Meaning & Analysis
If you lend your backside—an essential part of your body—you will be forced to suffer absurd or impossible consequences, like defecating through your ribs.
Insights
Foolish Generosity
This proverb warns against giving away something essential to your well-being. To lend what you cannot do without is to cause yourself harm or discomfort.
Self-Deprivation
Highlights the irrationality of sacrificing one's own necessities for others, especially when such sacrifice leads to personal absurdity or dysfunction.
Mockery of Impractical Altruism
The crude humor underscores the foolishness of trying to please others at your own expense, ridiculing overly accommodating behavior.
Cross-Cultural Humor and Utility
This proverb, noted as Russick in origin, demonstrates how earthy humor transcends borders, often used to stress the absurdity of lending beyond one's means or needs.
Embodied Logic of Refusal
By using the human body as its terrain, the proverb physically dramatizes the impossibility of functioning without what one has lent—an allegory for how deeply personal and practical boundaries matter.
Merchant Vernacular and Cross-Border Expression
Its association with merchants suggests that this saying thrived in commercial contexts where boundaries of ownership and need had to be negotiated with humor and firmness.
Rhetorical Devices
Grotesque Hyperbole
The image of defecating through one’s ribs exaggerates the consequences of unreasonable generosity, amplifying the proverb’s comic and cautionary force.
Crude Humor
The proverb’s bodily vulgarity is central to its punch, reflecting folk sensibilities and a rhetorical strategy that shames impractical behavior through scatological wit.
Irony
It is deeply ironic: an act meant to help (lending) becomes a source of personal dysfunction, reinforcing the foolishness of self-denial taken to extremes.
Transcription
Quotations
Lend you mine A— and sh— through my ribs.
Annotations
- That is lend you that whereof I have necessary and frequent use, and want it my self. It is a Russick Proverb and of frequent use in that nation, and was I suppose, first brought over to us by some Merchants that traded there.
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.