Hello, Welcome. I’m Renée Valentina and this is Musing Interruptus. Musing Interruptus is a podcast for sharing thoughts and stories and enjoying idiomatic phrases. You can read along; just click on continue reading in the description to open a Google Doc with the transcription of this episode. The idiomatic expressions are in italics. Try to get the meaning from the context and then look them up to see if you were right. If you like it, subscribe, follow, and share, but more importantly, continue the conversation. Drop a comment with your answers to today’s questions! I love hearing from you! The background music is called Matamoscas by Blue Dot.
The mix and master were done by Jesus Darío, my sound partner.
Today, The Fact of The Matter.
Since there are many truths, they should each have a name!
They kinda do, if you turn to idioms. For the record, idiom has a false friend in Spanish, idioma.
An idiom is a phrase that has a different meaning from that of the sum of the meanings of the words in that same phrase. For instance, the idiom when pigs fly means that something is impossible. However, the sum of the words paint the picture of pigs propelling themselves with their curly piggy tails, like early propeller planes. If you ask someone for a favor and they say, when pigs fly, they are not trying to entertain you, they are saying no, never ever, just forget it.
Back to the truth.
You might get the truth from the source, in that case you would say you got it straight from the horse’s mouth. So you see, this doesn’t mean you actually got information from a horse. But that would be something, to be interrogating a horse, under a hot lamp, with their hooves hooked up to a polygraphy. I’ve never known a horse to lie. I think that a lie detector test is unnecessary. I think you can trust horses to tell you what they think about you. That goes for most of the animal kingdom, except human beings, who tend to lie, pretend, and hide their intentions to get something from you. Not all of them. I know a great deal of very decent and good and basically lovely human beings. I’m lucky that way. Horses are generally good eggs. If I had to wager a guess, I would say that that is the reason we say, straight from the horse's mouth to indicate that information comes from a reliable source. Continue reading
