“It’s like being slapped in the dark”

Yesterday, during a physically-distanced chat with friends, one of them used an idiom.  "Who creates all these?" I said.  Like "pushing the envelope."

Of course, there are experts in the field who know the answers to such questions.

When we were kids, we had a rudimentary English-Tamil dictionary--the same dictionary that gave me the correct spelling for bougainvillea.  It also included equivalents of  few English and Tamil idioms.  I was glad that we had such a dictionary because the meaning of the words that are strung together in an idiom do not by any means add up to what the idiom means.  "Pushing the envelope" does not mean pushing the envelope, right?  Or, even better is this one where the words have nothing to do with that the phrase means: "It rained cats and dogs."

Every language/culture has its own sets of idioms.  In the culture we grow up with, we don't think twice about the usage until it comes to explaining it to a non-native.  Like how difficult it is to explain what "it warmed the cockles of my heart" means!

Today I came across an idiom.  In Italian.  È come essere schiaffeggiato nel buio.

It means “It’s like being slapped in the dark.”

But, it is not about the slap or darkness.  There is a deeper meaning behind those words: "You don’t know where it’s coming from, and you don’t know why it’s happening to you."  When you are slapped in the dark, you have no idea where it came from.  And if it is in a quiet room where you thought you were alone, you have no idea why you were slapped either.

I suppose if there were an Italian-American dictionary, comparable to the English-Tamil dictionary, then the equivalent of È come essere schiaffeggiato nel buio might be "it came out of left field."

Even more fascinating that the person who used that Italian expression was no Italian.  It was an Indian-American!  Padma Lakshmi, the model-turned-chef-turned-celebrity uses that Italian expression in an interview.  She is able to toss an Italian idiom into the conversation because, according to Wikipedia, "Lakshmi speaks English, Italian, Spanish, Tamil and Hindi."

We live in such a fascinating world.  Instead of appreciating the beauty in all these, we have a demented demagogue who can barely speak in sentences that are at a second-grader's level, and who probably thinks that somebody like a Padma Lakshmi is from a shithole!

The election of tRump is certainly one of those that is best described as È come essere schiaffeggiato nel buio.