As I began searching for idioms with a digestive theme, in honour of this year’s “Poop” edition of What’s Up Yukon, I discovered there were a lot of them. I briefly contemplated the correlation between poop and a fan but decided that could get messy—so there will be nothing “hitting the fan” in this column. Instead, I decided to go with my gut. Here goes; join me if you have the stomach for it.
Go with your gut! This idiom may not always be the best advice for someone if there’s time to consider the facts, to listen to sage advice and to digest all the options. But gut instinct, which often manifests itself physically, should never be ignored. Take the Fight, Flight or Freeze response, for example: sometimes you just need to act, and act fast. On those occasions, go with your gut.
In the 1900s, another idiom made its gutsy debut simultaneously with the appearance of cast iron and we developed cast-iron stomachs, iron guts or guts of steel (not to be confused with abs of steel). Yep, we developed intestinal fortitude. This idiom literally, at times, refers to those individuals (my husband included) who have cast-iron stomachs because they seem to be able to ingest almost anything.
The next idiom is belly full of lead or lead belly. This is believed to have originated with Huddie William Ledbetter (stage name, Lead Belly), the American folk and blues singer and famous melodeon player whose incarceration and subsequent enduring spirit gave rise to “The Midnight Special,” with its famous lyrics, written by one who understood the meaning of hard times (youtube.com/watch?v=CrdioqIMtpY). If you have a belly full of lead or are a lead belly, you can withstand a whole lot and can pretty much chew on whatever life dishes up.
And the final idiom is yellow belly. Yellow elicits thoughts of sunshine and warmth; and of daisies, dandelions and daffodils. It’s the colour of chicks and of one vibrant stripe of the rainbow. But not here. Its origin is debatable, as origins of idioms often are, but yellow belly is thought to have originated in reference to the pale skin of folks who lived in the Lincolnshire Fens, a marshy region in England, or perhaps in reference to an important staple in their diets: eel—the underbellies of which were yellow.
Yellow has become synonymous with the original yellow belly but referred to those members of the military who were considered to be weak-kneed and, later, to characters in Westerns who were deemed cowardly. People have been hurling these insults ever since. Then, even the poor yellow-bellied sapsucker was drawn into the mix when its name was added to yellow belly as a variant of this idiom, as though adding “sapsucker” would somehow deepen the insult.I hope these idioms have left you with fire in your belly—not the stomach-acid kind, but the kind that gets your creative juices flowing.
