, so when they arrived everything was given away so god felt very sad about that and gave them a peace of heaven. So in heaven they have many beautiful mountains and rivers and sea and all apparently heavenly nature.”

Background information about the performance from the informant: “This story was told to me and school as a kind of nationalist fable about our country. Bulgaria is very sort of dreary and not a lot of fun so this story was designed to help make us feel better about the country we lived in by telling us we have an especially nice spot in heaven.”

Final Thoughts: This is one of the more nationalistic pieces of folklore that I collected. It appears that the story is told with the express purpose of making Bulgarians feel more proud of their national identity. This story seems to imply that the concept of the nation state is so integral to the way the world works that God expressly thought about it while creating the earth. They also imply that being Bulgarian is something which has been ordained by god and that nations are holy creations as opposed to political creations.

Mexican Slang – El Huevon Trabaja Doble

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: Middle-Aged
Occupation: Teacher
Residence: Los Angeles, CA, USA
Performance Date: April 23, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Do you have, umm… like a saying, or a riddle, from when you were growing up?

 

“One of the popular ones there that came, comes to mind right now is, uhh… Whenever you use, somebody entrances you to do something, uhh… umm… almost of any kind, any kind of task, and uhh… you just, uhh, careful, you’re careless, you just want to finish something like right away, you just say, uhh, you just do it, you know, really fast, kinda shoddy, so… they send you back to do that kind of thing again, they say, ‘El huevon trabaja doble.’

 

Which is, uhh, pretty much like, lazy people have to do double the amount of work, because they don’t do it carefully in the first place.

 

So it’s an old saying that everybody knows this, it was applied so frequently when I was growing up, and you know, so, it was in a way it was a message for you to do things right the first time.”

 

So it’s kind of like the English saying ‘measure twice, cut once’?

 

“There you go! Very, very similar to that.”

 

Analysis: This is a very straightforward proverb relating to laziness. It essentially proclaims that laziness doesn’t pay dividends, as the lazy man will inevitably need to do more work anyway to make up for being lazy. Proverbs like this, and their equivalents in English, are very common in more rural areas like that which the informant hails from, and it seemed very well-known to the informant years later, implying its frequent use. It is also worth noting that the Spanish word ‘Huevon’ is a very derogatory term for someone who is so lazy that they are incapable of holding their testes above the ground.