After a couple of days of mixed rain/snow in the air, today was a bit more spring-like, even if still chilly. Wearing a knitted hat on your head is still a good idea... But when my eye spotted this market stall display, I could not quite decide whether to see it as funny or creepy! (...so I took a photo...)
When I got back home, I posted the photo on Facebook - and was asked to 'tag' eight of the heads as friends! Still borderline between funny and creepy! (Why only those eight, they did not explain...)
Going on to read some other FB posts, I had one from a language program on Swedish Radio which I follow. They were asking for suggestions and questions for a future program about expressions including body parts. For some reason (have a guess!) ... what came up first in my mind was (the Swedish equivalent of) "lose your head"... So now I'm wondering why we say that, and how long we've been saying it (if perhaps it goes back to the days when people were literally beheaded?), and if it's a common expression in other languages as well. I do think I've heard "den Kopf verlieren" in German too. As for the other languages I've been digging into, I haven't really dug deep enough yet to find any lost heads...
And writing that, it suddenly also strikes me that in the book I'm (re-)reading at the moment, there are a lot of heads and skulls as well - and not all of them attached to their bodies. The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths (2nd in the Ruth Galloway series - cf my recent book review of The Stone Circle, 11th in the same series). (Janus was a Roman god, usually depicted as having two faces, looking to the future and to the past, and the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways etc.)
Now this is getting creepy... I'd better stop while I'm ahead... ;)
9 comments:
HaHa You're a head of the game!!! Fun post. I've heard the expression. "Be sure to keep your head, when those around you are losing theirs."
Funny that they're selling all these warm hats in the spring. Did you pick out friends to match the heads? Please tell me I'm not the black hat on the bottom right!
As my work is Privacy Protection, I find almost everything creepy that facebook does, especially the face recognition thing, and would not like to know I've been "tagged" on anyone's pictures!
I love the "heady" theme of your post. And you are right, in German we also say "den Kopf verlieren", and I think it does indeed originate from the time when people could physically lose their heads for relatively minor things.
all this from a display of heads and hats. ha ha on Ginny and the black hat... we say lose you head, which means we don't know what we are doing, or that we are crazy...
OK Ginny, you can have the red hat instead, if you like that better... Haha. (Don't worry - I don't use face-recognition tags at all.)
Meike, I only use FB with a limited number of friends, and have quite a few privacy settings turned on... I've not yet found a way to tell them to not even ask me to tag faces in photos, though. But I never do. Actually I don't even post all that many photos of people. So I guess they just got a bit overexcited when for a change they got a picture from me with LOTS of faces in it! (ha)
Funny and creepy at the same time. Great photo opp.
When I was a wee child my Uncle said to my Mum and Dad, in my hearing, that someone he had been teaching to drive had lost her head and that he'd never teach anyone else to drive. I had this terrible idea in my head for years and I can still remember the incident seventy years later.
oh there's lots of heads there, at least none of them are creepy. I read a post on facebook a while back where someone had taken old dolls heads and made them into nightlights. Not sure how I felt about that...
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