A pilot of a podcast. A variety of accents and presenter.
Description
Read MoreVocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
Welcome to an idiom is worth 1000 words. A podcast. All about all those little phrases we love that really gets my goat. You can't have your cake and eat it. No pain, no gain. Come up smelling roses. She who sucks with the devil should use the long off f break a leg. Hope, hope not brilliant. This first episode is going to be on the idiom which inspired the title for the podcast. A picture is worth 1000 words. But first here is my nan I've never wanted to leave the East End. Never. I mean, different people said to me, oh, now Jim is gone. Will you move out in the country somewhere? I said, no way, no way. You know, I mean, I don't know it, it that with this flat and um the saying that move out and I said, no, I'll never move out. When I do go, I'll be carried out in a box. Want to go in there and carry it in a box. That wonderful stoic tone is my nan Rita Brian, lovely sort of the F L cockney girl and it's the Cockneys and the East Enders that are my closest connection to the sort of folk wisdom of Britain and being one of the wisest people. I know. I thought I'd give her a little spot as I'm introducing this podcast. So this is what she has to say. I mean, a lot of it is all, um east end saying is that, um, handed down from my mum. And where do you think she, where is she getting from? It was just been brought up in the East End more or less. Yeah. All the older people do. But as I say, when you get into the younger generation, they don't know about it. It's a shame. It is a shame. You miss out. I mean, it's the old world. A lot of the youngsters want to forget but is their roots, let's think about it. Is their roots, they shouldn't forget. Couldn't agree more. No. So the reason we're doing this podcast is largely to kind of connect us to just the wealth of awesomeness that exists within our own idioms. So I'd like to say a special thanks to my nan for being very patient with me and my microphone. Um You'll be hearing her voice occasionally because, you know, she is and kind of her generation and the, the, the part of my family from the East End is a lot of the inspiration of why I want to do this because I've lived a very different life from them. You know, I've moved around Europe and I've been to international schools. I've studied philosophy and therapy and history and I'm doing my philosophy masters at the moment. And when it comes down to it, you can study all these things. You can sit around campfires with all my hippie friends and we can talk about Yogic principles and Buddhist principles and, you know, paganism and stories and all these amazing things and they're all legit and amazing And, and I've loved every second of discussing them, but I keep reaching stages of my life um helping other people through things. And nine times out of 10, when I really feel like I've reached a stage where I understand something when I feel wiser, when I feel like I've really got more of a handle on, on life. And myself and my psyche, a little cockney voice pops into my head and he goes, your guess is as good as mine or perhaps a blessing in disguise or cross that bridge when we come to it. And I keep repeating them to people then and tell myself these things and there's something about them that's so much more unique than what you get on a meme or another new idea of saying the same thing or a new way, rather of saying the same idea and something about them being rooted in our culture and our language and everything I think adds a weight to them. So what we're going to be doing on this podcast is going through some idioms and I'm going to unpick them. And, you know, we can really look at all the philosophy you can just derive from these wonderful little phrases that just sit there like little Zen door mice being super wise and intrinsically connected to the human condition, which is don't give a toss whether you listen or not, but if you do catch them and listen to them and inquire further as to, you know, just what that means or why is that important? I can open a huge array of beautiful sentiment and connection to other people and other cultures as we understand that, you know, the same meanings are conveyed in similar if not the same ways. So the first one we're going to do, And this introductory episode is a picture is worth 1000 words. The reason being that idioms are in themselves imagery, a lot of the time they're metaphorical, they seem to convey meaning through an implied narrative. A sort of little scene of something that we can almost imagine that is far more indicative of the situation and what it means than say someone just explaining it to us. And we'll get to that more. But that's why we're going to look into this one. And I will definitely use more than 1000 words to go through each of these little images. A picture is worth 1000 words is apparently first attributed to the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, 1000 words leaves not the same deep impression as does a single did. That's wonderful, Henrik. Thank you. You are very welcome. And this would have been the turn of the 20th century, turn of the 19th century to the 20th. Um and it's been since paraphrased and so on up until the first most accurate um phrase for it, which was in reference to World War One In a 1918 newspaper advert for the San Antonio Life, one of the nation's greatest editors says one picture is worth 1000 words. The San Antonio Lights Pictorial magazine of the war exemplifies the truth of the above. Just gonna let this roll because I absolutely love it. So um a picture is worth 1000 words after its sort of first recorded showing that became popularized somewhat by a man called Fred Bernard in the twenties. And he would do various ad campaigns. Uh One of them used the phrase, one picture is worth 10,000 words and another was one look is worth 1000 words. And he actually uh labeled this a Chinese proverb and he even attributed the phrase to Confucius. And it completely wasn't. He just did it to quote unquote. Um have people take it more seriously? And so this is sort of how it works in a lot of our sort of even our early history of Western media and so forth. But there's lots and lots of historical examples um which go through the ages. Um Some of the most notable people in history, in fact, as we've seen, see, have actually used a very similar sentiment, which is amazing because that just puts it into the larger human context. It's not just based on having print media or photographs. So one of these people was believe it or not the great renaissance artist, Leonardo Da Vinci, who said a poet would be overcome with sleep and hunger before being able to describe what a painter can depict in an instant. And I'm sure he was quite biased towards painters. However, perhaps he's not entirely wrong. Of course, I'm not wrong. I went. All right, Leo, It's a bit difficult to be dead for 400 years. It makes a man. How do you say cranky? Oh, that's all right, mate. I'm sure it can't be easy being buried for that long. So, alright. Alright, wonderful. There's also the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, who if performed by a particularly erudite squirrel might have sounded something like It. Drawing at one glance shows me more than what might be spread over 10 pages in your book that ladies and gentlemen was Gary Pumpernickel. Thanks, Gary. It's no problem. It was the ruler's point of play and even Napoleon Bonaparte who said a quick sketch is better than a long speech. So as we can see across Italy, Russia, France in history, this sort of idea that you can convey a lot of meaning through an image is hardly one that is unique to any one place in time or history. And this is why it is very much like idioms for, they are not entirely unique to any one culture. They're not entirely unique to any one person. We find some historical connection to them, but they're never the be all and end all of its history. It's just the first time it was recorded or the first time someone put it in print or whatever it might be. But the reason I'd like to go into idioms is because I've spent a lot of time studying archetypes, for example. So for those who don't know, archetypes are.