I is for IDIOM (#9 of 312)

Idioms are fun. My wife and I still laugh about the difficulties in sharing English idioms with our students in Hungary. “Balazs has such a BIG FACE!” You start thinking about this kids face, and it seems developmentally appropriate, and just as big as Zsolt’s face, or Gergely’s face, and then it clicks. Head. He has a big head.

Or, “It’s really not my cup of coffee.” You think about it, and you get to tea, and you share that the phrase is “it’s not my cup of tea” and they don’t agree. “But this doesn’t make sense,” they say. “We’ve never seen you drink tea. You’re always drinking coffee.”

Also, idioms are a fun bridge to activities and technologies that many are not familiar with. I have too many irons in the fire. (There is a great scene in The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert where a guy says that he has “too many irons in the fire” and Elizabeth, describing the scene, realizes that this is not a figurative assessment but just a plain fact. He was in his blacksmith shop working on too many projects at once.)

Think about all the terms and phrases we get from printing and typesetting: uppercase, lowercase, out of sorts, baseline, bury the lede, stop the presses, mind your p’s and q’s.

Fun stuff.