Topical Guide 595
Mark Dorset
Language: Idioms: English: “It’s Greek to me.”
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 12:
I understood only a portion of what I read, and the portion I understood was not the portion that conveyed most of the meaning. I moved my eyes along the sentences, did my best to pronounce the words, and used my dictionary quite a lot, but so much of what I read was incomprehensible to me that, in a way, my reading brought me closer to my father, because for the first time I really understood what he meant when he said, as he often did, “It’s Greek to me.” Here is a passage from the book as it appeared to me then, which is exactly the way I still recall it:
To create the effect of incomprehensibility that Peter describes, Kraft (whose ignorance of Greek is nearly total) resorted to a straightforward transliteration into the Greek alphabet of the portions of the English text that would have baffled Peter:
The “correspondence principle” attempts to define the relationship between the macroscopic or “everyday” realm (where classical physics obtains, the dominant force is gravity, and we can believe most of what our senses tell us) and the microscopic realm at atomic ог subatomic scales (where quantum physics obtains, the dominant forces are electromagnetism and the strong and weak interactions, and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle describes the limits of what we can know.)
By the way: I have often asked myself what speakers of Greek say when they find something incomprehensible. Wikipedia tells me that they say “Αυτά μου φαίνονται κινέζικα.”
Another BTW: In a personal communication, Madeline Kraft has pointed out to me that Hemo the Magnificent is the mostly likely target of, or inspiration for, Kraft’s parody Quanto the Minimum, not The Coriolis Effect that I posted in Topical Guide 593. Here it is, with thanks and a tip of the Dorset hat to Madeline:
See also:
Language TG 11; Dialect, Slang, Idiolect, Shibboleths, Jargon TG 137; Slang, Insults, Terms of Abuse TG 140; Slang TG 169; Languages: Learning and Translating TG 393; Idiolect, Private Meanings and References, Code Words TG 373; Idioms: Tug the (One’s) Forelock TG 459; Technical, Academic, Gibberish TG 492; Language in Translation: Russian to English TG 495
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