A Saying for Those Living Under a Rock

Have you been sleeping in the ear of a bull?

-Local Oral Tradition

Tonight I was enjoying some fish and chips at a downtown Indianapolis plaza while recovering from a long day of support-raising training. Suddenly, I found myself recruited by strangers to join a team for the Taylor Swift trivia competition about to begin in the plaza. I warned my three enthusiastic new friends that I was one of the worst people they could possibly find for knowing pop music trivia. When it comes to superstars like Taylor Swift, I have very much been living under a rock. Or, as my Central Asian friends say, sleeping in the ear of a bull. And I am okay with that. There are Central Asian idioms to learn, after all.

Alas, the Swifties recruited me anyway. Funnily enough, I did help them get the answer right to the first song Swift ever learned on her guitar. But this was only because anyone who was a teenager beginning to learn the guitar in the 2000s was bound to quickly learn Kiss Me by Sixpence None the Richer. It was easy, catchy, and made you sound much better than you were. This deduction shocked us all by actually being correct and left my much younger teammates (who had been stumped by the question) thoroughly impressed. I also helped them spell the name of Zayn Malik, not because I know anything about him as an artist, but simply because I’ve had Muslim friends named Zayn or Malik. You really never know when two utterly isolated fields of knowledge are going to suddenly intersect.

Anyway, back to Central Asia. “Have you been sleeping in the ear of a bull?” is the kind of idiom someone would throw out when a person is ignorant of something that has become common knowledge to seemingly everyone else. In English, we would say things like “Where have you been?” or “How could you not know that?” or “Have you been living under a rock?” Imagine someone in the US not knowing that America is facing the slow-motion train wreck of Trump vs. Biden 2.0, for example.

My unbelieving Central Asian friends might use this saying when they’re insisting that it’s really the US who controls groups like ISIS as part of its grand puppet master strategy for the Middle East. And my believing local friends might use it when foreign Christians reveal that we don’t really understand what Jesus is talking about with the whole wineskins thing. Their common experience with using goat skins for liquids that ferment makes Jesus’ parable about the kingdom needing new goatskins super straightforward, something everyone surely knows – unless they’ve been asleep under a rock, that is, or in the ear of a bull.

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