If you have a monkey for a friend...

...your stick won't spend the night in a tree.

Um....

....welcome back?

So, you're saying that a woman to fuck is a monkey for a friend.

Interesting.

Thank you. I was in Ouagadougou and it wasn't easy to get back. But I finally made it.

Nope.

I guessed that the first thing most Wordforgers would think of was a sexual reference, but there is nothing sexual about it.

Welcome back!

Is it because a monkey will get it down for you?

Now you're just making names up.

Isn't that where there was an Al Qaeda attack at the weekend?

Yep. That's why I had such a hard time getting back. I saw the hotel from a few hundred metres away, during the attack (one whole end was blackened from the explosions), and from the airport we could hear the gunfire, especially when the special forces finally took out the terrorists about 8:20 Saturday morning.

I met one of the guys who had been in the hotel. He had come to Ouagadougou with a co-worker for a conference, and his co-worker was among those killed. He said the terrorists were just kids; between 15 and 20 years old. And they were all kind of dazed, as if they had been drugged up before being sent on what was pretty likely to end of being a suicide mission.

I was never in any particular danger myself, but it was kind of strange not knowing when or how we could get out of the country. (No international flights were coming into or out of the airport, because of the risk that the terrorists could attack at the airport as well, only about seven or eight hundred metres from where they attacked the hotel and the restaurant.)

Push pineapple, shake the tree?

Congratulations, that's part of it. But that's still not the meaning of the proverb. You're on the right track, though.

Wow.

And your biggest problem was getting a stick out of a tree? Your focus is commendable.

No, the "stick in the tree" proverb was something I learned two weeks before the attacks. I'm just interested to see if anyone can really figure it out, without knowing the cultural context that spawned it.

Wow, not a good time to have been there. I hope you weren't caught up in any of Al Qaeda's shenanigans.

As for the riddle, even google and a list of African proverbs haven't helped.

No one thinks it's a sexual reference. Everyone knows it's an obscure proverb that you're posting to highlight your knowledge of obscure things because that makes you feel particularly smart. Yes, yes, you can win trivia night if the category is "Badly Translated Obscure African Sayings." Congratulations.

I am glad to hear you weren't in any danger though it sounds like you were fairly close to where the attack in B.F. took place. Personally, being in a foreign country when such an attack goes down sounds like something right out of a bad movie and think of how bad the wounded folks had it given the limits of medical care in most 3rd world countries. WRT the proverb, I am guessing the literal interpretation talking about gathering fire wood (the monkey is helping you to do that) while the symbolic interpretation is that it is easier to solve problems if you have a helper whom you have paid a bribe. Am I any where close? It sounds like a typical 3rd world bribe justification parable which are so common in such countries.

Wrong again, but nevertheless useful information for the purpose of this thread.

Exceptionally close on the "symbolic" aspect, except for the "bribe" part. Congratulations.

The parable is old and simple. The tree is the Academy, the stick is an Oscar, and the monkey is Spike Lee.

Async,

Tell me how you feel in ten words or less.

Tired, glad to be back in France, but happy.

Too short, didn't read.

Welcome back!

Okay, I can finally take the time to get back at this.

First, the "literal" explanation of the proverb: the way of getting fruit down from trees you can't climb (such as baobabs) is to knock it down with a stick thrown into the air. But it too often happens that your stick gets stuck in the tree. If you have a monkey friend, he'll help you out.

The actual, practical meaning of the proverb: friends who know things are useful for avoiding troublesome difficulties.

The reason for the thread: I was interested in testing what chance people have of understanding idioms with non-literal meanings when they have little or no knowledge of the culture in which it originated. That subject interested me, because I have often seen how people interpret the Bible (both Christians who are attached to "literal interpretations" and anti-Christians who want to cling to the most ridiculous interpretation possible in order to have a handy strawman in order to discredit the Bible), with little or no consideration of the customs, idioms or even languages in which the texts originated.

Congratulations to Packard (who was able to figure out some of the literal meaning) and Dinner (who got a large part of the application). This shows that, with careful thought and some knowledge of the culture, it is possible to understand at least some of it. But the inability of the majority to figure it out (don't feel bad; when it was quoted to me because I had helped a guy figure out how to solve a problem with his car, I had no idea what he was talking about, or what relationship it had to the subject we were discussing, so I did even less well than Packard and Dinner) shows how distrustful we should be of attempts to interpret Biblical texts literally, as if they were written in our own culture, and how tentative our interpretations must be unless we have specific information on the cultural context.

And now, I suppose, I'll probably be gone from Wordforge again for a while. But maybe not...

Okay, I'll bite...

You omit here any comment on an approach to the Bible which uses as its starting point an inflexible application of modern theological ideas such as textual consistency, inerrancy, omniscience of the deity and so forth. I would say that that is just as flawed as any "literalist" approach.

Interesting. Does the proverb, to your knowledge, also contain a hint that a monkey, being a seemingly dumb or comical animal, is useful for ist special knowledge, and so might be a valuable friend, as in: Don't discard someone's friendship just because they seem weak?

There is a wandering anecdote in translation studies about some tribe that misread Romans 12:20 to say that literally pouring burning coals over a man is God's recommended style of torture or execution. I once tried to fail an original source for this and couldn't, but as an illustration of the general concept, I still find it amusing.

Those concepts, if they are held, should be the result of one's studies rather than the a priori starting point. Anything else is, as you say, fundamentally flawed logic.

Nevertheless, the failure to understand that the way one culture expresses itself may be fundamentally different from another will affect the conclusions drawn concerning the reliability of the text. For example, if someone ten thousand years from now with little or no knowledge of our culture were to find a reference to "sunrise" in our writings, if he did not understand that that is a fixed expression that is not to be taken literally, he could conclude that 21st century science was ridiculously untrustworthy, since everyone still believed that the sun moved around the earth. Thus, the concept of understanding a text in its cultural context (or at least making an honest attempt to do so) takes philosophic priority over the issues you raise.

No idea. I didn't hear anyone make such an application, but not having really extensive knowledge of the culture, I can't say that no one makes that application.

Quite. Whether the anecdote is apocryphal or not, it well illustrates the problem.

How does one study this pray tell?

By the use of logic and evidence, like anything else. A text is seen to be trustworthy, for example, if it passes the epistemological tests of congruency and consistency. Opinions about the nature of God (or non-existence of God) are valid to the extent that they are the result of rigorous rationalism, like all other fundamental philosophical questions. And so on.

Your "evidence" is that God spoke to you in your head and therefore he's real. Yet you've previously suggested this isn't a leap of faith, but rather something you simply "know to be true". But there is no evidence beyond your assurance that it is so...and you seemingly don't doubt the experience despite many credible arguments as to why your experience may have been misinterpreted. Therefore your starting point is one of rigid conviction.

How is this really any different from what @RickDeckard suggested?

On that note, until a couple centuries ago, the idiom "a double-edged sword" or "a two edged sword" meant attacking the problem from opposite sides, not something related to blow back or hurting your own case as much as solving the problem. Back when we used double-edged sword we struck alternate blows with the true edge and false edge in rapid succession. Sometime later fencers and cavalry men couldn't figure out why both edges would be sharp and everybody figured the back edge was just a spare - that was likely to cause self-harm, and then everybody read all the old idiomatic references to "double edged sword" incorrectly.