Human Sayings are Weird

bookwyrmnick:

We have a lot of weird expressions.  Some are anachronistic, having come from a time and place that no longer exists, leaving us with a phrase that seems to have no context; one of these would be to “bite the bullet”, which referred to the practice of literally biting down on a bullet (or a piece of would) while someone operated on you/seared a wound shut, to keep yourself from screaming too much or biting your mouth and hurting yourself.  In an era of much more precise surgeries and anesthesia, the context no longer exists, but the phrase is still used.

Then there are phrases that are deliberately hyperbolic.  “I’m going to tan your hide”. for example, is a descriptive way to tell someone you’re going to beat them, but odds are good you’re not literally going to be tanning their hide.

So I was thinking that a group of enterprising aliens would form a betting pool around certain words and phrases; you can bet whether phrases are anachronistic, literal, or hyperbolic, and then the pool pays out when the phrase is confirmed one way or another.  

Which brought me to an amusing little scene in my head.

———

Malchior 7 was an incredibly hostile planet.  All the local flora and fauna had self-defense features that would kill most species.  It was advised, if you were determined to visit, to wear full haz-mat suits and bring at least one human.  Most dangerous of all were the dominant species, a carnivorous form of primate with near-sapient intelligence, clever enough to use tools and form societies, but either not intelligent enough or too violent to have dialog with outside races.

So when a scouting party was ambushed by a large warband of these primates, the alien members fled in terror, only realizing about twenty paces down the path that the humans were standing and fighting.  Their hazmat suits were already ripped from the beasts’ claws, and their guns hand been knocked from their hands, but the humans still fought, wresting the primates’ weapons from their hands and turning them on their creators.  One of the humans managed to get a firm grip on the ankle of one of the beasts, and began slinging him back and forth, using the primate as a flail to slam into his cohorts.

One of the aliens let out a warble of delight, hurriedly pulling out its comm device and beginning to record, while simultaneously opening a codex page and beginning to type.

“Gor’thax, this is hardly the time!”

“You don’t understand.  I am about to make SO.  MUCH.  PROFIT.”  The alien uploaded the footage to the codex, with the title “[VIDEO PROOF – LITERAL PHRASE] “I’m going to beat a motherfucker with another motherfucker.”“