Turning the world inside out is very useful when we want to see things from another angle. Breaking the common rules of life is usually linked to moments of brilliance, success and innovation. It is not by chance that scholars such as Mikhail Bakhtin have realized that carnival games and parties are full of inversions that place a world under another perspective. Through laughter, jokes and exaggerations, life is celebrated in a unique way.
Over time, we see that these carnival inversions invade other fields of our life that go beyond the simple scope of the annual festival. The tongue is also curiously contaminated by these manifestations through slang and expressions that reach our mouths and are perpetuated over time. “Making a heart out”, for example, is an example of a term that well represents this type of situation.
Perhaps because of its banal use, we are not even able to perceive the carnivalesque tone existing in this comic expression used for moments when we must try hard. Thinking within a biological hierarchy, we know that the heart is an organ that plays important roles in our body. On the other hand, “the guts”, although important in digestion, play a secondary role when compared to our most active muscle.
Thus, in “making the guts of the heart” we refer to a superhuman effort capable of symbolically transforming the function of our intestines. In this allegory, seeking greater breath and resistance, the individual breaks the hierarchy of the body to seek something that seems impossible. In fact, we see this expression recurrently linked to any activity in which man engages with all his strength. Be they physical, intellectual or emotional.
By Rainer Sousa
Graduated in History
Brazil School Team
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Curiosities - Brazil School
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
SOUSA, Rainer Gonçalves. "Bend over backwards"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/curiosidades/fazer-das-tripas-coracao.htm. Accessed on June 28, 2021.