Day 26

'Don't look a gift Horse in the Mouth', Pen and Pencil on Paper

Decided to take a little break from the more figurative drawing of late in favour of something a little more obscure, a little more out of the ordinary.

The whole thinking behind today's 'draw' came from a conversation about the slang terms and colloquialisms that we use on a daily basis, mainly that when overheard by people from other countries, cultures and in some cases even those living only few miles down the road they can struggle to grasp exactly what is meant. Also how in some cases just by being in close proximity to people who use these slang terms consistently that we ourselves begin to unconsciously assimilate them into your own lexicon. At this point I'm going to stray of topic slightly just to highlight how much I have wanted to use the word 'lexicon' in a phrase, conversation or sentence for quite sometime, for no real reason other than I think it's an awesome word... unfortunately it just never seemed to fit the context, thankfully my attempts at seeming intellectual during my daily ramblings gives me the perfect excuse. A further point I like to make at this juncture is the the over use of long words (something I can tend towards) more specifically though the word that define this, that being 'sesquipedalian'. I find it curious that they would choose a word to define this situation that is in itself over long... it's fair to say that I'm fascinated by words and the use of language in general which funnily enough actually brings me back to where I was before diverging on that tangent. As I had been discussing earlier we do tend to use phrases daily that only those who live in close proximity will understand, however if we move home or are in a new place for a period of time then we can pick up this lingo without realising and integrate it in to our own speech patterns. This is possibly how much of the more generalised phrases that we use on occasion like, 'don't look a gift horse in the mouth' or 'every cloud has a silver lining' have come to be used on a much more widespread basis. As over time these phrases have spread from their point of origin through a sort of cross pollination of language that has been taken from place to place.

In the case of today's drawing I was actually thinking of the origins of a phrase and how sometimes the information can become confused over time or attributed to the wrong people. With the case of the above image initially I thought that the phrase was linked to the Trojan Horse that the Greeks used to infiltrate the city of Troy, as someone in the past had told me that was where the phrase it had come from, however something about it didn't make sense in this context... if they had of looked in the gift horses mouth then surely they would have found the men hiding inside and that would mean the phrase would be that you should always look a gift horse in the mouth. So I did a little digging and found that it is actually more closely attributed to St. Jerome and was originally 'never inspect the teeth of a gift horse' a response in reply to some literary critics on his writing. The notion behind it is that a horses value is determined by its age which can be ascertained by examining its teeth, due to them becoming longer with old age... coincidentally where the phrase 'long in the tooth' is said to come from. The phrase then suggests that we should be happy when receiving a gift due to the thought behind it rather than questioning its value. So the drawing then is an amalgamation of both these thoughts to hopefully highlight that sometimes we can misinterperate things or misunderstand them for a number of reasons and it is always good to look at where things have come from to get a better apprehension of what is being implied.