I recently had occasion to seek out some new precision screwdrivers, I suspect because my mischievous scamp of a grandson hid my older ones, as he is wont to do, or else my wife gave them to him, as she is wont to do, on the grounds he’s likely to do less damage around the house. So I went to the local hardware market area and went around the stalls looking for a sign with халив [ˈxεɬɪʷ], the native Mongolian word. Someone pointed me to the aisle with such tools, where I found a likely stall and asked the woman for халив. She looked puzzled, so I wasn’t sure if it was my accent or just that the word is not that common, so I asked, “Отвёртог [ͻtˈv̥ʲͻːrtʰɨɢ̥]?,” which would be the usual pronunciation, and she brightened right up and pointed, “Энэ манай screwdrivers!”
One grows accustomed to the slow replacement of native Mongolian words by Russian words and of them by English words, except curiously in the realm of obscene abuse, where Russian loanwords retain their natural superiority and well-
The greatest irony, however, is that etymologically the Russian word just doesn’t work at all in its new context (as if that ever mattered to the cunning of sociolinguistic reason): от- means ‘(away) from’ and as a verbal prefix conveys the sense (multa inter alia) of ‘unfastening’, while вёрт- means ‘turn, spin’, just like its IE cognates verto, vártate, and (with extension of meaning) werden and worth, and thus отвёртка means ‘screw remover’; yet the Mongolian verb used with it means ‘to apply a screw’ (эрэгдэх, from эрэг ‘screw, bolt’). However, this puzzlement, this discrepancy, this fickle twist of fate, suffices to reveal a major regularity in language that doubtless reflects profound depths of human cognition of the world, since everyone from generativists to sensible people like Cognitive Linguists agree that that’s exactly what such discrepancies mean, however much blood they lust to spill defending their opposite conclusions on everything. And that is: All languages can be classified as screw-
And this allows us to understand wide swathes of English idioms. Thus, a screw as prison guard turned the screws of shackles. To have a screw loose is obvious. To screw something up means to turn the screws out so that they rise above the level of the surface and no longer hold something securely in place. To screw someone over refers to overscrewing a screw so that it fails. To tell someone to screw off means you want them to remove the screw holding them in place so they leave. Screw this! is a demand for someone to fix a loose screw posthaste; similarly, Screw you! is a demand for someone to tighten your loose screws. Indeed, the only expression that is not immediately elucidated into transparency is the name of the cocktail, but there it is considered as arising from the drink originally having been stirred with a screwdriver.
But what is the wider significance of this set of expressions? We might, as it were, screw on our thinking caps, our monocles into our respective eyes, and our courages to the sticking point to state that it simply reflects the fundamental importance of rotation about an axis and thus the conservation of angular momentum, and shows that while the basic concept is either inherent to the human intellect or not at all inherent to the human intellect, it is still basic to human intellection, and thus the basic division of our experience of rotary motion as either advancing or retreating along the axis of rotation (and by extension implying a basic handedness of rotation) is manifested linguistically. (Our comrade-
And once again, we see the importance of possessing a full range of knowledge both linguistic and extra-