Language is a funny thing.

Written language has only been around for a few thousand years.

Spoken language maybe a hundred thousand.

Nobody’s really sure, since there was no way to record when people started speaking.

They can only guess.

Interestingly, this is also why we can’t really pinpoint when phrases were invented.

We can only look back and see when they appeared in print.

Even this is iffy, since lots of books and newspapers were printed and that was that.

If the actual paper or book isn’t around, we have no way of knowing exactly WHAT phrases were used.

So when researching phrases like, “Raining cats and dogs,” there’s no way to KNOW when it started being used that way.

Sure, there are plenty of interesting theories, but since things are spoken for a LONG TIME before they are written down, even the guy who first WROTE, “raining cats and dogs” maybe didn’t know why it meant that.

Only that it meant that.

This is an interesting subject for linguistics.

They can actually test whether we think of a phrase as a singular thing, or as a collection of things that mean something else.

They flash words and sentences, and by recording how quickly (or slowly) our facial expressions and other non-conscious behavior responds, they can tell if we need to TRANSLATE that phrase into a meaning or if we IMMEDIATELY take in the whole phrase to “mean” something.

Like the phrase, “kick the bucket.”

We interpret that phrase the same way we interpret the word “die.”

Linguists have a theory that when most people associate a phrase (like “kick the bucket”) with a single meaning (die) then it’s part of the common language.

Once it gets to this point, nobody needs to know WHY it means what it does.

Of course, that doesn’t keep us from having fun guessing.

The cool thing is that this is just as true for each WORD in our language.

Nobody knows when or how or why the sounds were put together to mean certain things.

All we need to know is that when we make these certain sounds in certain orders, we will conjure certain ideas in the brains of other people.

Which is pretty cool when you think about it.

(Which most people don’t).

By taking the time to learn how to put words and sounds together, you can purposely create some amazing ideas in other people’s heads.

And since YOU’LL be the one making those crazy ideas in their mind, to them it will seem like you’ve got super powers of mind control!

Street Hypnosis