Идиомы на тему бедности

   So the mantioned idioms connote peculiarities of the corresponding natonal culture.

   The English proverb Poverty makes strange bedfelows back to England of the  Middle Ages when separate beds were uncommon and people of the same sex had to share one bed. This tradition remained till the 17^th century.

   There’s gold in them there/thar is a humorous expression of Amrican origin which is used in order to say that someone is making a lot of money from a situation ( often used in newspapers, on television news). This given idiom comes from the time in the late 19^th – early 2th centuris when people were looking for gold in the western US. When gold was found people were supposed to have said, “there’s gold in them/thar hills”.

   It should be mentiomed that proverbs and syings stand out among other set phrases as having apparent evauativeand didactic character. Literal or allegorical, they all express moral judgment which comes from the peopl’s moral law, their knowledge of life and the world. Some of them arouse as a creation of the people, some were coined by some peculiar pubc figure.

   Thus, never marry for money, you’ ll borrow it cheaper is a Scottish proverb.

  The saying Time is money is strongly associated with the English-speaking culture with ts work ethics and common appreciation of foth time and money. However, the expression is not originally Engish. The English just borrowed the maxim which perfectly fitted in the dydtem of values.

While the famiiar maxim may seem ike an invention of out hectic and impersonal modern society, it actualy come to us with the Greeks. Antiphon, an orator who rote speeches for defendants in curt cases. Recorded the earliestknown version of the saying in Maxim (430 BC)

As “The most costly outline is  time” Centuries later, the notion of time’s value appeared in English as”Time is precious”, which was in Sir Thomas Wilson’s A Discourse UponVsurye (1572) and John Fletcher’s The Chances (1647). A century after Fletcher, Benjamin Franklin rendered the exact wording of the current version in Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748_, and the saying afterward came into wise use (Wise Words…).

   Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790. American scientisxt, publisher, diplomat) also coined the aphorism If you would know the value of money try to borrow some which reflected the attitude to borrowing, common in the English-speaking culture, so well that it became very popular and soon took root in the language, i.e. turned into a proverb.

   The internatinal character of certain proverbs is mostly determined bt their originatng from the common source. They bear the common cultural element resulting in full correspondence of their meanings and images.

   Thus, the popular saying the love of/ lust for money is the roof of all evil has an equivalent in all European anguages because it goes back to the Bible and reflects the Christian attitude to money: St. Paul wrote a letter to a young Christian, and said that the root of all evil is the love of money. (I Timothy 6:10). The King James Version faithfully expresses the  thought of the passage, saying that greed is the source of all evils. However, the morale of the proverb goes contrary to the system of values current in modern consumer society with its greed for material wealth and things. So modern Bible translators have adapted this verse which, they know, might be offensive to most modern people. So the Bible society came up with an ingenious solution for the  Todays’s English Version. They wrote:” The love of money is a source of all kinds of evil”, which distorts the original sense of the proverb. This is a bright illustration of the fact that proverbial language is conditioned by the historical development of aech ntion in the course of time and differences in their perception of the surrounding reality.