The only thing I can remember about a Tesco advertisement on the television the other night is the line: ‘No rest for the wicked.’ It was meant ironically, of course.
The only thing I can remember about a Tesco advertisement on the television the other night is the line: ‘No rest for the wicked.’ It was meant ironically, of course. The suggestion was not that wicked people alone shop at Tesco’s. Nor was the phrase intended as a pious invocation of the Bible, its source, Isaiah, 57:21.
An anthropologist describing the clichés, or tropes, of Western cultures might form the idea that biblical religion played a lively part in daily discourse. Just as we hear an Arab say, ‘God put me in the High Street this morning,’ and suppose that the man sees life as one theurgic system, so our speech seems a mosaic of sacred texts. We think someone, Tony Blair perhaps, ‘a man after our own heart’, ‘the salt of the earth’, who goes ‘from strength to strength’, but then we find his administration ‘a two-edged sword’, and when it begins to rule with ‘a rod of iron’, we ‘kick against the pricks’, and make the former prime minister a ‘scapegoat’, who if he had to ‘reap the whirlwind’ would escape by ‘the skin of his teeth’.
These are not quotations from the Bible, David Crystal makes clear, for quotations are characterised by being used only in settings where their religious application is relevant, and they maintain their original sense while sticking closely to the language of the translator. An example of a quotation from the Bible is ‘Behold, a virgin shall be with child and shall bring forth a son.’ A biblical idiom that has entered the language, by contrast, will also be used by non-believers, very likely with a change of meaning, and it will frequently be adapted, often for humorous effect.
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