"A novice; a late prentice to, or young beginner in, a trade, or art; also, a simple, ignorant, unexperienced, asse; a rude, unfashioned, home-bred hoydon; a sot, ninny, doult, noddy; one that's blankt, and hath nought to say, when he hath most need to speake."
The Englishman intimates that a thing has ceased to please by saying that he is "fed up" with it. The Frenchman says, "J'en ai soupé." Both these metaphors are quite modern, but they express in flippant form the same figure of physical satiety which is as old as language. Padding is a comparatively new word in connection with literary composition, but it reproduces, with a slightly different meaning, the figure expressed by bombast, lit. wadding, a derivative of Greco-Lat. bombyx, originally "silk-worm," whence also bombasine. We may compare also "fustian eloquence"—
"And he, whose fustian's so sublimely bad,
It is not poetry, but prose run mad."
(Pope, Prologue to the Satires, l. 187.)
And a very similar image is found in the Latin poet Ausonius—
"At nos illepidum, rudem libellum,
Burras, quisquilias ineptiasque
Credemus gremio cui fovendum?"
(Drepanio Filio.)
Even to "take the cake" is paralleled by the Gk. λαβεῖν τὸν πυραμοῦντα, to be awarded the cake of roasted wheat and honey which was originally the prize of him who best kept awake during a night-watch.
In the proverbial expressions which contain the concentrated wisdom of the ages we sometimes find exact correspondences. Thus "to look a gift-horse in the mouth" is literally reproduced in French and German. Sometimes the symbols vary, e.g., the risk one is exposed to in acquiring goods without examination is called by us "buying a pig in a poke."[75] French and German substitute the cat. We say that "a cat may look at a king." The French dramatis personæ are a dog and a bishop. The "bird in hand" which we regard as the equivalent of two in the bush is in German compared advantageously with ten on the roof.
NAUTICAL METAPHOR