The phrase, "By ear" goes back a long way in a figurative sense. It’s a metonym, the substitution of a word by another with which it is closely associated.
It’s in much the same style as Antony’s speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears”. He meant this figuratively, asking his audience to lend him the thing their ears contained, their function — in other words to listen to him, to hear him out. In phrases like "By ear," the process is taken one stage further: not merely the function of hearing but also being able to accurately reproduce a melody one has heard, without needing written music. So we have phrases like, "He has a good ear for music," and "She can play anything by ear."
The saying has been taken yet another step further away from anything literal when people use it to mean doing something in an extempore way, without planning, according to circumstances as they arise.
~From World Wide Words.
1 comment:
One of my favourite lines from the Canadian Comedy Duo Wayne and Shuster (who appeared dozens of times on Ed Sullivan) was from their bit called Rinse the Blood off my Toga (found in its entirety on YouTube) where the character strolls on stage with a large sack dragging behind him ...
He said "I said 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears ..."
A second character asks, "what's in the bag??"
"Ears !!"
Post a Comment