2023-10-27 07:02:37
If someone says “tongue of wood” to you, you think “politician (or woman)”, right? Rarely has an expression been so associated with a specific group of the population. However, anyone can get tongue-tied: you just need to show verbal acrobatics and overuse elements of language to avoid getting to the heart of a subject. What we often don’t know is where this expression comes from.
A first trace in 1919
” It is [l’actrice] Sarah Bernhardt playing her last role with a wooden tongue. » We find this sentence in an issue of the satirical newspaper The cry of Paris, in 1919, about President Georges Clemenceau. Was it the substance of his speech or his delivery that was then denounced? It is difficult to know a century later. In 1947, the author Claude Roy used this expression again in the sense of a rigid or boring style. The relationship of this expression with its contemporary equivalent remains unclear…
In the modern sense
In the current sense of a certain form of hypocrisy, the expression is rather associated with its Russian equivalent, “oak tongue”, already used under the Tsar, then especially during the Soviet era. The term would have passed through Red Poland, where the oak turned into wood, before arriving in France around 1950. First intended for communist activists, the expression was extended to the entire political spectrum in the 1980s: right, left or neither, no one is safe from the wooden tongue…
#expression #tongue #wood