Having thought I would be at a local rendezvous when I was out of town, a French friend here in Paris texted: “Ah! J’ai pigé quand je suis arrivée.” Piger wasn’t in my French lexicon, so I checked it in my translation device, where it came out as twig. Not the little branch, mind you, but the verb. (The branch is la brindille.) This rather eclectic translation turned me toward an idiomatic expression in English that I’d never quite understood: twig to it, or twig it. I recall its being common in the 1970s, shortly after dig it had become a hippie cliché. It seemed to mean “get it,” or “figure it out,” or “intuit.” Not grasping what a tiny branch had to do with comprehension, I was always reluctant to use the phrase.
Now that it appeared in my translation device, though I decided to dig into it (which is, still, quite different from digging it).
As my colleague Ben Yagoda observed in his “not-one-off Britishisms,” to twig probably has its origins in the Irish tuig, “understand,” one of the rare occasions wherein a piece of British slang owes its origin to an Irish word. The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t include this origin, and in fact gives scarcely a nod to the “got it” notion of twig. But where it does include a definition of slang meaning as “become aware of” or “comprehend,” it traces twig in both transitive and intransitive senses back to the early 19th century. So the word wasn’t coined in my youth, though it may have become hip then because of the British invasion and possibly, as at least one Irishman has speculated, because dig it, also derived from tuig, was popular.
How, then, do we get to piger? Well, French etymologists trace its origins to the Latin pedica, which evolved into French piège, or trap. It has an array of meanings connected to the idea of seizing, including stealing, arresting, and — yes — digging. There’s also a second meaning, apparently derived from the French pied, or foot, having to do with measuring or marking, sometimes with reference to a pin, or stem (tige), used as a measurement. Which of course brings us back to little branches, or twigs.
This circle of connected meanings is surely coincidental, especially if to twig comes from the Irish whereas piger comes from the Latin. What interests me is not just that one slang term finds its translation in another slang term, but also that idioms can both overlap and find distinctive flavors in their own languages. If I were to twig some idea or fact — which I still doubt I’ll ever do — I would feel myself sort of bending toward it, or maybe being brushed or scratched by it, because that’s what twigs do. If I were to piger, which I may try doing while I’m here, I’d feel as though I’d grabbed hold of that idea or fact. The meaning is basically the same; the figure of speech — leaving aside images of feet, stems, and any digging in the earth — feels quite different.
Slang, I suspect, can rarely claim a straight etymological course, and so feels even more peculiar to its linguistic universe than standard phrasing. Or, as G.K. Chesterton put it, “All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.” Tu piges?