Communicating with English idioms

By Herbert Vego

AS the editor of a weekly newspaper in the 1990s, I would often meet with the late Palanca awardee and English professor Dr. Leoncio Deriada, who happened to be one of our columnists.

He would often transmit “visual” thoughts to readers through idiomatic expressions. An idiom is a group of words in current usage having a meaning that is not deducible from those of the individual words.

“To rain cats and dogs,” for example, is now a common substitute for “to rain very heavily”.

Uncommon idioms, on the other hand, should be used sparingly and only when the context of the sentence would reveal its real meaning! Thus, to say “over the moon” is to describe the feeling of extreme happiness, as when a man and a woman become one couple in a wedding ceremony.

Unless grouped together, individual words do not make an idiom.

Both the grammar and the vocabulary of the idiom are fixed, and if we change them, we lose its intended meaning. Therefore, “Pull your socks up” means “Improve the way you behave,” unless it refers to its literal meaning.

Many idioms originated as quotations from well-known writers. It was English playwright William Shakespeare who first wrote “at one fell swoop” in his play Macbeth, and “cold comfort” in King John. Sometimes, though, such idioms today have evolved with different meanings that have been altered from the original quotation.

Some idioms are typically used in one version of English rather than another. Take note that the idiom “yellow journalism” originated from American English, based on sensationalism and crude exaggeration.

“Come hell or high water,” also of American origin, was first printed in an Iowa newspaper in 1882 in reference to cattle herders who traveled from Texas to the Midwest, forging deep rivers and crossing large prairies in the summer heat.

Other idioms may be used in a slightly different form in different varieties of English. Thus, the idiom “a drop in the ocean” in British and Australian English becomes “a drop in the bucket” in American English. However, in general, globalization and the effects of film, television and the internet have blurred the distinction between idioms of different English varieties.

English, one of the most vivid languages in the world, is made up of over 1.5 million words. Over and above that, the same word can have a variety of meanings depending on the context it is put in. Two or more words can have the exact same spelling but are pronounced differently’

The idioms made from the combinations of words further alter their meanings in a metaphorical way. “The world’s a stage” as used in a song is preferable to “the world is like a stage.”

Another important feature to point out is that while people cannot just decide to make up their own, idioms progress from a phrase already common to a certain community. It is typically figurative and usually is not understandable based solely on the words within the phrase.

Finding the origins of these idioms has been a herculean task among linguists. To recall two of them:

To “beat around the bush” is thought to have originated in response to game hunting in Britain, where participants would literally beat bushes in order to draw out and capture the birds.

To “spill the beans” is to leak a secret, most likely derived from an ancient Greek voting process, when someone would reveal the result of an election before its intended schedule.

Sad to say, “Filipino time” in the Philippines has assumed an undesirable context for coming late in an appointment.