On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 12:19 AM, Anand Manikutty <[email protected]> wrote: > The example of the phrase "It is/was (all) Greek to me" would sufficiently > make my point. The phrase is from Julius Caesar. (A little bit of Googling > revealed the section of the play from which the phrase arose.) What Casca > was saying was that he didn't understand what Cicero said because Cicero > spoke Greek and Casca did not. Somehow, this entered the English language as > implying that that the Greek language itself is somehow hard to learn.
When I read Julius Caesar in high school, the Cliff notes indicated that "It's greek to me" was an established phrase in Shakespeare's time, so he was actually punning on that phrase when he wrote the line. -- b
