Many times the meaning of expressions cannot be deduced from the words that compose them; By definition, that’s an idiom. “Being around the bush”, “being a piece of cake”, “being the black sheep”… If we know what situations they define, it is only because we have the cultural background to interpret them.
If we cannot do that, much less will we infer what their history is, where they come from, attending only to their morphological physiognomy, to their literalness. Babia is a real place, but until one is told what happened in that region of Leon, one cannot glimpse why we send the distracted there.
Phraseology requires study, and there are no shortcuts, because sometimes the sayings are disguised, as if they wanted to deceive us. “Pull the blanket” is not something that is said as a metaphor for the carpet being lifted to reveal the “dirt”, what was hidden, but refers to a practice typical of the anti-Semitic stubbornness of the Middle Ages. The “blankets” were canvases with the names of converted families that were exhibited in the churches of each place and that were used when there was doubt about someone’s ancestry.
Something similar happens with “thinking about the shrews.” For those who don’t know, they are mammals, like the mouse, but they have a shorter tail and a long, trunk-shaped snout. Its name is a derivation of the Latin mus (mouse) and araneus (spider). Quite possibly, the analogy with this insect is due to its size.
They are tiny. Of the 264 species that exist, the smallest is the Suncus etruscus, which lives in Spain. These have a maximum length of 50 millimeters and weigh between two and three grams. Because their tiny bodies lose heat faster, and this is the most incredible thing about this animal, shrews arguably live at a crazy speed. Their heart beats 1,200 times per minute, and they never sleep or stop eating for more than a few minutes, otherwise they would die.
Be that as it may, regarding the expression, in many Internet portals it is read that it arose from the habit of the laziest farmers of staring at these vermin instead of working. It would be, as the linguist Mario García-Page explains in Las appearances deceive. Notes on the phraseological lexicon (2006), a case similar to “gaping flies”.
As today, already in the 17th century the saying was used to refer to the one who is “in the clouds”. In his Treasury of the Castilian or Spanish Language (1611), which is the first Spanish dictionary in history, Sebastián de Covarrubias (1539-1613) gave shrews this other meaning: “little clouds that we imagine in the air”. For this reason, in chapter 33 of the second part of Don Quixote, Sancho says: “I am an old dog… and I know how to wake up in due time, and I do not allow shrews to appear before my eyes.”
However, there is a problem, because these mammals do not climb the walls or run around on the floor, nor do they give us, like flies, the opportunity to remain enraptured in their contemplation. Most people will die without ever seeing one. They do not enter the houses or walk along the paths that we use, but live most of the time underground and in inaccessible places.
Staring at “the swifts”, okay, but the shrews? Luckily, the lexicographer José María Iribarren (1906-1971) explained it to us in El porqué de los dichos (1955). Actually, the locution arose from the phonetic resemblance of “shrew” and “muse”. The former are the burlesque antagonist of the latter, those Greek divinities that inspire art. If the one who ruminates on something high is assisted by the muses, the one who does it on a trifle thinks of shrews.
