Phraseology in time; examples of culture-bound expressions from Baretti's Easy Phraseology (1775) and from Duverger's Dictionary (1810)

According to the OED the word ‘phraseology’ was last used in the since-then obsolete sense “a collection or handbook of the phrases or idioms of a language; a phrasebook” in the title of Baretti’s Easy Phraseology (1775), which, despite the sense attributed to its title, is neither ‘a collection of phrases or idioms’ nor ‘a phrasebook’, i.e. “a small book containing useful or idiomatic expressions in a foreign language […] with explanations or translations of their meaning” (OED, s.v. phrasebook, sense A). In fact, it is rather ‘big’ (424 pages) and its 56 fictitious dialogues, purposefully compiled to teach Italian, are not meant to illustrate phrases or idioms specifically, but rather to present “dieci o dodicimila vocaboli” (p.10), thus lexis in general, alongside a few morpho-syntactic structures and phonological aspects. However, Baretti’s Easy Phraseology is indeed rich in ‘explanations and translations’ of idiomatic and culture-specific expressions (the way in which ‘mannaggia’ is translated is linguistically quite interesting) and especially of proverbs, often meta-linguistically introduced by “the proverb says”. Proverbs are quite revealing about various cultural aspects (Iamartino 1994) and their very didactic nature (Knappe 2004) gives them a special position within phraseology. Some 35 years later the word ‘phraseology’ was juxtaposed with the words ‘Idioms’ and ‘Genius’ in the title of a very rarely cited different type of didactic material, Duverger’s dictionary (1810?) of English and French “modes of expressions adopted by the higher classes”, where it is used in a surprisingly modern sense (Nuccorini, 2008) which is paradoxically closer to the above-reported OED obsolete definition. A few culture-bound expressions from the two works, which share the same pedagogical aim and social views clearly presented in their respective Dedicatory Letters, will be analysed to show how they account for the different senses in which the word ‘phraseology’ was used across a short time span. For example the typical manners and customs of Italy ironically illustrated in Baretti’s “Dialogue the twentieth” are quite revealing of the author’s notion of phraseology and its links with cultural aspects as is, in a rather different way, the cliché “a man blessed with a good wife, with fine children” which illustrates the use of ‘blessed’ in Duverger’s dictionary.