Death by Idioms

Chia Suan Chong, UK

Chia Suan Chong recently re-located from Munich to York. Chia teaches Business and General English classes, in addition to teacher training (CELTA, Cert IBET) courses. With a degree in Communication Studies and an MA in Applied Linguistics and ELT, she also runs cultural training programmes and presents regularly at conferences on topics like English as a Lingua Franca and Intercultural Pragmatics. She is also a materials developer and a professional blogger, you can read Chia’s blogs at www.etprofessional.com and chiasuanchong.com. E-mail: chiasuan@live.co.uk

As English confirms its position as the global lingua franca and the language of international trade, business and tourism, there has been more and more talk in the English teaching world regarding the necessity of teaching idioms.

Seidlhofer (2004) warned of the dangers of unilateral idiomaticity, whereby the use of idioms by a speaker could result in incomprehension on the part the interlocutor who is less acculturated to native-speaker norms.

In other words, the use of idioms could be to the detriment of mutual intelligibility and serves no purpose except to perpetuate the native-speaker’s target culture, which is usually taken to mean the American or the British culture.

Now, before you get up in arms about this and start bellowing, ‘But my students want to be taught English idioms!’ from the rooftop of the nearest language school, let me reassure you that I am not entirely comfortable with lumping all English idiomatic expressions together and damning them all at one go.

So first of all, let us consider this. What is an idiom?

The online dictionary www.dictionary.com defines ‘idiom’ as ‘an expression whose meaning is not predictable from the usual meanings of its constituent elements’, while the Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary defines it as ‘a group of words whose meaning is different from the meanings of the individual words’.

Both dictionaries then proceed to give examples of idioms such as ‘to kick the bucket’ and ‘to let the cat out of the bag’. The meanings of these fixed expressions are clearly far from the meanings of the words themselves (‘to die’ and ‘to tell a secret by mistake’, respectively), but are idioms always so easily defined?

Look the following dialogue for example. Can you spot the idioms?

Rachel: Hey, why are you feeling so down?
Michael: My pet hamster passed away last night.
Rachel: Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. I know, how about some retail therapy to cheer yourself up?
Michael: I can’t. I’m broke. I blew all my money on this tiny hamster coffin. It cost a bomb.
Rachel: I’ll treat you to something nice. Come on, let’s go.
Michael: I can’t. I’m knackered. I stayed up all night last night mourning little Lord Nelson.
Rachel: Look, at the end of the day, you can’t beat yourself up like that. You’ve got to get over it.
Michael: I can’t. I’m dying inside…
Rachel: Alright then…whatever.

You could comfortably categorise ‘it cost a bomb’ as the same kind of idiom that ‘to let the cat out of the bag’ is.

But how about ‘passed away’, ‘cheer yourself up’, ‘blew all my money on ~’, ‘stayed up’, beat yourself up’, and ‘get over it’?

Are you arguing that these are phrasal verbs? But don’t most phrasal verbs have meanings that are not derivable from the individual meanings of its constituent parts? Are phrasal verbs naturally idioms then?

How about ‘feeling down’, ‘retail therapy’, ‘I’m broke’, ‘I’m knackered’, and ‘at the end of the day’?

Arguably, these are expressions that might have started out as idioms, but through common and frequent use, have earned a place in our cognitive processes as directly representing a different meaning to its linguistic origins? Most teachers might not even consider ‘broke’ an idiom, and would take its meaning of ‘without money’ to be simply another homonym of the word ‘broke’.

Another example of this is the above adjectival past participle ‘knackered’ (meaning ‘tired’). Originally meaning ‘to kill’, sending your horse to ‘the Knacker’s Yard’ meant that your horse was due to be slaughtered due to old age. However, even in late 1800s, ‘to knacker’ had already taken on its idiomatic meaning of ‘to tire out’.

But would English speakers from the USA, Jamaica, India or Singapore understand/use the word ‘knackered’ when they want to say that they are ‘tired’?

The online etymology dictionary www.etymonline.com states that the word ‘idiom’ was first seen in French in the late 1500s to mean ‘form of speech peculiar to a people or a place’, and in Latin and Greek to refer to ‘peculiarity in language’ and ‘peculiar phraseology’.

This suggests that the original concept of idiom referred to a type of colloquialism or code used amongst a particular group of people. This code-specific characteristic is clearly seen in the word ‘knackered’, where the target culture is closely tied to the idiomatic expression. The same can be said of the following idioms:

• ‘to be full of beans’ (‘to be full of energy’ – UK),
• ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’ (‘people who conform without questioning the belief or argument, displaying a lack of critical examination’ – US),
• ‘came out of the left field’ (‘unexpected, unusual, irrational’ – US baseball idiom)
• ‘catch no ball’ (‘didn't understand a thing, wasn’t able to grasp the concept’ – Singaporean English idiom resulting from a direct translation from the Hokkien dialect)
• ‘the equation has changed’ (‘the relationship has changed’ – Indian English idiom resulting from a direct translation from Hindi)
• ‘She’ll be apples’ (‘everything will be alright’ – Australian English)
• ‘box of fluffy ducks’ (‘everything is going my way’ – New Zealand English)

If the above idioms are used by a particular speech community and is code-specific to those peculiar to a place or country, then should we teach these idioms to our EFL students? If your answer is yes, which ones? And why?

Would you teach these idioms only for receptive purposes or would you encourage your students to produce them? What are the dangers of this? How do you decide which idioms to teach?

How about the use of the word ‘Whatever’ in the dialogue above?
It doesn’t really mean ‘anything that…’; nor does it mean ‘no matter what’.
It carries the illocutionary force of ‘I don’t care’ or ‘That’s your problem, man!’ to show indifference or dismissal. Although it started out as a code-specific slang word, it is now used globally, perhaps due to the dominance of Hollywood.

Could any of the above code- or community- specific idioms gain international recognition too? How do we know when such community-specific idioms are internationalized enough for us to include in our lessons?

Taking everything into account, how do we know what idioms to teach and when to teach them?
Do we teach all the idioms that appear in the coursebooks? When would it be acceptable to not teach them?
Do we teach idioms because we enjoy the imagery and find idioms fun to teach?
Or do we teach idioms because they are genuinely going to make our learners better communicators?

These are some questions we should all be asking ourselves when making decisions as to what we devote our precious classroom time to.
Look at the following questionnaires and consider your selection process when it comes to teaching idioms in the language classroom.

1. On a scale of 1-5, how much would you agree or disagree with the following statements? Why?
   1. I would happily do a whole lesson on idioms.
   2. I would only teach idioms when they emerge in context
   3. I make a distinction in the classroom between idioms for receptive purposes and those for productive purposes.
   4. I allow my learners to make up their own idioms or translate ones from their language.
2. Would you teach the following idioms to your class in your context? Why or why not?
   1. It’s raining cats and dogs.
   2. We’re singing from the same hymn sheet.
   3. If push comes to shove,…
   4. to take the mickey out of somebody
   5. That takes the biscuit.
   6. between the devil and the deep blue sea
   7. Hold your horses
   8. That’s the dog’s breakfast!
   9. a ballpark figure
   10. in the pink of health
3. What is your criteria for selecting the idioms that you teach? Select three of the following.
   1. I have used it once or twice before so it must be useful.
   2. I use it often.
   3. I hear it being used by native speakers often.
   4. I hear it being used by non-native speakers often.
   5. I see it being used in texts often.
   6. It has surrender value (it illustrates the meaning well and expresses something otherwise difficult to express).
   7. I think it makes my learners sound more native-speaker-like.
   8. It is easy to teach.
   9. It is in the book.
   10. I think it sounds good.

Ironically, when asked, many of my learners say that they want to learn idioms because it makes them sound more native. But more often than not, idioms are either used inappropriately, inaccurately, or simply overused.

Case in point: When John McClane in Die Hard 3 hears the building supervisor saying that it was raining ‘dogs and cats’, he immediately susses out that the building supervisor was not American, thus leading him to conclude that he was German and belonged to the villain’s gang.

In trying to sound more ‘native’, learners end up sounding less ‘native’. What a dilemma!

References

Seidlhofer, B. (2004) ‘Research Perspectives on Teaching English as a Lingua Franca’. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 24, pp:209-239.

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