GTAGE: Losing One's Religion

Today's installment of the Golden Treasury of Anglo–Greek Expressions (GTAGE) takes religion in vain. That does not mean the expressions I'm going through are blasphemous per se—although if taking religion lightly is not your thing, you shouldn't be reading further. If anything, the expressions show how central a role Orthodox Christianity has played in how Greek saw the world and their society, just as Shakespeare's English betrays a lot of popular Catholicism, that was slow in dying in England.

Most of the translations this time around aren't all that jocular, but instead are quite close to the literal meaning; it's the opacity of the idioms, of course, that lends them their humour. But the first instance resorts to an English soundalike:

Aaron, Aaron: Άρον άρον

This is a biblical quotation: ἄρον ἄρον, σταύρωσον αὐτόν "take, take, crucify him!" (John 19:5; English translations uniformly leave it as "Crucify Him! Crucify Him!") The expression is quite opaque now, so the GTAGE compiler could get away with namedropping Moses' brother instead. It is opaque, because ἄρον is no longer the imperative for "take!"

• The present tense of "take, lift" was αἴρω; now it is παίρνω, which is the modern counterpart for ἐπ-αίρω, "to take up, lift up" ( /ep-aírɔː/ > /eˈpero/ > */ˈpero/ > /ˈperno/ : Modern Greek deletes unstressed initial /i, e, o/, and avoids /r, l/ as a present tense ending, adding the less anomalous /n/ after them.)
  
• The imperative which was ἄρον is now πάρε. The ancient imperative of ἐπ-αίρω is ἔπ-αρον, a second aorist (corresponding to the Germanic strong verbs). The second aorist died out and was replaced by the first aorist (corresponding to the Germanic weak verbs). Even if the second aorist stem survived, its inflection did not, and at any rate the aorist imperative endings were matched to the present imperative; so ἐπ-άρε. The initial /e/ becomes unstressed and is deleted, by analogy with the present; so /ˈeparon/ > /eˈpare/ > /ˈpare/.
  
• In addition, Ancient Greek allows "take!" to be used without an object. In Modern Greek, you can only do this with inanimate objects: you can say πάρε to mean "take it" (actually, "take some"—if you're not naming what is taken, it is assumed to be something appropriately nebulous.) But for a human object, you would have to supply a pronoun: ἄρον ἄρον, σταύρωσον αὐτόν "take, take, crucify him" would now be πάρ' τον, πάρ' τον, σταύρωσέ τον "take him, take him, crucify him".

ἄρον ἄρον doesn't make any sense to Modern Greek speakers, and the repeated imperative sounds odd, like some sort of incantation. (For all I know, ἄρον in antiquity may have been more about seizing the moment than literally taking anyway.) So the phrase was reinterpreted to make sense in context. Churchgoers heard "Aron Aron Crucify Him", and concluded that "aron aron" must mean "hurry up", coming from the crowd pressing to see Christ executed—and so with a connotation of an action being forced. The slang.gr definition is:

Said of something happening very quickly, in a great hurry, a great rush and great stress. Said of something that happens on the go, on the fly, in the fast lane, heart beating like a drum, whoosh, etc.

The phrase is not really slang at all, but quite commonplace mainstream Greek; in fact there was a debate on slang.gr on whether the phrase should be included at all. It's presumably not related, but that interpretation is reminiscent of an earlier repetition, at the end of actual Greek incantations (magical papyri and tablets): ταχὺ ταχύ "quickly, quickly!"

That's the only phrase from the liturgy in the list; there's also a reference to the man reading the liturgy:

And if you are priest you will stand in the queue: Κι αν είσαι και παπάς με την αράδα σου θα πάς

Just about literally rendered, but for the affectation so beloved of GTAGE, of overliterally translating και: και literally means "and", but it can be used not only to join two things, but also in front of just one thing, to mean "also" or "even". So, "and if you are and a priest, with your line you will go": that is, "even if you are a priest, you're still going to stand in the queue." So also defined at slang.gr:

An All time classic popular expression used since time immemorial. αράδα as we know is a queue (σειρά). We also know of the respect that villagers for the most part showed their priests (as well as the teacher and the policeman). Often people would give their place to the priest, so he could be served in a timely manner.

So the expression simply means that one must await the suitable time or moment to act, without exception. Even if one is a priest, for instance, he must still wait his turn—let alone a common mortal.

The explanation presupposes a Greek notion of queues, something that does not quite gel with my experience of Hellenism. Now αράδα is a quite old word for "line", which is now limited to typography and as a synonym for "large number of"; "queue" now is σειρά, which is why slang.gr had to gloss it. But σειρά, which is after all the same word as series, has a clear notion of one party following another; αράδα doesn't have that connotation to me. So I suspect αράδα is used to refer to it being one's turn to be served, without there being an single orderly queue in place. Turns are ordered one after the other, even if the petitioners for those turns are not. Note that it's "*your* line (= turn)", not "your place in the line (= queue)".

In a society where Christianity is the default, Christianity can stand in for what is self-evident: if everyone is supposed to be Christian, then Christianity is supposed to be understood by anyone, putting it in the same category as knowing how to walk or how to jump a queue. So not understanding Christianity was not brought up as a badge of free-thinking, but of questionable mental capacity:

He doesn't understand Christ: Δεν καταλαβαίνει Χριστό
I don't know Christ: Δεν ξέρω Χριστό

Compare the Southern US phrase losing my religion, which actually means "being at the end of one's tether"—although when the Southern US rock band REM launched the phrase into a more secular listening public, that's not how the phrase was understood.

The Greek phrases are used to indicate that someone is refusing to understand something, which should be self-evident. Consequently, it means that someone is pig-headed, since what they are refusing to understand (i.e. go along with) is what *you* are proposing is self-evident.

There is a nuance here: the definite article is not used before Christ. So the phrase cannot mean, literally, "he doesn't understand Christ (e.g. what Christ is saying)" or "he is not acquainted with Christ": without an article, Christ is not being treated as a person. Rather, Christ is being treated like a body of knowlegde—just like δεν καταλαβαίνει βιοχημεία "he doesn't understand biochemistry" or δεν ξέρω κολύμπι "I don't know swimming (= how to swim)". So what is not being understood is not Christ himself, but Christ's body of knowledge: Christianity.

That's my interpretation; slang.gr has a different take:

The religious counterpart to δε μασώ "I won't chew" [I don't give a damn], indicating that the subject is so determined to maintain a particular position that even if Christ himself came down to explain why he should change his mind, he would not understand and would not be persuaded.

But the absent article makes me think I'm right. There is a second meaning, "I don't understand a damn thing" (brought up in the slang.gr thread, appropriately enough, by the user called Jesus). That could be a reinterpretation of the phrase: "I refuse to understand a damn thing" > "I can't understand a damn thing" (hearers take away that it is invective and involves failure to understand, and reapply it); or it could play on the same notion of Christianity as Obvious Truth ("I'm so confused by this, I don't even understand Christianity any more"' cf. the use in English of "I've forgotten my own name.")

If someone obstinate won't even understand Christ, someone hallucinating will misunderstand Christ, again because Christianity is assumed to be self-evident, as common property of the community. Hence, the absurdist vision:

He saw G.I. Christ: Είδε τον Χριστό φαντάρο

Once again, GTAGE requires the Greek to be rendered in English without nuance. By putting φαντάρο "conscript" after the object τον Χριστό "Christ", "conscript" is a small clause, a predicate describing the result of the verb, like "he painted the house red": here "he saw Christ as a conscript".

In another culture, and another time, this would be quite right-thinking, if liberal theology: Christ humbled to the station of Everyman, and the Greek army conscript is as Everyman as the modern culture allows—a stage of humiliation and drudgery every Greek citizen is supposed to go through, if they don't have the right connections to avoid it. The theologians always knew about the humbling of the Incarnation, which is why Byzantine theologians came up with the concept of Kenosis—the emptying out, the voiding of God's will in the Son of God as He becomes Man.

But that's theologians. The common folks' understanding of Christ is what they saw in the icons: Christ as Arch-Priest, as the Almighty, as the Conqueror of Death.

For someone to see with their mind's eye Christ voided, as a lowly Everyman (and as a contemporary Everyman at that), they must be pretty far gone. Accordingly, the phrase is used to indicate that someone has been driven to extremes, that he has been pressed or worked so hard, that he is hallucinating, and seeing manifest absurdities.

More summarily, slang.gr defines the phrase as:

1. Used to stress that we are going through difficult or intense experiences.
2. To be terrified.

Orthodoxy—common folk and theologians—have a special place for the Virgin Mary, as universal mother and divine intercessor. In fact, slang.gr reports an extension of "I saw G.I. Christ": Είδα την Παναγιά περίπολο και το Χριστό φαντάρο, "I saw Holy Mary on patrol and Christ as a conscript." So if something is especially rare, it gets calledː

Holy Mary's eyes: Της Παναγιάς τα μάτια

Eyes are already used to refer to something dear, something that cannot be replaced—with accompanying derision for blindness in proverbial wisdom. So μάτια μου "my eyes" remains a term of endearment. If you're going to pile on preciousness and scarcity, the object of affection can't just be irreplacable eyes, but the irreplacable eyes of someone irreplacable: your mother. And to go even further, not just your mother, but the universal mother. But the expression refers not to something dear but to something scarce. Per slang.gr, with suitably irreverent example, and a definition which looks different but ends up meaning the same:

Absolutely everything, the lot:

Woah, she ate absolutely everything, that fart-eater. She didn't even leave Holy Mary's Eyes out!

The next reference to folk religion has been rendered overliterally once more, although the idiom is opaque enough that it's hard to realise:

He cannot crucify girlfriend: Δεν μπορεί να σταυρώσει γκόμενα|o

girlfriend/boyfriend actually (γκόμενα ~ γκόμενo), and the phrase does not refer to executing one's partner on a tree. The phrase actually means there is no partner to execute: "he can't possibly get a girlfriend/boyfriend". The expression can be used with anyone or anything impossible for someone to get hold of: δεν μπορεί να σταυρώσει φράγκο "he can't crucify a franc = he can't get (= earn) a single drachma". The nuance is that this is because of the person's inability or incompetence, not because it is impossible for a person of reasonable means to do; so you wouldn't say δεν μπορεί να σταυρώσει κότερο "he can't crucify a yacht", unless you wanted to imply that surely anyone who's anyone can surely afford a little yacht, dahlink.

The catch with this idiom is that σταυρώνω does not only mean "crucify". In traditional Greek society, which did not use Roman methods of execution, the only entity referred to as crucified was Christ, and those references were limited to Easter. The more commonly used sense of σταυρώνω is "to make the sign of the cross over" something or someone. For people, this was done as a blessing, typically to ward off evil spirits. For objects, this was done likewise, and evil spirits would be warded off a costly acquisition.

The implication here is a nice little vignette: the pauper, after much effort, finally gets a single drachma, and makes the sign of the cross over it to keep it put. The dateless is yearning to get a girlfriend; if he ever does (which he won't), he will be desperately making the sign of the cross over her, to make sure she doesn't get away from him through the offices of some evil spirit (or less nerve-wracked lover).

slang.gr does not have a distinct entry for crucifying girlfriends, but deals with the colloquial use of the verb overall:

To acquire, to happen upon, to make one's own, to fuck [in the slang sense of "to be a success"]. This admittedly pas tellment slangue term is usually expressed in the negative. Possibly from the English "he cannot crucify a girlfriend". [Yes, slang.gr in-joke referring back to GTAGE.]

The other examples given of something not gained, despite great effort and desperation, are a football victory, and a customer:

• The team cannot manage to play soccer, it cannot "crucify" a victory (δεν μπορεί να σταυρώσει νίκη), and of course it is not even dynamic enough to get bad referreeing.
  
• Doubling up the range of a brand, with two models close to each other, often shows bad strategy from the car manufacturer. A classic example is the VW Jetta; as long as the Passat is alongside it, it cannot "crucify" a customer (δε μπορεί να σταυρώσει πελάτη).

The discussants are at something at a loss of where the expression comes from. Xalikoutis suggests two possibilities. The first is crossing a customer off a list, with some relief. The second, which is along the lines I have proposed, is housewives making the sign of the cross over a painstakingly prepared dish, before putting it in the oven. Others bring up examples of passengers making the sign of the cross over the airplane crew, and a lawyer making the sign over the trial documents.

"Crucifying" a girlfriend would be a red-letter day indeed for our hapless Lothario, at any rate. After all,

It's not every day St. John's: Δεν είναι κάθε μέρα τ’ Αη-Γιαννιού

GTAGE overliteral word order of course: "Not every day is St John's", with "every day" emphasised by moving it after "is not". St John's is an important feast day in Orthodoxy as it is in Catholicism; the importance of the day for Catholics has made it the Quebec National Day (and makes for some awkwardness, now that the day is being promoted as secular, and not exclusive to the Francophones).

The Catholic feast for St John the Baptist is the commemoration of his birth, on June 24, making it the midsummer festival. The major Orthodox feast day for St John the Baptist is on January 7, making it the capstone to the Twelve Days of Christmas.

To conclude, a rendering which combines the Byzantine, the Information Age, and Modern Greek aggro, describing the kind of blasphemy that this posting has skirted.

I downloaded vigil candles: Κατέβασα καντήλια

Κατεβάζω can be used to mean "to download", and doing so is incongruous enough to make it a natural choice for GTAGE. Its more general meaning, of course, is simply "to take down". The expression means "to blaspheme", and it is modelled after κατέβασα άγιους, "I brought down saints". It would be tempting to assume in this expression some sort of rueful self-awareness, that by blaspheming in naming saints, one is bringing the saints down to their base level.

But that kind of self-awareness is fairly counterproductive, and instead I think the expression is based on the use of Χ τον ανέβασα, Ψ τον κατέβασα "I brought him up X, I brought him down Y", meaning to go through a list of descriptions for someone—the descriptions typically derogatory. (There is a variant "I brought him up X, I brought him down X", meaning that the derogatory description X is the only description fit for something.) The first few examples I've googled:

• Νερόπλυμα τον ανεβάζω, νερόπλυμα τον κατεβάζω και ποτέ δεν τον πλησιάζω (Of filter coffee) I bring it up "dishwater", I bring it down "dishwater", and I won't go near it.
  
• Το Στάθη γιατί τον ανεβάζω κωλόγρια και τον κατεβάζω πορνόγερο. Το χειρότερο είναι ότι είναι και τα δύο Why do I bring Stathis up "old hag" and bring him down "old goat"? What's worst is that he's both.
  
• ολοι σιγουρα εχετε διαβασει ποστ μου οπου βριζω τον τζεικ και σκυλο τον ανεβαζω κουταβι τον κατεβαζω
  αλλα νομιζω οτι τωρα τον εχω συμπαθησει σαν χαρακτηρα You must all have read posts by me where I swear about Jake (of Twilight), and I bring him up "dog" and bring him down "pup". But now I think I like him as a character.
  
• Ποιος έγραψε πουθενά ότι ο Παπαχελάς είναι “πράκτορας της CIA”; Εγώ πάντως όχι. Αν μη τι άλλο Μπιλντερμπέργκερ τον ανεβάζω Μπιλντερμπέργκερ τον κατεβάζω And who wrote that Papakhelas is a CIA agent? Not me. In fact, I bring him up a member of the Bilderberg Group, I bring him down a member of the Bilderberg Group.
  
• κάθετα όχι. Δεν μ'αρέσει. Ντικ τον ανεβάζω, ντικ τον κατεβάζω. Δεν ξέρω γιατί, μάλλον εμπάθεια (Response to someone welcoming Dirk Nowitzki to Olympiakos Basketball Team) Absolutely not. I don't like him. I bring him up "Dick", I bring him down "Dick". I don't know why, probably my hostility.
  
• Έτσι και πάρει την ΑΕΚ, έχει να γίνει πολλή πλάκα με τη φάτσα του. Ερμπακάν θα τον ανεβάζω, Θείο θα τον κατεβάζω (Of Haralambos Kozonis, prospective owner of AEK Football Club) If he takes over AEK, there'll be a lot of fun to have about his face. I'll bring him up "Erbakan" [because of his similarity to the Turkish politician], I'll bring him down "Uncle".
  
• Και εγώ θα τα πάρω με το Λεωνίδα, μαλάκα θα τον ανεβάζω, καριόλη θα τον κατεβάζω, θα του ρίξω τα καντήλια του I'll get in a rage with Leonidas, I'll bring him up "wanker", I'll bring him down "whore", I'll throw him down his candles. [Variant of the phrase under discussion here.]
  

The image here, *I* think, is of someone going up and down a catalogue of descriptions; by using them to describe someone, you are taking them up and down the catalogue. Once you have gone up and down a catalogue of saints, you can shorten it to just going down the catalogue—which would emphasise, if not the earthiness of the listing, certainly its definitiveness and condemnation (by the straightforward spatial metaphor, DOWN = bad, condemnation, anger).

If the saints are being brought down, it is a euphemistic and absurdist metonomy to switch from saints the cult objects associated most with saints: the candles lit in their name in church. Taking down candles is an oblique of saying you're taking down the saints that the candles are lit to honour, which in turn means to go through a derogatory cataogue of saints.

One last time, the slang.gr definition, and an explanation in comments that I don't agree with (the candles don't go down of their own accord in the expression). But it's all opinion for these derivations anyway:

Swearing, usually swearing about holy matters, blasphemy.
"Panayotis, stop pinching grandpa, because if he wakes up he's going to take down a candle on you, and he'll be entirely within his rights to."

• Meaning, our curse will be so blasphemous, that the very candles of church won't be able to stand it and will come down.

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GTAGE: We have removed him John

The Golden Treasury of Anglo-Greek Expressions (GTAGE) at slang.gr (see my pretext for this thread) begins with the enigmatic syntax of the following idiom:

we have not seen him yet, and we have removed him John: ακόμα δεν τον είδαμε, Γιάννη τον εβγάλαμε.

The actually meaning of the phrase is rather more transparent: "we have not seen him yet, [but] we have [already] named him John". It's said to refer to rushing to conclusions, assessing an outcome before all the facts are in.

But what I have translated as "named" really is literally "removed". Why is naming associated with removing?

What's actually happened of course is that the verb  βγάζω is used more generally than "remove". This can be explained through an underlying difference between Greek and English: βγάζω does not mean just to take something out of a set; it also means to put that something into a bigger set. Not just "remove from", but "expose to"; not just "take out from", but "put out to".

English doesn't make that conflation, which is why the GTAGE translation can use remove incorrectly. You can βγάζω εφημερίδα, which is to put out a newspaper (publish it), whereas βγάζω την εφημερίδα with the definite article would be taken as taking out the newspaper (remove it physically). English does allow you to take someone out (e.g. to dinner); but that's always about accompanying someone into public view. The corresponding idiom in Greek is να σε βγάλω στην κοινωνία "to put you out into society"—to make them aware of the ways of the world.

Putting something out means exposing it to the world, which means making it known to the world. And the main way of making something known is by giving it a name for the world to use. The fuller expression for "naming someone" is τού έβγαλα το όνομα Γιάννης, "I put out for him the name John". The point of naming is not that I have something to call John by; it's publishing the name, so that the rest of the world has something to call him by too. The expression has been compacted into the small-clause ditransitive you see, τον έβγαλα Γιάννη "I put him out John"—i.e. "I published him (to be) John", just like "I painted him (to be) white".

The same notion of "putting out" as public knowledge can be seen in:

He/she took them out arseholes: Τους έβγαλε μαλάκες

This is not quite "he named them arseholes" (though it can mean that too); but it is "he put them out (to be) arseholes", "he publicised them (to be) arseholes". The sense here is "proved them (in public) to be"; we dodge the "naming" sense here, because "arseholes" is not a name, it's a description, and descriptions put out in public have to be proved to be accepted.

The same principle motivates the expression μη με βγάλεις ψεύτη, "don't put me out (to be) a liar", "don't prove me a liar": namely, "don't make it a commonly accepted judgement that I am a liar". The expression corresponds to English don't let me down. The premiss is that I have publicly sung your praises as a person able to see something through; you should "not make the public think I was lying", by not living up to those expectations.

So we have names being put out, and descriptions being put out; but putting out the name of someone means something different again:

Eye-removal beats name-removal: Κάλλιο να σου βγει το μάτι παρά το όνομα

Literally, "Better that your eye be put out than your name." The expression is playing with the double meaning of βγάζω, because βγάζω το μάτι σου really does mean removing someone's eye. What does putting out the name of someone mean? It can't be giving someone a name: the definite article implies this is not a newly coined name (it's not: "than that someone makes up a name for you").

This context is more obscure, but "name" here stands in for "reputation": people with a good or bad reputation are said to have a good or bad name (καλό, κακό όνομα). Which makes sense, since the name is the public label for the person, and is what public judgement of the person is attached to. "To have a name put out" means to get a reputation, to have one's name put out in circulation for public judgement. And in closed societies, having one's name put out for public judgement is not normally a good thing.

… Did you work all that out? Or, to quote GTAGE,

Have you removed edge; Έβγαλες άκρη;

Surprisingly perhaps, we're back to "taking out", rather than "putting out". The image is of a complicated shape, standing in for the problem, which the person is trying to work out. Working out the shape means extricating its edges from the jumble: not necessarily removing them physically from the jumble, but distinguishing them—removing them conceptually. The corresponding phrase in English, though with a slightly different image, is get to the bottom of this.

Although getting to the bottom of things is a responsibility not everyone is eager to undertake, if they have to live with the consequences:

Will I extract the snake from the hole; Εγώ θα βγάλω το φίδι από την τρύπα;

For a change, the translation is straightforward. It makes it to GTAGE because it's an image unfamiliar from English, but the image is clear: getting the snake out of the hole is to the public benefit of the farmworkers, otherwise the snake could strike them at any time. But the speaker doesn't want to be the one to have to do it; and the inclusion of the personal pronoun is emphatic. ("Will I have to get the snake out of the hole?")

If you don't live up to your expectations, though,

I don't have face to exit in society: Δεν έχω πρόσωπο να βγω στην κοινωνία

This unintentionally makes sense in English, because English borrowed from Chinese the concept of "face" as public reputation. Greek does not use πρόσωπο in that way as much, but this template of putting one's face out in public as confidence does turn up elsewhere; a variant of the expression is με τι μούτρα θα βγεις την κοινωνία; "with what sort of a face will you go out into society", using the vulgar word for "face".

The verb is not βγάζω "take out, put out", but the related βγαίνω "go out", though with the same kind of ambiguity GTAGE exploits for βγάζω: going out of a place (exiting), vs. going out in public. "Face" here is used as a vehicle of shame: if a person is embarrassed, their face will be blushing, and will give the person's shame away. It will not be a face that one can get away with showing in public, "that one can go out with in society". I'm assuming the concept of blushing is behind the Chinese notion of Face as well.
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GTAGE: Screw you and your car jack!

Language and slang.gr advisory

Greeks on email have inevitably received at least twice joke emails that feature Greek phrases literally translated into English, to hilarious effect. (For moderate to small values of "hilarious".) The humour lies in the fact that the Greek phrases are idioms, which cannot be translated literally, or that English and Greek have different semantic maps for their vocabularies. Less often, and less amusingly, the humour lies in the fact that a word of Greek kinda sounds like a very different word of English.

Email is not the only venue for Greeks to play with the literal interpretation of idioms. The blog Λεξικό της αργκό (Slang Dictionary), based on a book of the same name, translates slang idioms literally into pictures.

It occurred to me when I got one of those emails yet again last year, that they are an excellent resource for linguistic pedantry. These joke translations offer excellent grounds for explaining why the literal translation doesn't work—and in the process, exploring the pragmatics and semantics of Greek that make them not work. In other words, a great way of posting on Hellenisteukontos without having to do any research.

I was going to start with the list I received in November, but when I got around to it, the list of idioms just wasn't juicy enough. That may be because the list was generated by the second-to-third–generation diaspora, whose command of Greek is certainly not as juicy as in the motherland. The marvelous slang.gr has come to my rescue, not for the first time: user vrastaman, with the aid of other regulars, has posted a extensive listing of such literalisms—as he calls it, a Golden Treasury of Anglo-Greek Expressions (GTAGE): copious, occasionally illustrated, and, unusually, bidirectional.

I'm not going to post today about the titular idiom, we have not seen him yet, and we have removed him John. I want to bundle together several idioms using βγάζω, But I want to get a post out on the idiom I deal with here today, while it is still on the front page of the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos' Blog.

As it turns out, I've been thinking about this idiom for a while, because it's a nice illustration of implicature and speech acts. Before I explain what that means, the idiom:

Don’t you defecate us you and your cricket: Δεν μας χέζεις εσύ και ο γρύλος σου!

The idiom means "I rebuff your expression of concern." Really. It does.

In classic GTAGE fashion, a figurative use of a word is taken literally: γρύλος is the insect "cricket", but it is also a car jack, since car jacks look like a cricket's legs (I guess). The line is the punchline of a joke, and that's the context Sarantakos brought it up in: a post on punchlines that have become proverbial. Proverbial enough that political cartoonists can use them to express their resentment at the current relation of Greece to the European Union:

Greece, on the torture rack of a car jack, is shown the European Negotiations To Determine A Bail-Out Mechanism. Greece's response: "You, and your car jack!"—meaning, like I said, "I rebuff your expression of concern."

The phrase as cited in GTAGE actually means "why don't you shit on us, you AND your car jack". Not that that's any clearer. I'll explain the reference, but my main point is the oddity of "why don't you shit on me" as an insult: if I want to express my anger at you, why on earth would I invite you to do something bad to me?

The joke explanation first. The phrase is glossed in slang.gr, though under the variant άι σιχτίρ κι εσύ κι ο γρύλος σου—with the much more normal insult άι σιχτίρ "Fuck off" (σιχτίρ is Turkish, άι is probably from Ancient ἄγε "lead! (go!)" The explication is from user acg:

Punchline of an old widely-known joke, now used independently following the Zeitgeist and constituting a separate and officially recognised entity, utilised to describe a situation whereby the subject is wound up and peeved over something on their own, despite the absence of any hint indicating that what they are fretting over will in fact go pear-shaped.

For those who have formerly lived in a fishbowl and do not know the joke: a guy has a flat tire in the forest, at the dead of night, and has no car jack to lift the car up. He sees a farmhouse 500 m away and heads off.

As he's walking, he thinks and mutters to himself: "It's a farmhouse, he's bound to have tools. Surely he'll have a car jack. Wouldn't it be something if he has a car jack and refuses to give it to me. I just want to borrow the thing for half an hour, it's not like I'm going to steal it. Why, the bastard! That bloody miser! Yeah right, you jerk, as if I'm going to make off with your crappy car jack. You just wait until you need something from me, and then I'll straighten your tie for you alright! What kind of an arsehole does this guy think he is, anyway? Refusing to help me in the middle of the night, when the bastard should be coming out and changing my tire himself! But it's my fault for sitting around and begging him in the first place!"

He knocks on the door, and as soon as the villager opens, he says, "why don't you and your car jack just fuck off!"

Right. That's the joke. Hence, "I rebuff your expression of concern." (And also, "My action of rebuffing you is irrational", but I don't think that's the meaning the cartoonist had in mind.)

But why would "fuck off" be rendered as "why don't you shit on us"? (And as it turns out, rendered *more* appropriately?)

Time to drop some science on you. Statements can be true or false. Other things people do with words, other speech acts, can't sensibly be true or false. It's nonsense for a command like "open the window" to be true or false: it something you do or refuse to do. But a command does have felicity conditions, conditions under which it makes sense. If I tell you to move the building with your bare hands, my command is not meaningfully false; but it is pointless, because commands presuppose a preparatory condition, that the action is in fact possible. It's similarly pointless for me to tell you to wash the car while you're already washing it: that's the propositional content condition, that the command has to involve a future action.

When people say something that doesn't make sense, or seems pointless, our first assumption isn't that the person's insane. We assume that when someone tells us something, it is somehow relevant; and when it doesn't immediately seem to be relevant, we try and work out some hidden meaning, which makes the utterance relevant at a deeper level. If we didn't do that search for hidden meaning, there'd be no figures of speech, and no wit. In fact, figures of speech and wit delight us, precisely because they makes go to the extra effort of working out what their point is.

Commands have another felicity condition, the sincerity condition: "the speaker genuinely wants the hearer to perform the requested act". As a corollary of that, if I want you to do X—especially if I want you to do X to me, then X must be something I would want to happen: it is something desirable or useful to me.

Which brings us to "why don't you shit on me". (I'll come to the "us" later.) "Why don't you shit on me" does not sound like something I would want to happen. Yes yes, I have heard about paraphilias, but the point of those kinds of predilections is that the victim gets some sort of kick out of it, so they do want it to happen after all. We have no such context here, so the command seems to be pointless. Like "kill me now" is.

"Kill me now" has a well established figurative meaning, which isn't about commands at all; I leave it as an exercise to the reader to work out how we get from the literal to the figurative meaning. But "why don't you shit on me" does still have a command as its figurative meaning. Let's start ratiocinating.

If literal defecation isn't what is meant, what figurative meanings of χέζω can we use to make sense of this? Here's the Triantafyllidis Dictionary entry:

1. (literal meaning) 2. (metaphorical) a. insult someone vulgarly; b. used to express indifference, contempt; c. (passive) show great cowardice [cf. English shit oneself]

The meaning we want is 2b; but that still violates the desirability condition:

• Why don't you express indifference/contempt towards me?

Why would you seek out contempt? Let's try something else: If I want you to do X, it may be because that stops you doing the opposite of X. That doesn't help yet, but let's try it:

• Why don't you stop expressing interest/esteem towards me?

… For the English-speakers in the room: that already sounds more plausible, doesn't it? And it's a classic trick of indirect language, using double negation of X to say X ("he's not unkind"). It sounds more plausible, because while we don't want bad things to happen to us, there are times we can have too much of a good thing happen to us.

In particular, the other person may be doing something *they* think is good to us, and we don't. Let's try to get that in there.

• Why don't you stop doing things to express interest/esteem towards me?

And because we command something when it is desirable to us, we make that relevant by doing this equation:

I want you to do something pleasing to me.

• I want you to stop doing things displeasing to me
  
• I want you to stop doing things to express interest/esteem towards me
  
• Ergo, the things you are doing to express interest/esteem towards me are displeasing to me

That chain of reasoning underlies "why don't you shit on me". In fact it makes it better than "fuck off" in expressing the joke's sentiment: by asking you to treat me with contempt, I am explicitly rejecting your shows of respect. The English equivalent would be something like "do me a favour, and stop giving a shit about me."

Does that look algebraic to you? Well, if you're Greek, think of the tone of δεν με χέζεις. It's impatient dismissal. You could paraphrase it equally well (though less pungently) as δεν με παρατάς "why don't you leave me alone". And "why don't you leave me alone" is explicitly rejecting someone's show of interest.

There's one more peculiarity to the expression: why "us" and not "me"? I'm guessing here, but this is an equivalent of the English Royal we: by claiming the angry sentiment not just for herself, but for herself and her (absent) posse, the speaker bolsters the authority of the statement: "I , and everyone like me, think you should fuck off." The tenor is quite different though: this is a colloquial artifice in Greek.

The "car jack" is not the form of the expression I was familiar with, btw. The form I knew was δεν μας χέζεις ρε Νταλάρα, "why don't you shit on me, Dalaras", referring to the renowned singer George Dalaras. From Sarantakos' thread, I find this was itself a punchline, in a joke by Harry Klynn. The punchline was so prominent in the early '90s, commenter Ilefoufoutos [e-fufutos] had conjured up a scenario that it might end up in Babiniotis' dictionary, and attract lawsuits from the litigation-happy singer.

I don't know what the joke was, but Dalaras is earnest and serious enough as an artist that the reaction is plausible. (Not for me, I love his rebetika; but I found the reaction says a lot.) To quote another artist who was at times earnest—but not this time:

What that oure Hoost hadde herd this sermonyng,
He gan to speke as lordly as a kyng.
He seide, "What amounteth al this wit?
What shul we speke alday of hooly writ?

Or, as the Pig said to the Deer at around the same time (vv. 428–429):

Ήλθεν και άλλη φιλόσοφος μείζων της αλωπούτζας
και έχανε το στόμαν της και έχεσαν οι πάντες.
Here's a new sophist, greater than the fox!
Her mouth's agape, and everybody shits!

…What an… unfortunate note to finish on. If only I could claim it was a one-off…
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