It’s Time To Take a Chill Pill

The weather across North India at present is sultry and the temperatures are soaring high as eagles. Amid all the hullabaloo of taking precautions while going out and staying in; the linguist’s mind can hardly be at rest. So while I don my thinking cap, I advise you, my readers, to take a chill pill– a phrase whose origin can be traced back to the 1980s when the medical world first recognized ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) as a neurodevelopmental disorder among children. The medicine designed for the disorder helped the hyperactive kids to relax and hence was known as the “chill pill”. How quick are we to assimilate things and situations in our day-to-day lingo!

On a regular basis, we make use of idioms and phrases related to circumstances around us including weather conditions and temperature settings. You may give someone a ‘warm response’ to show your enthusiasm or a ‘lukewarm response’ to show insignificance, depending upon your affiliation with someone or something. At the same time, you may extend warm greetings to make someone feel loved or give a cold shoulder to show indifference towards him or her. To drop something like ‘a hot potato’ is a situation that is too controversial to handle and therefore is passed from one person to another but if things sell like hot cakes, it suggests that the thing is extremely popular and is in huge demand. People are categorized and judged on the fact whether they are warm-hearted or cold-hearted; whether they are hot-blooded or cold-blooded and whether they are hot as flame or cold as ash.

The wise always say that ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold’; that you must strike while ‘the iron is hot’ and that ‘you must not set yourself on fire to keep others warm.’ In case you have done something wrong you might end up ‘breaking into a cold sweat’; develop ‘cold feet’ or find yourself ‘in a hot seat’. However, if you have done a good deed, you might end up ‘warming the cockles of someone’s heart’ which is probably the deepest part of one’s body.

Well, the most interesting phrase that I landed up with turns out to be “blow hot and cold”. The phrase in simple terms means ‘to vacillate between two alternating moods, situations or courses of action’. What is totally scintillating about the phrase is its origin and it’s no mean feat when I say that the origin can be traced back to Aesop’s Fables or Aesopica. In one of the fables titled ‘The Man and the Satyr’, a traveler knocks at a satyr’s cottage and asks for shelter. The satyr serves porridge to the man who blows upon his hands to warm them and upon the hot porridge to cool it off. The satyr says that he cannot trust a man who blows hot and cold in the same breath.

If your heart has been warmed up by my words and you do not wish to leave me out in the cold, then do not blow hot and cold. Instead, get on a hot line with me and warm the cockles of my heart. Who knows it might bring the temperature down a few notches!!!